In my blogs I try to answer questions that I am regularly asked and that should ultimately help people make a more informed choice in both the purchase and application of Happy Tokens systems. So apart from the hot topic of using Sad Tokens, the other frequent questions I get asked is: Should I buy a single or double tube? What is the difference?
So, once upon a time I only made single tubes. These were sufficient and did the job I wanted done. I awarded Happy Tokens where agreed and Sad Tokens too. But for some jobs I was filling the tubes too fast Namely anything that took a little extra focus.
For example, when my youngest started toilet training. We agreed every time she went to the toilet and ‘tried’ she would be awarded a Happy Token. So off we went but you can imagine how many time a day we went to ‘try’. Sometimes within a few hours the Tube was reaching full or we were reaching our goal. The times between the count up and issuing a reward became shorter and shorter and she could achieve 4 rewards a day. I was spending more time on rewarding her than focusing on achieving anything else.
But we weren’t ready to change the goal posts yet. Setting the goal of keeping dry was beyond her capabilities and awarding a Happy Token every time the ‘try’ resulted in something induced straining – if you get my drift (not something I wanted to encourage).
I still wanted to shower her with positives but lengthen the time between rewards. So I came up with the Double Tubes. I figured if I continued to reward her ‘tries’ as I had been then we could set mini rewards such as a Gold Tokens in between. Something like a Gold Token for every 5 Happy Tokens she collected. Then we would save Gold Tokens in one Tube while we collected Happy Tokens in the other. She loved it!
With my older children they decided they wanted to go camping as one of their rewards! So for several reasons, we agreed. They each recieved Double tubes and each had to save a specific amount of Gold Tokens. Sometimes they would recieve a Gold Token for 5 Happy Tokens, sometimes for more and sometimes for less depending on their goal. And do you know they did it! It was a huge challenge but such an incentive really encouraged them. Since then we have used the Double Tubes for lots of different reasons and goals and achieved lots of fantastic results and rewards.