Post from The Laughter Dad...

The night James was working on following written directions with us and the homework behaviorist was frustrating for our little guy. He was quite chagrined to discover at Question 8 that he was supposed to ignore Questions 1-7 when he had already bulled ahead and done them. One thing James does in such situations is to talk about the problem he's had to try to figure it out; tell the story of what happened, as it were. He started doing this; meanwhile, the behaviorist was still trying to ram home the lesson of "read ALL the directions" and talking over him. Naturally, James got upset. Declaring he was done because no one would listen, he headed upstairs. I followed to see if I could talk him back down. He wasn't having it. I told him I understood how he was feeling, but that if he went back downstairs I was sure the behaviorist would say he was sorry. "No, he'll never do that." Then James had an idea to get out of having to go down the stairs. He had been playing with a penny; now he said "I'm going to flip this coin. If it comes down Heads I'm never going down. If it's tails I have to." I wasn't about to agree to this, but he had already started. Flip, catch, slap it onto his arm. Tails! James headed downstairs saying "I hate coins!"

                           
Incidentally, he was only halfway down the stairs before the behaviorist called up to him apologizing.