Guilty Conscience

Sitting down to dinner with my favorite little man.  He's calm.  He's engaging in conversation.  Most importantly, he's eating his vegetables.  I notice however that he seems kind of far from the table.  As I go to push him in, I recognize that he has something in his pocket.  That something looking like the outline of my chap stick.  Little stinker!  He must have taken it out of my purse when I was getting my haircut this afternoon.  So, I give Jack the "mommy knows" look and I asked what's in his pocket.  Suddenly, his face turns serious.  "No mommy" he says.  I think to myself, what is going on?  I say to him, "bud take it out, what is it?".  Out comes what I was sure was going to be my chap stick, but chap stick it was not.  Jack had a toy with him.  So I just asked, "where did you get that?" "Who gave it to you?"  With that, he bursts into inconsolable tears.  What is going on?

I take Jack away from the table to try to get him to calm down so I can figure out what happened.  Of course, my "mommy sense" has already set in and I know what happened.  I know because I was his age once. I cried like this once (well maybe not just once).  I cried like this because I knew I had done something wrong.  And here I was holding my four year old, trying to get him to calm down.  My four year old who has a conscience and a guilty one at that.  I was at a crossroads.  Grateful that my son has a conscience and seems to be able to determine right from wrong.  At the same time, concerned for him because I knew how much this guilt was going to eat away at him.  And eat away at him it did for 60 whole minutes.  He would say things as he gasped breaths between bursts of tears, "I'm sad your mad at me", "I wish I didn't take it", "I should have asked to borrow it".  Here my four year old was taking all my lines, all the things I should be saying to him in reverse.  He totally got it.  He did something wrong, he upset his mother, and he felt awful...really awful.

So, I did the only thing I knew how to do, we had "the talk".  The one that starts with, "I'll always love you, but I am disappointed in what you did..."  Was I really speaking these words?  These were the words that made me cringe inside when I was a young girl.  I always wished my parents were the type who would just ground me for punishment.  But no, it was far worse.  They always had to have "the talk" with me.  The one that started exactly as I started mine with Jack, "you know I'll always love you...." This talk killed me.  It was the worse punishment ever because it just made the guilt ooze out of me.  I knew exactly how Jack was feeling.  But, still we had "the talk".  As heart wrenching as it was to watch my little man cry and cry over the toy he took from daycare, I knew it had to be dealt with.  This had to be a learning experience.  In effort to get him to take it easy,  I decided to share with Jack my own experience of how I learned that stealing was wrong. I confessed to him how when I was younger, his "Auntie Lisa" and I took a pair of earrings from a store and put them in our pockets.  As we left the store, we glanced at one another.  I was sure my face was burning up.  We weren't even at the car before we confessed to her mother that we had stolen earrings.  Back into the store we were marched to fess up and give them back. 

We all have our stories, right?  It's easy to forget we were all kids once to as we deal with our child's wrongdoings.  We mustn't forget.  We must try to pull into our own previous experiences and remember what it felt like for us.  We need to empathize, but also discipline.  Discipline is a great tool for learning, developing coping skills, and building resiliency.  Kids need discipline, they crave it.  And I truly believe discipline is not punishment, rather a tool for supporting learning in our children.  When your child does something wrong, try not to react strongly right away and take a few moments to think back to your own childhood and the "learning experiences" you took advantage of.