Neighbour’s kid picked my daffodils

Picked or not the daffodils would be dead by now. Time to let it rest.

The child stole someone else's property. This isn't cute or sweet, it's wrong. This child should be taught that, now.

Wisgingplenty No, it's obviously not the worst crime ever committed, but now you're just creating a strawman (i.e. exaggerating to try to make the oposite argument seem ridiculous). No one is "going to war," but it's still wrong to pick other people's flowers or to pick flowers that have been specially planted to give pleasure to everyone. Teach your child the difference between wildflowers/weeds and flowers that have been carefully planted to beautify our public areas. Also, I think you mean "petty." "Petted" has an entirely different meaning lol

I picked flowers once as a child, took them home to my mum who went mental!! She took me to a shop, made me use my pocket money to buy a plant and took me to the house i stole them from to apologise and "replace"

Never again did i touch a flower that was growing 😂

What an ignorant reply.

Non-OP flower thief update. Someone picked ANOTHER yellow tulip through the fence (metal railing)...during school run time 🙄 So I attached some trellis with cable ties to keep the riffraff out and tulips in. This morning there was a yellow tulip poked back into the trellis 😁

If you're the parent that made your child return the tulip - thank you! I was upset and now I'm less so.

She’s embarrassed.
That’s what embarrassed mothers do.
She knows her kid did wrong, so she dropped the flowerpot and skedaddelled outta there as fast as her kid’s legs could carry her.
She’s also a coward. A big one. Huge.

Missing the point spectacularly.

And this was a neighbour. Maybe she had been trusted to walk to the end of the road to post a card? Who knows? Who cares? Don't allow your 8 year old out, that's fine. We're all the boss of our own parenting.

Oh what a vile excuse of a person you are, completely contradicting yourself as well.

Did your nasty words make you feel better?

Yup. She engaged for a while and then wrote her final post. I think that she was fed up with some of the sillier comments insisting that she needed to be kinder.

I think the OP let it go long ago...it's Mumsnet who is keeping it going.😄

I think that the age of criminal responsibly is 10 in the UK where presumably we are talking about the planned execution of the burglary.
Yes I agree, you can apply the one sided argument to anything, and it stands still. Personally I think an apology is fine. I would let it go.

Doubtful. Kids change very quickly.

It is a worry that they went into a private garden to do this quite apart from the daffodil pinching and not respecting private property there could have been a territorial guard dog out and about. Or even worse a person who would have been delighted to find an unattended 8 year old girl in their garden and invited them in for god knows what. These things are unlikely but it is always important to make sure our children are aware that there could have been danger.

I don't they have apologised though. If my children did this then l would be mortified and they would be apologising

@LazyArsedMagician. Surely eight year olds know what daffodils and daisies are? And I don’t think it’s appropriate for any eight year olds to be allowed to roam the streets alone at that age.

"you like Tulips do you kiddo? How about I bust your Two-lips, if you pick any of mine?"

Is it though? You didn't actually address anything in my post you just decided that a kid who doesn't know daffs shouldn't be picked FROM THE VERGE shouldn't be allowed out alone. And then asked me if I thought parents were condoning the action.

Anyway - was going to add on that another poster said this "they’re picking flowers, like daisies, or planting flowers, like daffodils". An 8 year old PICKING FROM THE VERGE might not know the difference. So i don't think classing that as "not knowing not to take things that don't belong to them" is really relevant under those circumstances.

Capitalised because I'm unsure if you missed the part where I specifically said that picking flowers from a verge is obviously very different than from a garden.

PS this has been a hugely entertaining post. Sorry the actual incident was so upsetting OP.

you mentioned me so I mentioned you....its called a discussion.

Are you deliberately trolling me?

I'm pretty sure I've said at least twice that kids might not realise that daffs are different to weeds and shouldn't be picked. I also said (paraphrased) that a parent might not explicitly say not to pick them as they might just assume the kid knows? I definitely said at least twice that I didn't until I gave my mum some daffs and she explained not to. As I also said - I assume your kids never ever made a mistake because you definitely furnished them with every single piece of knowledge they could possibly ever need? By 8 years old?

(I also did say that I had assumed the kid picked them from a verge rather than OP's garden, and, I also said that she was wrong for it!)

So I'm not sure why you're picking a fight with me tbh.

You could apply that argument to literally every thread. We only ever have one person’s perspective. It’s no more true here than it is on threads where you yourself might side with the OP.

The child is 8. The OP has said this.

I certainly think trying to involve the police (who wouldn’t give a toss anyway) would be overkill here. But I also wonder at the thinking of people who seem to think that expecting a face-to-face apology and explicit assurance that it won’t happen again is somehow tantamount to putting the child in Guantanamo Bay.

There are worse things happening all over the place all the time. But if you were to have something that held meaning for you stolen, I wouldn’t tell you to not make a fuss because there’s war and famine and death in the world. And I wouldn’t tell someone who’d just been made redundant ‘at least you’re not the victim of human trafficking’ or someone whose house was being repossessed ‘at least you’re not in a concentration camp’. Your feelings about smaller things don’t stop being valid because of those terrible things. And neither do OP’s. There’s a thread kicking about on ‘toxic positivity’. It’s apposite here.

They didn’t. OP made clear that every one of her daffs were taken, and the daffs in the girl’s garden were untouched.

I agree with this, to be honest. It’s not terribly sincere as apologies go, and it wouldn’t fill me with much confidence that it won’t happen again. It wouldn’t fill me with much confidence that the parent(s) even agree that what she did was wrong . . .

you can keep them to their own home and garden and have them learn on your daffodils and not someone else's.

The majority of people are simply saying the OP is right to raise with the child's parents, which is what she's done.

I agree it's an overreaction to involve police etc like some are saying. I disagree that it's considered "super sweet" that an 8 year old (which was in OPs post by the way) stole. She does need speaking to by her parents over that, whatever her reasons or thoughts behind it were.