Compliment Night

As a family, we pray together every night before bed. Last summer, when I asked a friend for any good parenting tips, he described something called "compliment night." Here's how it works: when it's your turn to pray, everyone in the family gives you a compliment first.

We thought it was a great idea, and so we decided to try it out. It has worked beautifully. If your kids are anything like ours, they will invariably start to complain about it being "their turn" for prayer. Though some relish it, all our kids, at one point or another, have chafed at it, but not since we instituted compliment night.

The kids just eat it up, and can't wait for it to be "their" night to pray. Tonight, five year-old Mary beamed for five minutes straight as we went around the circle. Although it becomes a bit of a challenge to come up with something new to say, we counter that by looking for specific examples of good things that person has done on that particular day. That kind of positive reinforcement has had a powerful effect.

Parenting is tough. We get things wrong. We screw up. We institute "programs" and "projects" that don't stick. So it's nice to occasionally get one right: compliment night, a seriously good idea.

(Photo retrieved through a Yahoo image search and identified from the following link: http://www.sacredheart.catholiccharitiesseattlearch.org/. It's a bad link, though, so I can't be sure of the source. Such a great photo, though, that I had to share.)