Christina Wilcox, a single mother in Omaha, Nebraska, put her kids on a street corner for over an hour, recently. Each of the three, a teen and two little ones, stood with home made signs proclaiming their crimes for all to see. The oldest held a sign reading, “I’ll never have a girlfriend. I can’t respect my mom.” The seven year old has been caught stealing several times, and the exasperated mother of three says her five year old daughter is copying her older brothers.
So what does she do to change their behavior? Humiliate them.
I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to walk in this woman’s shoes, but it sounds like family counseling is desperately needed to sort out this mess. She says she works full time, and so her punishments don’t always work.
Maybe the kids don’t need punishments, but consequences. If the child steals, he or she has to work that proverbial butt off to make as much money as was stolen. Perhaps the disrespectful teen has to volunteer at the old folks’ home to learn the value of older folks. Kids do things. As parents, we have to show them that what they do has actual consequences in the real world.
This parenting method will only scar the children, rather than teach them a valuable lesson. I am a teacher, and I have seen what this type of parenting can do to a child’s self esteem. It’s degrading.
Ouch. I know every parent has their own techniques for handling misbehavior, but it sounds like there is much more to this story.
I think this technique is over-the-top in the first place, but the “I’ll never have a girlfriend” comment was a mean and unnecessary addition to “I don’t respect my mother.” I really feel sorry for those kids. My hunch is that they will harbor resentment toward her for their entire lives, regardless of what life circumstances provoked her to take this approach.
While I see the punishment would end up being counter-productive with regard to the teen, there is an aspect of this that makes sense. Riffing off an element in Gayla’s response, embarrassment is mild form of shame.
If more poeple (adults setting examples for children) had a healthy concept of SHAME…
Interesting, and somewhat creative … I guess we won’t know if it works until they grow up: life lived in hindsight.
I will sometimes call my kids out or even random stupid people for doing stupid things when out and about as a means of embarrassing them into not doing whatever it was again – but to go to this extreme, this is insane and will only cause more problems with the kids mental state i would think.