Hi Nicholeen, our eldest daughter (13) is still not taking on the program after taking the three-day live course a few months ago. She’s always been “the good kid” and has learned with other adults to just submit begrudgingly, rather than get in serious trouble. Therefore, she doesn’t use the Disagree Appropriately skill. We’ve tried incentivizing with playing the bean jar game. But even if she really, really wants something to the point of being upset- she’d rather just give up and say OK in a rejected/whining voice vs use the skill. And then when we correct this voice, she takes it personally and cries that we are being unfair/hard on her. She only really uses any of the program if she thinks she will lose all her privileges, but it doesn’t feel like she is learning anything about governing herself. I understand that she’s gotten along 13 years just “being the good kid”and then being afforded extra privileges. She does usually act very rationally and behaves well which is why she doesn’t feel motivated to do the program. How do we get her on board? She’s voiced her resistance that she feels the script isn’t authentic to her voice and makes her feel like we are just doing repetition vs being authentic. When we ask her to mock disagreeing appropriately, she just keeps saying no- should we go into the rule of 3 to force her to mock this tool?
Our youngest (11) loves using the Disagree Appropriately but we feel she over uses it. Often she’ll ask to disagree appropriately without having a reason, just to stall for time and then try to come up with a very long-winded reasoning. Since she’s smart, she’ll make up some pretty good reasons or clarifying questions, but gets upset when we interrupt her once we've gotten the point that she is clearly making up. We tell her these are not "appropriate" disagreements. She’ll often want to ask clarifying questions after we’ve made our decision and try to litigate herself through all the loopholes. It can be exhausting. We’ve let her disagree appropriately twice in a row and even after I've made the decision, she will want to keep asking clarifying questions and get herself all worked up to the point of crying. How do we help her understand what an "appropriate" disagreement is, versus these "inappropriate", long-winded delays? How do we engage in longer discussions effectively without spending hours in circular debates?