After one month at the hospital, when we returned home, even basic habits like brushing teeth, eating on time, drinking water, walking, peeing etc became a challenge. Each day seemed to consist of a long list of rituals. It was like having a newborn baby, who was five years old…

Thanks to a wonderful suggestion from one of the nurses, we tried jewels as rewards. It worked! Our daughter loved jewels, and a jewel chart was a perfect way to motivate her to do basic chores (and eventually, choose good activities).

We bought adhesive jewels of different shapes and colors. Red hearts for “thinking happy thoughts”, pink hearts for “brushing teeth”, green stars for “eating”, pink ones for “walking”… And if she earned more than 20 jewels a day (that typically meant brushing teeth twice, drinking around a liter of water, eating 3 meals, taking medicines, walking well, pee + poop regularly… and bonus for good activities), she could pick a surprise gift from the treasure box (we made one up with items from the dollar store or such). Soon, the chart was filled with jewels. 🙂

We then asked our kid what she would like to do when she gets well. She wanted a 3 day trip to Disneyland with her best friend and family. Nothing like a happy dream or wish to look forward to, amidst the painful medications!

We went online, checked the ticket price for a 3-day trip to Disneyland, made a list of how many tickets we needed, and she did the addition and found that we needed ~2500 jewels needed to make this wish come true. We gave her a bonus of 1000 jewels for enduring her first month of hospitalization and for doing a great job with her medicines.

Our kid started working earnestly towards the Disneyland milestone. Each day of boring rituals was now converted to earning colorful jewels!

In a couple of months, after making the Disneyland milestone, she was starting to tire of jewels. At this point, we switched to reward stickers. Emoji stickers for good attitude (her favorites!), food stickers for healthy eating, space stickers for learning, sports stickers for walking, ribbon stickers for excellence — you name it, we had the sticker. 😉

We set a mix of small and big milestones. After reading for half-hour (roughly the time to read a picture book like the Berenstain bears), she’ld get a small sticker, and after reading 30 such books, she‘ld get a small trophy! She suddenly fell in love with reading books. After every book, she’ld go and pick a favorite sticker and paste it on her chart.

Her room was soon filled with colorful jewels and sticker charts! She loved it, and for us, it was a simple and effective way to help her choose good habits and activities over bad ones. Tell us what worked for you!