For months I have been searching for a way to minimize the whining in my house. With three kids and another set to join us any time before school lets out - I can only handle so much of that sound! I stumbled upon this "No Whining" jar idea and decided to give it a shot.
It took a few days for me to decide how I was going to handle the money aspect of the jar. I had already been struggling with the idea of allowance vs. conditional allowance based on chores vs. doing chores because you are part of this family. Was this money going to be tied to all that too? What a mess! So I decided, we are just going to start this No Whining jar and figure the rest out later. The 6 yo and 4 yo each get 10 dimes after church on Sunday. Each time they whine, fuss or complain, a dime is lost to the jar. If there are any remaining dimes by the time we leave for church the next Sunday, they get to be put in the kids' piggy banks.
I washed out some peanut butter jars, stripped their labels and printed out this verse:
Do everything without grumbling or arguing. Philippians 2:14
The girls colored and decorated their labels, then helped glue them onto the pb jars. We put their dimes in a little bag and put everything on the dining room table. Lo and behold, at the end of the first week, they still had money left!! I never thought they could make it a couple days without whining at least 10 times, much less a whole week! So Sunday after church, I again doled out 10 more dimes. So far, they haven't lost them all again this week and I am excited to see how this experiment progresses.
