Favorite Thing #10 — Marble Jars

These have come up in conversation a few times in the last couple of week so I figured it was time to share them on here. We do marble jars to help train our kids in good behaviors and habits. This was not our original idea, we have many friends who do this as well. I think the idea amongst our group of friends originated with a Five Minute Fatherhood podcast. It’s a great podcast, you should check it out. But I digress . . .

These marble jars are a way for us to easily reward good behavior and also give a small consequence for behaviors we’d like to discourage. You earn marbles for good behaviors and you lose them for behaviors we want to discourage. The marbles can then be used in a sort of marketplace that we created. We have a list of what you can turn your marbles in for. Some things are “cheap” and some are “expensive.” Some items you can combine with a sibling to do. This encourages them to want to work together to get as many marbles as possible.

Basically, you earn marbles for good behaviors such as:

1. Encouraging another person with your words
2. Seeing a need and meeting it (maybe you find a piece of trash or a dirty sock on the floor and throw it away even though it wasn’t yours)
3. Helping a sibling or friend without being asked
4. Sharing with a sibling or friend without being told or reminded
5. Working diligently on your school work with a joyful heart

You can lose marbles for many things, but we use them primarily for two buckets:

1. Attitude issues– such as talking back to mom and dad, not having a joyful heart when asked to do something, or bickering/arguing with a sibling.
2. Not cleaning up after yourself — when I find shoes or underwear scattered around the house, I tell the person to pick it up and I take away a marble

There aren’t many rules, but these rules are strictly enforced:

1. You can never ask for a marble. If you ask for a marble, you lose a marble. You can tell Mama or Daddy that you think a sibling deserves a marble for something– we like to encourage them to point out good things they see in each other.
2. There is no complaining or criticizing what we do and don’t hand out marbles for. We regularly remind them that you won’t always get a marble for good behaviors, you may get one. There is no complaining about that. We sometimes give them an opportunity to talk to us about these things at a family meeting, and that is an appropriate time to politely tell us that they think we should give marbles for things that we aren’t currently giving them for.
3. If you touch any of the marble jars, we dump out all of your marbles.

That’s about it. You can see our current marketplace list in the picture, but this is fluid, it changes every few months. We try to count marbles every Sunday and encourage the kids to use them. This system works best when the kids are seeing the benefits of earning and keeping marbles. We hope that this system is helping us to train up our children in the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6). There are many different systems that you can use that are similar, this is just the one we’ve really found to work well for our home. Happy training!