On Monday, while walking to the park with my boys and Mason (Darin's cousins boy) my next door neighbor stopped me and asked me if he could show me something... without getting me mad at him! I was like... "OF COURSE!" So he takes me around the side of his house where we share the fence with him and hiding behind his garbage can is an adorable little skull and crossbones written in SHARPIE on his side of the fence. Fantastic! I immediately recognize the art as one of my boys while he's trying to explain that he doesn't know if it was one of my boys or not. I politely inform him that I am 100% positive it was one of mine and ask him to PLEASE not clean it off... that the culprit needed to learn a lesson.
I totally understand that parenting with Love and Logic is an amazing tool when you have time to think up great punishments and I had approximately 3 hours to come up with something. The boys arrived one at a time and I first started on Damon with simple questions... "Do you have anything you want to tell me about Vance's fence? Behind his garbage can?" Damon is obviously oblivious so I wait for Jaydin to get home. With the same questions on the table he starts out denying it but within 10 seconds admits his crime. He was not happy to hear what his punishment would be.
First he had to go over and clean it off the fence. Because it is a vinyl fence it came off (for the most part) with rubbing alcohol and this weird cleaner we got from costco a couple years ago. After the evidence was gone he had to apologize to Vance. Vance was a good sport and while telling him that he wasn't mad at him, he talked about graffiti and how it is bad. And last came the "real life consequence". In the real world, you do community service for vandalism so.. with the help of Nana and Papa and the slobs of Lehi Utah who like to throw crap on the ground, he spent 2.5 hours picking up garbage alongside the road, next to the field at their house.
So... will he ever vandalize anything again? I pray that this was a grand opportunity to teach a valuable lesson at 7 instead of when he's 15 and the cops bring him home! ;o)
And FYI... Jaydin picked up a total of 4 garbage bags of garbage on his own. Nana, true to her kind nature, started helping about 1.5 hours into it... together they picked up another 3 bags!
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Community Service
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7 comments:
Wow! I'm so glad you were able to actually use a real life consequence. It's so hard sometimes to give the right punishment. I, too, hope he learned his lesson now and won't think about repeating it come his teenage years.
I'm impressed with how you handled the situation. Your son learned how to make amends for his mistake by cleaning off the fence and then he also experienced doing community service. I bet this lesson sticks with him for the rest of his life!
Yeah, I like how you went about with his punishment. LoL. I know it it'd been me it would've worked! At least I hope it would. Good thing for me I've alway been good. =P *snickers*
Way too go!! I think you did a great job!! Hopefully your Damon learned a good lesson as well by watching Jaydin and what he went through.
Wow Kari way to go. I probably wouldn't have had the patience to come up with such a great punishment. I am sure Jaydin learned more then one valuable lesson. You are amazing. Love ya.
Way to go. That is a great punishment to give him for vandalizing something. I really liked how it didn't just stop at cleaning the mess he made. Making him clean other crap people just toss out may have been just the ticket to get him to realize this isn't something that should be done again. Great job!
I love it! That was an awesome response to the situation at hand. I will have to file that one away for when my little mancub gets older.
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