One Glove Wonder?

I must be the worst mom in the world tonight, or at least one that needs to re-examine disciplining her child and her own very bad reaction to a trivial problem - I actually yelled, very loudly and in a not-so-nice way, at my son for loosing a glove. A glove!

I should say though, that after my son’s break-down just last week over loosing one of his new Iron Man gloves, I thought he’d have learned a lesson. (Loosing a pair of gloves a week is getting expensive!) This entire school year I have been drilling home that his gloves and hat need to go into, and stay, in his backpack when they aren’t on his hands. So why this should even have been an issue. He’s old enough to know better. His crying and carrying on last week over this glover were terrible! I thought that telling him not to worry, since a single Iron Man glove would be of little interest to anyone, however since the lost and found box has yet to belch out the afore-mentioned single missing glove, I now have to wonder if there was another little boy missing HIS Iron Man glove… But I digress.

This post is about discipline, both mine and his. It’s also about teaching a child how to care for their own things and about handling the repercussions when they don’t.

I have been asking my son to keep everything in his backpack since the start of school. I have also told him that HE is responsible for his own backpack and lunch bag, however I may have set a bad example when the dog ate through both the backpack and the lunch bag when my son did not listen, and left his bag out where the dog could get at it. What did I do? Went right out and bought him a new backpack and lunch bag. I suppose I didn’t think about what message this would send my son, after all he needed both as the backpack and the lunch bag were beyond repair. But what does that say to a child? Don’t worry mom will just buy more, right? How would it have better been handled? He did pretty well too until the missing, well love glove incident of last week. Mostly though this is due to my constant reminder for him to be aware of his things.

Today as my son was emptying his backpack and yet again said the dreaded words, “Mom I lost a glove.” What makes this even worse is that it is actually 3 missing gloves since his (also new) Batman gloves were double-layered gloves that included two black full gloves with two fingerless gloves on top. I was going to suggest that from now on he would have to wear one Iron Man glove and the now single Batman glove, the problem is the remaining Batman glove is the fingerless one!

I told him that tomorrow he and his father would have to go out and buy two new pairs of gloves, with HIS money. I just can not discuss the gloves again. I still think I missed the mark though. My biggest concerns as a parent though are ‘why should missing one glove cause such an eruption of my emotions’ and more importantly, since it did, what will happen when my son truly does something “bad” and I get mad? I also need to consider him coming to me with his real issues; if I react so poorly won’t he choose to not come to me as a parent?

So here I am stuck between a rock and a hard place, and knowing fully well that I handle led the entire situation very poorly. I know I am not alone as there are at least 20 single gloves in the lost and found that would likely produce likewise unhappy parents, I just need to re-examine my own behavior over the missing glove incident tonight as well as how to handle my son’s need for new gloves.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, I am currently reflecting upon some of the following questions:

- How do you teach your children to respect personal property?
- How do you teach a child the value of ‘things”?
- At what “age” should children be expected to be responsible for belongings?
- How do you discipline a child when something “necessary” is lost or damaged?