(note: some names have been changed to protect the identity of those involved)
I would like to raise my son in such a way that he will be grow up to be a kind & caring sort of guy. So when he gets in trouble at school, I feel it is my duty as a Mom to get to the bottom of the issue.
At school, they have these cards they move when they have an occurrence. The card starts out on green, and if they have misbehaved, they move the card to yellow (that is a warning). If they misbehave further, they move their card to white and get a time out. If they misbehave a third time, they move their card to red and get sent to the counselor that helps them come up with an action plan and an oops report.
Thankfully, we haven't seen a red card in a while, however, very recently our son came home several days in a row, reporting yellow cards. This concerned me, and I wondered if it had something to do with his "best friend" leaving to go to another school.
As we were winding down for bed-time, I inquired about his consecutive yellow cards, saying gently, "honey, is there something that has been bothering you at school lately?"
He replied, "well, I could use another snack in my lunch".
"I could arrange that. Have you been feeling hungry at school?", I asked, knowing this may be true, yet he was stalling from the real question. "You've been getting a lot of yellow cards, lately, does it mostly happen after lunch?"
"yeah, I know", he said softly "no, its not just after lunch".
"So what has been going on Hon?", I asked with genuine concern.
I knew he had gotten the first days yellow card from putting glue on a chair. He told me he couldn't remember what happened the next day, and the third day it was for crawling around on the carpet when he should have been doing something else. Then he said, "do you want to know, honestly?"
"Well, yes, I do want to know, honestly, I always want to know honestly", I answered with anticipation.
"I was trying to glue George to the chair".
"Oh.", I said, trying really hard not to giggle. Seeing a slight smirk in my face, he started to smile, as I continued, "though that might seem like a funny thing to do, its not very nice, why would you want to glue George to the chair?"
"Because they did it on SpongeBob, somebody got glued to a log" (I am sure he told me the character's name, but I cannot remember it)
My keen mom insights could see through his endeavor to blame his actions on television, and I replied, "well, you know, that is exactly why I don't like SpongeBob and we don't watch it here, at home. Maybe I will have to tell the daycare not to allow anyone to watch SpongeBob. You know T.V. is make believe, and I know you know its wrong to glue people to chairs, don't you?
"Yeah.", he mumbled.
"So why WOULD you glue George to the chair?", I inquired again, inquisitively.
"Because he is pretty bad to everyone, and I thought I would teach him a lesson by being bad to him and gluing him to the chair", he replied, in a matter of fact tone.
"I see... did the teacher realize you were trying to glue him to the chair?"
"No, I think she thought I was making a mess. I had to clean up all the glue, and it was hard to do".
"You know", I said, "the glue they have at school would have taken way too long to dry, you wouldn't have glued him to the chair anyway."
We then had a short discussion about bullies, why/how bullies might have become bullies, and how dealing with bullies by gluing them to seats, probably isn't the best way to deal with bullies.
Hopefully this was the beginning AND the end of his vigilante ways.
