Since the divorce that the kids spend roughly half their time at my house and half the time at their Dad’s house. We split the week in half, give or take.
A couple of weekends back, I took the 2 girls to the high street to get passport photos. We got a ride there and then would come back by bus.
As we walked to the bus stop, we went past WH Smith and went into the shop. I wanted to check out some 11+ books.
Miss Z immediately asked me to go check out the beanie boos stand (don’t know if that’s the right spelling) that was in the middle of the shop. I said she could go look but not to touch anything. Miss A, the little one, asked if she could go too. I said the same thing.
I went past them and onto the aisle of the school books. I could hear them talking and then all of a sudden it went down to whispers. I went to check what was going on and caught Miss Z in the process of putting a toy in her bag. I reacted really badly, put the toy back, immediately walked out of the shop and gave both girls a piece of my mind, almost all the way home.
When we were walking from the bus stop to the house, there was a Police Community Officers’ van with a few officers setting up near our house. I asked an officer to talk to my daughter, so she could understand the seriousness of the situation. The PCO gave her a stern speech which I hope gave her a serious fright. Afterwards she was grounded for the rest of the day and had to stay in her room and write lines (with a sentence I gave her… something along the lines of “I shall not….”). Her birthday party was the next day so I couldn’t ground her any longer…
Then, last week Thursday, when the kids were at Dad’s house, Miss Z was supposed to go with her Auntie and cousin to ballet and she was quite rude to her for some reason (I don’t know the full details that sparked the conflict). Her Granny proceeded to have some words and she was rude to her Granny too. When her Granny smacked her bum, she immediately turned to smack her back.
Granny called Dad on the mobile, and when she handed over the phone to Miss Z, she swore (the F word!) saying she didn’t want to talk to him, and hung up the phone on his face.
Dad called me a couple of hours later to tell me what had happened, and was so angry that he wanted to give her “the hiding of her life”. I thought that wasn’t the way to go (we are both doing a Family Toolkit course that is all about being a positive parent), and I suggested my strategy of grounding her and making her write lines. I managed to talk him down from smacking, but he didn’t like my suggestion, so we agreed to do some research online – surely there would be some good tips on the internet on how to deal with this kind of behaviour.
After a quick search and reading a few articles, I ended up recommending him this strategy:
1. get her to tell the story from her side
2. talk about appropriate behaviour/set expectations
3. natural/logical consequences – for example, she has to clean the whole room by herself and all the things on her desk will be confiscated for x time.
4. restitution – apologise to Auntie and Granny and make something for them (something that takes time)
When Miss Z came back to my house at the weekend, she still hadn’t been given the punishment for her episode. This evening, Dad and I will be going to the 3rd instalment of the Family Toolkit course, where Behaviours and Consequences will be discussed. I am definitely looking forward to it, because at the moment, I’m at a loss on how to deal with these kinds of deviant/disrespectful behaviours, which would never be accepted when I was a kid and basically be met with a belt and end up with a very very sore bum.