My daughter has been caught stealing :(

[WannaBeWildCosMyLifesSoTame]

My friend told me last night that a few weeks ago while our 2 DDs were playing together at her house, they stole money from her older daughter's money box then lied and said that it was my DD's and went to the sweet shop and spent it. The older girl realised and told her Mum who then didn't know whether to say anything to me or not.

I also discovered that my DD pesters other kids for money on the school bus so that she can spend it in the shop.

I will be asking DD for her version of the story as I think that's only fair but I do believe the gist of it because it ties in with some of her other behaviour recently.

I can't express how pissed off and disappointed I am. We have always tried very hard to be firm but fair with DD. She has money to go to the shop once a week and reasonable access to sweet stuff at home. To be frank she's got quite greedy about sweet things but I never thought it would get this out of hand.

I just don't know how to deal with this. My instinct is to ban pocket money, playing out and trips to the shop full stop but I'm worried about coming down too hard and making things worse. I know what I do now will set the tone for the future and I want to get it right.

DD has been a fairly easy kid so far (she's nearly 10) and I naively put that down to my sensible parenting. Show's what I know doesn't it :(

I think you will have to come down quite hard if it does turn out she's been stealing and scrounging money for sweets. Nearly ten is quite old enough to know that what's she's been doing is very very wrong.

Yes she will undoubtedly know that it was the wrong thing to do and she has made it worse by lying about it, she will know that already.

But kids make mistakes its the learning from them that is important.

Don't beat yourself up over it, its not a reflection of your parenting, she just made a bad choice.

Obviously you need to come down hard and lay the law down, put some consequences in place and move on.

Have just reread your OP - am I right in thinking your friend's younger daughter was involved in the theft from her older sister, as well as your dd? If so, do you know what your friend has done about it?

Fussbucket - yes she was. My friend has made her apologise to her sister and pay the money back, I'm not sure if she was punished in any other way. I will be making DD apologise to the girl (who is also supposed to be a friend of her's :( ) as well and ensuring she pays the money back out of her own money even if it has been given back already.

It is impossible to second guess what her response to your reaction to her behaviour will be. Go soft - she may carry on. Go hard - she may carry on. You aren't just trying to get her to stop this you are also trying to teach her what kind of activity she is doing and wanting her to realise for herself that type of carry on is not the person she wants to be.

One goal you have is for her to stop but the other is for her to really understand why it is unacceptable.

So all you can do is deal with it truthfully which is to demonstrate the level of concern/anger/shock/outrage you feel.

If you play this down you are doing her a disservice by failing to enlighten her as to the context and seriousness of her actions.

We all make mistakes and have been naughty but to conceal from her the gravity of the situation for fear that she will rebel is not going to help her.

She must understand that the moral code of the people around her has implications for her if she chooses to ignore it i.e. that she is not free to make up the rules.

Even if she kicks back against it to start better she understands it is serious than carries on blithely as though it doesn't matter, then if she continues it is without any illusions. If you play it down, and she then continues it is under the mistaken belief that while it maybe disliked it can still be partially condoned.

Going easy is the wrong message to give IMHO even if giving it to her straight how far from impressed you are produces anger / unpleasantness for a while.

At least you have been honest which is the best example you can give.

She is stealing and extorting money - doubtless involving bullying or at least heavy pressure for the latter. These are not minor misdemeanours and she needs to experience the consequences or how does she understand how serious it is? Gentle chat about how it isn't nice for the other children is inappropriate (hate that word so over-used, but fits here) IMO.

i once caught my daughter stealing sweets in tesco.. i reported her to security with a wink of course, he gave her a stern telling off and she never did it again...she has grown into a respectable citizen without a criminal record...

could be an idea to get her to confront the victim and allow in a name/shame kind of strategy, as i sincerely believe grounding, with holding of pocket money will do nothing....

Doormat My mum did that in Woolies with one of my much younger sisters when she was about the same age, dsis says it was absolutely mortifying and she never dared do anything like it again!

ino fussbucket but sometimes parenting calls for tough love, i hated doing it and can imagine your mum did too..but it had an effect with my dd like your dsis...the joys of parenting lol x

Could you maybe make her do some volunteer work for a charity as a punishment? It might help her develop some empathy for others as she seems to be lacking this at the moment.

lol seems like i am hijacking this thread but as to the re bullying aspect... if any of my children have bullied someone, i drag their scrawny backsides to the victim to give untold apologies and grounding with the heavy talk of "what if it was you, how would you feel?"

in your situ i would personally get on the scchoolbus and shout out to the other kids that if my dd went to any of them asking for money to tell me as she would be in serious trouble..all done in front of her..but that is me as i am a bolshy bitch at times, especially when it concerns bullying...

I have to say in her defence I don't think the money on the bus thing was bullying as such, just what I'd call pestering and dropping hints. I don't know this for sure but I can imagine because she does it to me too. I don't think she's going up to kids she doesn't know and demanding their dinner money so although it's serious I hope it's not as bad as that.

I'm planning a massive bollocking when she gets home from school and will be taking/sending her round (not sure whether to go with her so she does it properly or make her brave it out on her own) to apologise to both my friend and her daughter. She won't be getting pocket money or playing out until I think she's learnt her lesson and I'm not sure yet whether there will be any other consequences for her. I will ensure she knows how disappointed in her I am but I'm not convinced it will make much difference :(

Sounds good Wanna hope it does the trick.

I am sure she isn't a rotten apple, though she may not be scaring anyone I do think it would take more than a polite request to get money off a kid in that situ, most kids don't carry spare and are given money for what they are going to get themselves, so to hand it over to her... maybe she 'borrows' it but doesn't give it back, but I bet the kid in question would rather not 'lend' it.

Stealing is a perfectly normal thing to go through and sometimes there can be very easy reasons for it.

One of the things you need to keep an eye on is her hormones and hunger. One of the reasons I stole when I was 8/9 was because my mother had weight issues and did not give me enough dinner money/food.

Craving sweet things is a very hormonal response so make sure she is less hungry and getting her sweet fix from slow burning carbs like dried fruit etc. Also watch out for growth spurts.

Just in general give her a bit more food as well as keeping an eye on her behaviour and the deceptive aspects of it.

That's a very good point Laurie - I posted on another thread that she'd been getting bad headaches and someone has since suggested these could be hormonal. She's recently started to need to use deodorant so things are definitely happening with her body.

I certainly have weight issues but try very hard not to pass these on to her. She is a fairly fussy eater but a normal day's diet would be something like this:

Breakfast (7.30ish) - Cereal/toast/fruit.

Mid morning - she's allowed to take fruit to school but doesn't usually. She has £1 a week for snacks at break time which equates to a cheese toasty once or twice or plain toast more often.

Lunch (12.30-1ish) - Sandwich/wrap/something like pasta salad. One other savoury item eg breadsticks/strips of pepper and carrot/crisps/handful of cherry tomatoes. Yoghurt/jelly/pot of fruit and one other sweet thing - sometimes a homemade cake, other times might be a cereal bar or small choc bar eg Club. She quite often doesn't finish her lunch but always eats the sweet thing .

After school - if it's edible she has to finish what's left in her lunch box then she can have fruit or a plain biscuit. If she's starving and tea is going to be late maybe a slice of toast or something like fruit loaf.

Tea (6ish) - varies obviously but we eat quite healthily - something like chicken with pasta or rice and veg would be normal. DH and I would have sauce as well but she doesn't like it. Convenience food like fish fingers maybe once a week. Fruit or yoghurt for pudding.

After school on a Friday she has 50p to go to the sweet shop and on the last day of term she can buy a hot sausage roll for her breakfast (which some of the kids do most days ).

Does this sound like a balanced, filling menu for a girl her age? I try to ensure she gets lots of the good stuff plus a few treats but maybe I've not got it quite right.

Gin - I'm not sure she actually does get money very often! I was only told that she tries to :( I agree that at this age kids don't tend to have much on them.

I bet it all settles down in the end. Hope the telling off goes ok.

I remember when I became hormonal I would get through tons of chocolate each month but had no sweet tooth in between. As I got older I realised I didn't want to do this and read up on why it happened.

Result was I realised I was hardly getting any fruit or veg down my neck, I made a big effort to change that and the choc cravings went away - it was just a nutrition thing and the body was seeking energy to compensate.

I am not saying she doesn't get her veg but it is worth bearing in mind, she wouldn't be the first girl.

All the best.

Menu looks lovely Just sometimes she might need to eat more. my DD plots her periods (guessing yours hasn't started yet) on the calender so that she can see to eat a bit more.

When she was in primary I always had an after school snack for her - protein and carbs (like cheese on toast) rather than just a simple sugar like fruit.

I found dd ate quite a lot of calories at that age because she really needed it and eats quite a bit less now at almost 14. Obiously better she gets more calories from protein/carbs than sweets.

I used to steal money and buy sweets, I stole biscuits etc too. 'Just' from my parents house though (and once from a shop, i got caught and that put me off ). I always spent it on sweets/cake/crap.

Not saying this is the case for your daughter but for me it was because my mother (who had major food issues and thought being fat was absolutely the worst thing that could possibly ever happen to anyone ever), restricted my (only my, not my sibling's), access to 'treats'. They were called treats, too. So I felt I was being punished for being 'fat' and kicked against it by hoarding and stealing food. It doesn't sound at ALL like this is what's going on with your DD but stealing/covertly aquiring food/sweets rings alarm bells for me - I'd want to know what her associations with sweets etc are - treats, rewards, things she feels she 'deserves' and isn't given enough of?

Essentially though I had no 'off' switch when it came to sweet things. Possibly hormone-related? I get like that around my period still. I could've eaten sweets all day without getting sick of them. The stealing and binging was to do with emotions and anger and feeling deprived, but the yearning for sweet things kicked everything off and I think it was to do with puberty.

That's really interesting to read April. I have been overweight on and off all my life (although doing something about it now) so have been very aware of trying not to pass this on to DD. She is very petite and can eat what she wants without putting on weight (of course this may change) so has never needed to worry whether she's eating too many sweets/treats.

She does have quite a - to use a very MN word - 'entitled' attitude at times :( so I do think there's an aspect of thinking she 'deserves' more treats than I let her have even though what she does get is perfectly reasonable I think.

Update - I confronted DD about what I'd been told when she came home yesterday and she admitted being involved but claims it was the other girl doing the actual stealing (I know she would say that but I think I believe her). DD says she told her they shouldn't do it but admits that she shouldn't have gone along with it. Because she was involved I still insisted she apologise to my friend and pay back the money which she was mortified about but did as she was told.

The money on the bus thing seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding (again I only have her word for this but it sounds believable). She seems to spend all her money for break time snacks at the beginning of the week, often buying something for others, then she has not much left by the end of the week so suggests to those she has bought things for that they return the favour or tries to borrow a few pence from someone to get enough for what she wants. Again she hasn't handled this very well but I don't she has being doing anything especially wrong.

I think I may have over-reacted yesterday but it has worked out OK in the end and taught DD a few valuable lessons about walking away from trouble rather than keeping quiet and going along with it and about not borrowing money especially from friends. I've also suggested she thinks carefully about who she chooses to play with and I think she'll view a couple of her 'friends' (ie the one who stole and the one who dropped her in it) a bit differently from now on.

Thanks so much for all of the advice yesterday, I was dreading speaking to her about this and it wasn't fun but who said being a parent was going to be easy?!

Wanna it's great things have gone so well. Pleased the problem has been reduced back down to size, and it's good you have both talked about it like this without major drama.

One of life's little lessons for DD.

Onwards and upwards.

Have you thought about letting her have control of her "sweet" and general food intake? I know it sounds counter intuitive and most people say "but he/she will just only eat crap!!!", but HONESTLY, it works.

We practice self-directed eating with DS and I have a few RL friends who do it with their kids.

In follows on directly from BLW - you make foods available, either through mealtimes, or simply having them in the house, and the child directs what they eat. We have meals together as a family but if DS doesn't like it, he gets something else for himself. DS is 7. He chooses sandwiches, soup, yoghurt, fruit, cheese, left overs, whatever he can find in the fridge. He has a sweet tooth like most kids, but does not eat any more than a typical child, in fact probably less.

DS is involved in choosing meals, shopping and preparing meals (when he can be bothered!)

The only time he is EVER coerced into eating is at school by the dinner ladies! I should add that he has Asperger's and can be VERY faddy about his eating, but because he's self-directed, it's his business. I keep a general overview and sometimes make educated suggestions to him about foods (because adults about things like fibre and such), but food is a total non- issue for us, other than really enjoying ourselves.

If you introduce it to an older child, rather than following on from BLW, they do go through about a 6 week phase of gorging on forbidden stuff, but it soon passes when they realise that these previously regulated foods are available and will not be limited, or taken away.

Long term, it helps develop a much healthier attitude to ALL foods, as the child learns to listen to their body and eat what they want/need.

We also do not refer to ANY food as treats. It is all simply FOOD. All valid choices and delicious, enjoyable and valuable.

If you want to know more there is a fabulous book called Preventing Childhood Eating Problems by Jane Hirschmann and Lela Zaphiropoulos. They have worked with people with eating disorders and the book was developed from their research.

Jane Hirschmann also has a website called Overcoming Overeating:

overcomingovereating.com/

Sounds like it all got sorted, but I was going to say what's the other girls involvement - if the stealing occurred at her house and she was party to it, it makes sense the other girl was the ringleader....otherwise shed have said 'no, that's my sisters money?!'