The Peterfreund Family

Jo visits the Peterfreund family in Chandler, Arizona where Sonya (36) & Keith (39) have four sons: 5-year-old Jett, 3-year-old Gage, 2-year-old Trey and newborn Myles.

Episode Summary
Jo visits the Peterfreund family in Arizona where for the first time, she works with a family who has a newborn son.

Parents Keith and Sonya are so overwhelmed with their three older boys: Jett (5 years old) Gage (3 years old) and Trey (2 years old) that they're not remembering their Newborn baby Myles' needs.

Mom literally has to run through the house after the active older boys with Myles hanging off her arm, head bobbing dangerously. Keith works as a flight attendant and travels frequently, leaving Mom to care for all four boys on her own.

Neither Sonya or Keith are consistent about discipline and their go-to punishment is "saucing" the three older kids, putting a dab of hot sauce on their lips. Can Jo show these overwhelmed parents of four how to parent effectively without using condiments?

Submission Reel
Jo has arrived in Chandler, Arizona. She is very excited about meeting her “first” family with a newborn (Even though The Wilson-Knutson Family featured Newborns first). Father Keith (39) is a flight attendant and Mother Sonya (36) is home with the kids all day. Jett (5), Gage (3), Trey (2) and Myles, their two-week old newborn.

As mentioned on the paragraph above, Keith works as a flight attendant and is usually gone from Monday-Friday. Chaos erupts while Keith is gone, as Sonya is constantly holding Myles while his head dangerously bobs his Head.

Jett, being the oldest is spoiled and disobedient to his Parents. Gage is extremely headstrong and Keith describes him as doing “whatever he wants when he wants”. Trey, being in his terrible twos, makes him the hardest to deal with. The parents are trying to get Myles to sleep longer, however with the older boys running around like animals, it’s really hard.

Fighting in the house can sometimes get extremely rough and dangerous. Keith and Sonya have tried nearly everything to discipline their wild sons, mainly Timeouts and Soap, but most of the Time they backfire. Because of this, they’ve resorted to putting a dab of hot sauce on the Kids lips. Which is shown in a very shocking and disturbing scene where Keith attempts using Hot Sauce on Gage as he screams in terror.

Observation
Sonya is seen struggling to control the kids, mainly when they get on the roof of a Playhouse, the only problem was that she couldn’t do anything since she was carrying Miles. When she went inside to feed Miles, Gage is shockingly caught throwing a Football at him, which could’ve killed Miles if Gage wasn’t careful. Thankfully, Sonya does manage to get Gage away from the Baby, after feeding Miles, Jo realises that Miles doesn’t feed like he normally does and assumes Sonya could be overfeeding without knowledge, as without an exact chart to tell the time of when you need to feed a baby, you can’t properly remember when it was last fed. Thus, Sonya has resorted to using her Memory. We then see more of her struggling with the Kids.

A while later, Keith returns from his Flight Attendant Job, and goes to Gage and Trey’s room, only to find a giant mess, he picks up Trey and uses him in which Jo describes as a “Human Magnet”. Later Miles pees his Diaper, however Keith believes he needs to feed him. After Miles almost spits up, Jo leaves

Parents Meeting
At the Parents Meeting, Jo confronts Keith and Sonya about how they use Hot Sauce as their Discipline method (despite it not being shown being used outside of the submission reel scene) and how they don’t address the needs of Miles when needed.

Teaching
Jo enters the House. Not with a Routine like she usually does, but with something brand new, a baby log. Seeing as how Keith and Sonya only rely on their Memory to keep track of everything for Miles, she brought it in so they could keep track of it.

With Keith out of Town as a Flight Attendant a lot. It's hard for Sonya to keep track of the Kids, so Jo brings in the Roaming Technique for a trip to the park. Before the trip, Miles was sleeping, so Jo decided to have a stuffed bear in place of Miles. At first, the Boys were apprehensive of the Technique, but eventually they were able to use it perfectly, And had no embarrassment, mainly because there seemed to be Nobody else at The Park.

Next, Jo decides to bring in proper discipline as the Parents have been using Hot Sauce, So she brings in the returning Naughty Bench and has Hot Sauce back where it Belongs, the Pantry. Later, Trey gave Keith the opportunity to use the Naughty Bench when he began crying and hitting the Computer for unknown reasons, when Trey goes there, Keith constantly communicates with him, but Jo manages to snap him out of it. During this, Keith asks Jo if there's a record of how long she’s done a timeout, and she says 3 1/2 Hours. Eventually Trey gave in and apologised to Keith. Keith finally knows thanks to the Naughty Bench, Hot Sauce wont be used anymore.

Jo decides It would be best if Keith gets to spend more time with Miles, since he usually never gets to spend quality time with him because of his job as a flight attendant, so Jo has Sonya leave the house. Whilst Sonya is away Jett is refusing to eat his Lunch, and then the boys play outside. When Sonya gets home Jo decides to have a heartwarming moment, where Keith gives Miles a bath, during this Keith admits he hasn’t actually given Miles a Bath since he was born.

The next day. Jo returns to see how Keith and Sonya are doing with the baby log, and is glad to see they’re keeping up with it.

Before Jo leaves, she brings in an imagination box. The box will be used for the family to perform a Story together, where they dress up and have fun. Trey and Gage say they liked the dress up. Afterwards Jo leaves for a few days.

Reinforcement
After the DVD meeting, Jo decided to take Sonya and the boys out to a train museum. However, Trey began to throw a tantrum because he wasn’t allowed to climb the train they were observing. However, whilst Gage and Jett were climbing the train as well, Jo thought it was alright for Jett to climb it, since he’s the oldest. Trey continued to throw his tantrum so Jo stepped in and told Trey that if he continued, he’d hold onto the stroller. Trey’s tantrum eventually calmed down and he didn’t throw another one.

After this, Jo decided to set some timeout reminders, so that Keith and Sonya stop talking to the kids during their timeouts. Later, in the afternoon, Gage, for some weird reason, pooped in the waste basket, causing him to be put into a timeout. Sonya never communicated with Gage throughout the timeout, showing that the reminders did work.

Before Jo leaves, she points out how Keith is away every week, so she decided to give him an airplane with a picture of his family on the front window, he also writes things on them for them all to remember whilst he’s away as a flight attendant. And with that, Jo’s work with The Peterfreund Family is done.

Family members

 * Keith Peterfreund, 39
 * Sonya Peterfreund, 36
 * Jett, 5 (Born October 4, 2004)
 * Gage, 3 (Born July 5, 2006)
 * Trey, 2 (Born August 9, 2007)
 * Myles, Newborn (Born October 31, 2009)

Behind The Scenes
This was filmed in November 2009.

Trivia/Errors

 * This episode is stated to be the first time Jo helps a family with a newborn. This is a continuity error for the series, as The Wilson-Knutson Family featured newborn twins Will and Jesse.
 * Jo mentions the longest time she’s ever done a timeout was three and a half hours. This is another season four callback, this time to The Benjany Family, where Jo, Lisa and Richie had to discipline Zoe for that amount of time. However, once again. This is a continuity error as the longest tantrum ever recorded was Cameron’s tantrum in The Smith-Clarke Family
 * Keith and Sonya’s use of hot sauce is similar to a 2010/2011 case where a mother named Jessica Beagley disciplined her adopted Russian son, Kristoff with a bottle of hot sauce before sending him to a cold shower. Jessica was featured on an episode of Dr. Phil where she discussed it. The Dr. Phil episode aired a month prior to this episode and could’ve landed Keith and Sonya in jail, had it happen around the same time.
 * As for Jessica, she was arrested and sentenced to three years of probation and $2000 Dollars of Fines (Some argue she should’ve been given a Life sentence) however it’s currently unknown if Kristoff was ever taken back to Russia by Child Protective Services or stayed in the US, being adopted by a different family.
 * its unknown why Jo mentioned hot sauce in the meeting. Despite it being the parents discipline technique, it was never shown being used outside of the scene with Gage in the submission reel. It could be possible this scene was filmed in the observation in its entirety but wasn’t used, leaving only five seconds off it in the submission reel, since it could’ve been majorly controversial, especially after the afromentioned Jessica Beagley ordeal

Pop Culture
Whilst not an indirect pop culture reference entirely. At the start of the reinforcement Gage and Trey say “I like Trains”. Which is a quote popularly associated with the I like trains kid, from the ASDFMovie YouTube series. Coincidentally. Both ASDFMovie 2 (I like trains kids debut episode) and the Peterfreund Family were both released in 2010. With this episode airing 10 months after ASDFMovie2’s release