The most common setup mistake is a chart made entirely of the things that go wrong. It is understandable — those are the things on your mind at the moment you sit down to make it — and it produces a chart a child cannot win on, which is a chart they will not use.
The mix that works
| How many | What kind | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Two or three | Things they already do most days | Brushed my teeth · Got outside |
| Three or four | Things that take real effort | Said yes the first time · Sat down and did my homework |
| One or two | The genuinely hard ones | Asked for help when it got hard · Stayed cool when someone pushed my buttons |
| Always one | The comeback | I had a hard moment and I came back |
The easy ones are not padding. They are what makes the chart usable on a bad day, and they are the reason a child will look at it at all.
Too few is the failure nobody predicts
A chart with four lines gives you four moments in a day where something good can be said out loud. That is not enough to change what a child hears about themselves, which was the entire point. Eight to twelve is not clutter — it is the difference between a system that notices things and one that checks boxes.
Rules for writing each line
- An action, not an absence. "Kept my hands to myself", never "no hitting" — a child cannot practice a negative.
- Their voice. "I" and "my". Third person turns it into a report about them.
- Small enough to answer honestly. "Was good at school" cannot be answered. "Started the first time I was asked" can.
- Nothing that depends on somebody else. "Got on with my sister" can be ruined by the sister, and then it is not about them at all.