Julia Proverbs: Great tool, but don't get stuck

Reward charts can be a useful and successful way of getting your children to toe the line.

Getting dressed, using good manners, toilet training, brushing teeth and going to bed can all be remedied with a sheet of paper, a marker pen and a few stickers.

Once they have mastered it you phase out the chart and, voila, the good behaviour remains.

Unless your child develops an addiction.

Miss Two has become sticker dependent.

And weaning her off is proving harder than trying to get an addict off crack cocaine.

It all started off so innocuously.

To try and stop the tantrums and daily wrestle to get her clothes on in the morning, I introduced a "Heart Chart". Which is, basically, a heart shape cut out of an A4 sheet of card, on to which a heart-shaped sticker is placed every time she gets dressed without a fuss.

It worked a treat and within a week she was going straight for her chest of drawers the minute she woke.

"I got dressed all by myself. I get a heart chart for that," she proclaims proudly every morning.

Which was cute and very satisfying to start with but is now wearing thin, given that the chart was started a month ago and is now adorned with 105 heart stickers.

Can you spot the discrepancy?

Yep, that's way more stickers than days in a month.

Because Miss Two decided that if, for any reason, she had to change her clothes during the day it would earn her a sticker.

If she gets wet or dirty the clothes instantly come off and the new ones go on.

"I get a heart chart for that," she instructs.

In fact, some days she just changes her clothes with the sole intent of getting a sticker, leaving clean, dry clothes discarded all over the house. And if we don't dish them out, a tantrum ensues, bringing us back to square one.

Really, stickers should come with a health warning.

What if we had used them for brushing her teeth? She wouldn't have any enamel left on them by now.

Or for toilet training? A bladder infection would almost certainly result.

Stickers: use sparingly and with caution.

Over-use can result in compulsively good behaviour.