Blame and shame doesn't solve anything

Truth #6

I have 6 occupants living in my house. Me, my husband, and our 3 children. And a wicked mouse.

The wicked mouse first came along a few years ago, when my oldest was a preschooler and learning not to draw on the walls. One day crayon just appeared on the wall, but my son assured me that he didn’t do it. It was the wicked mouse.  

This wicked mouse gets up to all sorts of mischief. Sometimes the wicked mouse leaves rubbish on the table. Sometimes the wicked mouse pulls books off the bookshelf and leaves them on the floor. The wicked mouse has been known to unroll all the toilet paper. Whenever there is an overwhelming amount chaos or mess, it was probably the wicked mouse who contributed to it.

A few months ago, the wicked mouse got up to mischief for the first time in a while. I’d gone upstairs to where Mr 5 had been quietly playing (at his age silence isn’t always a sign of getting up to no good, thankfully!) and discovered that there was orange crayon on every imaginable surface. There were orange squiggles on the tiles, on the shower glass, on the toilet lid, around the edges of the bath, on the chest of drawers, on the toilet brush, even on the plug. Nothing in the bathroom was untouched. It was as though an experiment had been done to see which surfaces a crayon would work on – the answer: it works on all of them. Interestingly, the orange crayon had even been used to leave a message on the tiled bathroom floor. Five letters, spelling out Mr 5’s name.

There were only two possibilities to what had happened. Either my 5 year old had gotten creative with a crayon… or the wicked mouse was trying to frame him.

Now, I probably don’t need to say this… but the wicked mouse doesn’t really exist. And it’s not that my son was lying when he first blamed wall drawings on a wicked mouse. Young children, especially preschoolers, don’t really lie, at least not in the way we might do as adults. They just tell us what they wish the truth was. So my son, when blaming the wicked mouse, was really saying that he wishes that someone else had drawn on the wall, because he already knew that he shouldn’t really have done that.

I could call him out as a liar. I could shame and blame him. I could punish him for what he’d done so that he’d ‘learn his lesson’.

But instead of blaming and shaming, I had a different tactic. I called my son upstairs, and this is what was said:

Me: You wouldn’t believe what the wicked mouse has done! Come look with me. The wicked mouse drew all over the floor! What a cheeky mouse!

Mr 5: Oh no! The wicked mouse drew on everything!

Me: What are we going to do? Can you help me clean it up?

Mr 5: Ok!

Me: Here’s a scrubber. Let’s get to work.

My son then spent the next 30 minutes helping me identify every spot that had been drawn on. And for mysterious reasons, he seemed to have a very good idea about where the wicked mouse had scribbled. He personally scrubbed out at least half of the drawings, diligently working with me until every spot of orange was gone.

Would he have been so helpful if I had blamed him? Probably not. He probably would have felt so ashamed that he would have hidden his feelings behind defensiveness and anger. I probably wouldn’t have been able to engage his cooperation at all.

But he shouldn’t have gotten away with it! You might think.

The thing is, he didn’t get away with anything. The consequence was the same. He still needed to help clean up.

By not blaming him first though, he learnt some really important lessons.

We can find solutions without finding someone to blame first. I can be part of the solution even if I’m part of the problem. I don’t need to make others feel bad when something has gone wrong. I can focus on problem solving.

We can teach our children without blaming them. They can learn to be responsible for their actions without being shamed for them.

I think every family of young, destructively curious kids would benefit from having a guest come and stay. It may be a wicked mouse, a cheeky frog, or a silly pigeon.

I can’t wait to hear what sort of mischief they get up to!

Beck xx