Response to Reprimand

A couple of days ago, I was talking on the phone with one of my daughters, when her almost three-year old could be heard whimpering in the background.

Daughter: What's the matter Maddie?

Granddaughter: I was shy.

Daughter: Who were you shy of?

Granddaughter: Daddy

Daughter: Why were you shy of Daddy?

Granddaughter: Because, he told me the truth!

Apparently she had been running with a stick in her mouth, and he had told her to take it out and explained that she could get hurt.

I was amused, because it revealed something about her personality which is very like her mother's personality as a little girl.

Children respond in many different ways to discipline. These sweet ladies are mortified that there is even a need for discipline. Neither my daughter or her daughter like the notion that they have done something foolish. Maddie doesn't know the word "embarrassed" yet, but I think that's what she was going for with "shy."

My son was likewise horrified at the need to be corrected. When he was about 6, I commented that he had never been spanked. He said, "Oh, yes I was."

I asked, "When were you ever spanked?"

He replied, "One time when Dad was trying to help me put my jacket on, I did not cooperate, and he spanked me."

This was humorous, because this incident had occurred years earlier when he was a toddler, and what he counted as a "spanking" was one swat on the behind to get his attention. No matter...in his mind, he had required correction, and that certainly wasn't going to happen again.

In contrast, another daughter had a completely different response to discipline.

My husband needed a new suit, and we thought we could get away with taking our daughters, who were about age 3 and 4 at the time, along on the shopping trip. We figured we would just tell them that if they were good, we would go to McDonald's for lunch afterward.

We were in one of the higher end stores in our small city checking out possibilities. We had placed the girls on a bench within sight and instructed them to stay there. We turned our backs only briefly looking at the suits. When we turned around, they were gone. We split up looking for them. How they could have moved so quickly, I don't know. I found them in the display window in the front of the store...clearly visible from the sidewalk. They had taken a shirt off a mannequin and had added about a dozen pairs of black socks to the window display.

I retrieved the girls from the window and found a clerk. I apologized that my daughters had rearranged the display. She crawled out in the window, and as she picked up each pair of socks, she made a noise of disgust.

We took the girls home, gave them a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and put them in their rooms for nap time. My husband said he was going to go up and talk to them about what they had done.

The first girl agreed that what she had done was wrong, and that it wouldn't happen again.

When he asked the second girl what she had learned from this experience, she responded vehemently, "That the next time we are going to McDonald's, we'd better not go shopping first!"

Ahhhh....guess how the teenage years went with that one.