The Ebay Threat: Child Discipline as Power Selling

I have tried so many fresh and exciting discipline techniques this Summer.  Usually I clep my friends’ imaginative ideas.  One of my favorites, however, has been a technique I actually developed independently–something quite unusual for me–and I would like to share it with my friends.

See, I have been selling rare and not-so-rare books on Ebay and Amazon for almost 10 years.  I have an absolute obsession with books, and I thrill to occasionally finding rare first editions in thrift stores, so this has been a perfect stay-at-home business for me.

Yet there is another grand advantage to this sideline:  Selling my children’s DVDs and video games that become a discipline issue.

It may sound a little drastic, but there is something mighty powerful about having the Ben 10 Alien Force game for the PS2 one day, and seeing it shipped out the door to a deserving child in Montana the next.  (I usually price it a little low so it will sell quickly.)

The first time I made this type of threat, my children did not believe me.  I confiscated the game dramatically, made a big show of listing it on the computer, and stacked it in my laundry/inventory room.  They looked slightly worried, but since I’m not the most consistent disciplinarian, they figured I would bring the game back out in a week or so when they made me a bird house out of poison ivy vine and cardboard scraps.

Yet the next morning, they got up and saw the packaged CD prominently displayed on the kitchen counter.  “Guess what I sold last night?”  “Not the Ben10 Alien Force game?” they cried, terror filling their eyes.  “No, no, no!”

“Yes, yes, yes!  It’s headed to an obedient child in New Jersey.”

Now I thrill to hearing conversations like this lilting from the back of the van:  “Star Wars The Complete Saga for the PS2?  No, man, we don’t have that game anymore.  My mom sold it on Ebay.”

And then the shocked friend’s reply: “Dude, dude, man that’s bad.”  (It seems that “dude” is another word all the 8-year-olds learned at camp.)

So what’s on the current chopping block?  The new Wii Boom Blox, which my boys and their cousin have fought/screamed over for three days straight.

With an Amazon sales rank of 79, it looks like I could unload that offender tonight for around $35.00!

How about you?  Any new discipline ideas for the Fall?