Teaching morals and values

Turning your child in for doing something wrong is hard for me to do. I know it’s important and it’s the right thing to do but it really rips at my heart. I just keep telling myself that if I don’t do it now, the “small” things that happen now will just turn into big stuff in the future.

Last year, Aidan stole a book from his classroom and put it on his bookshelf in his room. I came across it one day and it had the teacher’s name inside it. I asked him why it was here and he said, “I wanted it.” We had the big conversation about how that was stealing and it was his responsibility to return it the following day and tell his teacher what he did. His teacher last year was really mean and it worried me to no end how she might respond to this. Come to find out, he lost both of his recess times for that day and had to stand by the wall. Okay, I can deal with that and hopefully he learned a valuable lesson.

A couple of days ago, I’m going through Aidan’s homework folder and come across his reading minutes from last month. The total was 647 minutes. This is unusually high; Tristan hasn’t even ever accomplished that. I remember saying to myself, “Did we really read that much?” It’s possible with the tutoring and what not and then I flip it over to the calendar that we record them on and notice that every day that I hadn’t written some minutes in, Aidan had taken the liberty to write in some totals and sign my name for me. Can you believe it? Forging a signature at the age of 8?

Of course I asked him why he did it and his only response was, “I wanted it to look better than it did.” I told him he would have to tell her what he did. Immediate tears fell from him; honestly I wanted to cry myself. He wrote her a letter of apology. I highlighted the minutes that he should not have received credit for and his true total for the month should have been 250. I also sent her an email to just give her a head’s up that he had something to give to her and if for some reason he didn’t to please let me know.

Again, I’m worried about what may happen to him. He’s worried because he knows that he’s disappointed me and he loves his teacher this year and doesn’t want to disappoint her also. She did get the email and asked him if he had something for her. He gave it to her with another apology and she told him, “It makes me really sad.” That’s it, no punishment - the lucky boy! Who cares though, the whole point in this is that if you do something wrong you have to face the music and whatever consequences come with it.

I told Josh about it last night and his response made me laugh. It seems that Aidan is a lot like Jeremy, Josh’s brother. Jeremy signed his mother’s name in 2nd grade also and was caught. Josh remembered asking him, “Why would you do that when anyone with eyes could tell a little boy wrote that and not a mom!”