My daughter has this obsession with taking shiny things and hiding them. Specifically, my husband’s wedding band. The good news is that we obviously have child-proofed drawers, so I hide most of my jewelry and make up in them or else Sunny would look like a crazy bejeweled gypsy with makeup on every day.
She likes to find shiny things and put them in hiding places all over the house but then never remembers where she put them. It’s like asking Rose from Titanic where the diamond is.
It’s really frustrating because she’s 4 ½, so it shouldn’t be hard for her to remember where she’s hidden these treasures. She’ll hide my husband’s wedding band because for some reason, she thinks its absolutely hilarious and then we’ll ask, “Where is it? Where’s the ring?” and she’ll get this look of confusion on her face. You can tell she’s slowly recalling the act of taking it but then she looks a little upset and you can tell she’s completely forgotten where she’s hidden it.
So she starts coming up with fake answers. “I put it in a drawer.” “Which drawer?” “At Grandmas house.” “Oh okay, can we call her?” “No… It’s actually not at her house, it’s in my room.”
So we start looking, but after searching for, like, 10 minutes she’ll say, “No, no, actually it’s in my room in Santa Barbara, I promise.” Sunny hasn’t been to Santa Barbara in a month and she took the ring this morning, but she swears it’s there. It’s like asking my grandfather what he had for breakfast on his tenth birthday.
My housekeeper thinks I’m weird because I have asked her, like, five times to find my husband’s wedding band. She’s probably thinking,“Take a hint. lady.”
This is a really tough situation, but I beg you, for Sunny’s sake, there need to be repercussions. She has to understand that 1) taking things that don’t belong to her is wrong and 2) lying about ANYTHING is absolutely wrong.
I’m certainly no expert as we only have two daughters, now 20 & 25. However, one of my most treasured gifts was given to us this Christmas. It is a plaque that our oldest made for us highlighting the most important things we taught her. Among them were “always tell the truth, always do your best, be HAPPY & know your are loved”.
My point is, you are not raising a child, you are raising a person who is going to be an adult for a very long time. I think that as mothers, we owe it to our children to give them tools that will help them be responsible results – whatever we decide the best tools are.
I wish you the best of luck!
I hate your articles. Lying to children undermines trust they have in you and they will eventually catch on that you think they are stupid.
Being a parent almost requires telling white lies to small children. I’m pretty sure that when this little girl grows up, she’s not going to hate her mother for telling her that she shouldn’t steal her father’s wedding ring because then they might not be married anymore. 4 year olds don’t understand that a wedding ring is symbolic and often expensive and I’d like to see an explanation of a ring’s symbolism deter a child from taking it.
It’s not that she thinks her child is stupid, it’s just easier to explain things on a child’s level of understanding than to give them an adult-ified explanation, which often requires stretching the truth. Also, these lies can protect children from hearing even WORSE things. If your kid lost your husband’s wedding band, would you rather tell her that it had cost you thousands of dollars and was irreplaceable and it was HER fault that it was gone? It’s better to stop kids from doing these things ahead of time by making sure they understand why they shouldn’t do them, whether the consequences are real or not.
My 5 year old niece likes to claim that missing items are in the cat’s mouth
My 14month old loves taking things and packing them away! We’re currently moving house and the other day I had to unpack 4 boxes as my son had ‘packed’ our TV remote away and I couldn’t hack Disney all evening!