By Arthur Lightbourn

"One thing Leland Ancier knows for sure, and from personal experience is: If you can’t say ‘no’ to your child and mean it, both you and your child are in deep, deep trouble.

Some people call it ‘hands-on parenting’ or even ‘tough love.’ Or simply, teaching a child that privileges, even in the wealthiest of families, have to be ‘earned’ and when they are not, they can be taken away.

Ancier recently launched a new software company, Encourage Software, dedicated to developing software and services for parents seeking new solutions for their children’s behavioral problems. The new company’s flagship product is called EasyChild, a patented software program that helps parents and children identify and organize weekly goals and sets up reward-based plans of action for achieving those goals.

The customized plan uses a checklist of ‘what we expect them to do and checking off when they do it and at the end of a week the number of points a child has earned determines what level of privileges a child has earned.’ Ancier recommends printing out the checklist once a week and posting it on the refrigerator door. By tracking and tallying points over the course of a week, the child earns a Privilege Level for the next week. Generally, Ancier said, it takes about three weeks to achieve noticeable and consistent behavior-changing results. In less than an hour, Ancier said, a family can customize the system by specifying the positive behaviors they wish to encourage, such as doing home-work, making your bed, showering, and the negative behaviors they wish to eliminate, such as hitting, lying, not accepting directions, etc. Once set up, the program requires less than 15 minutes a week at the computer.

The new company, formed in 2002, now has a staff of five employees, including psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Bruns, who teaches graduate courses at Chapman University, Orange, California, and is the author of The Defiant Ones, a manual for raising kids.

‘A child is going to try and get what they want by arguing and manipulating,’ Ancier said. ‘This [program] breaks that habit.’

‘Most kids, in the program and at the end of the week,’ he said, ‘end up on Level A so they actually end up getting more than they got by arguing before but they deploy a different strategy and it’s much more peaceful.’ Ancier is also a great believer in the power of ‘allowances’ for children.

‘Its amazing when we were surveying around here, very few parents use allowances any more. Literally, they just buy the kid everything he wants. And then they are surprised when the kids don’t have any sense of value and they’re actually running the house, which is really sad.’

In working with his son, Ancier first created what eventually became EasyChild ‘on paper.’ And, two years ago, he decided if it helped him and his son it could help others as well. That’s when he decided to create and market a computerized version of the program.