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I was one of the beta testers for this product, but other than that I have no connection with Dr Awesome, who created it (and yes of course that's his real name! It must be, right?). I thought I'd best be upfront about that, but I have not been paid for a review, and the following are my honest opinions. I cannot be bought!
My daughter is three, and shall we say challenging? I practice gentle parenting and do not agree with time-outs or other punitive punishments. I also do not like reward charts (have a read of Alfie Kohn to find out why). So finding a way to discipline my child can be hard.
I tried out the Awesome Deck of Awesome and fully did not expect it to be much good for us. I didn't expect my little girl to be interested in the cards or earning them, but I was wrong!
First, I let her look at them but made it clear they were mine. She spent happy time sorting them out into piles of girls' and boys' ones (my beta deck was a neutral deck with cards for both sexes) and decided on her favourites.
She was then very keen to earn them by being awesome! I allowed her to keep them and gave her a purse to put them in. I now need a new deck because she has nearly all of them and refuses to give them back! I guess I should have made it clear to her that they were currency so I didn't run out, but she is too young to want to use them to buy treats for her, they ARE the treat. But that is great, because that is why and how they work.
With older children it would definitely work to get them to spend cards to buy treats.
I think the deck is great awesome in fact!
It focuses attention on the positive behaviour rather than the negative and offers opportunities for "bad" behaviour to be turned around and made awesome to earn a card. My daughter has grasped the concept of "being awesome" and even issues me with cards if she feels I have been awesome enough, which is super-cute and also makes it much more holistic. We are each of us both the teacher and the student.
The cards are fun, and although it might feel sexist to have girls' decks and boys' decks, we beta testers did ensure that designs were not focused on prettiness or being "feminine" so they are really just more focused designs than pigeonholing genders. I was pretty vocal about that in the beta testing!
It's surprising how many ways you can use the cards and how versatile they are all ages the Awesome Deck of Awesome blog has more ideas for how to use them.
In all, a great gentle parenting resource that you can use in loads of fun ways.
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