I don’t know how to get past how angry I am with ds

[MumOfFury]

He’s 10 and yesterday did something outrageously stupid which is likely to cost me several hundred pounds (all the savings I have for Christmas) and was also incredibly dangerous, could have killed him and his brother and could have cost thousands and thousands to fix. The owner of the damaged item is trying to get quotes to get it repaired today and is hoping it may be at least partly covered by insurance.

I am so, so angry with him though and I can’t see that fading anytime soon. He’s sorry that I’m cross with him but keeps trying to justify what he did and doesn’t seem to particularly think he did anything wrong because it was an accident (it was stupidity and he could hear me shouting to him to stop before I managed to get to him to physically stop him).

I don’t know what to do. I’ve take. His screens away but he’s perfectly happy sat in his room reading books. I’m tempted to send him to stay with my mum for a few days. He wouldn’t consider it a punishment but I’m so angry with him I’m frightened I’m going to say something awful to him.

Please be gentle on me. I’m sobbing writing this I don’t know what I’ve done wrong to end up with a kid who genuinely sees nothing wrong with this type of behaviour and seems to have no concern about the huge cutbacks we’ll have to make if I need to pay for the damage he’s caused.

Don't know whether to laugh or cry at the poster who thinks a ten year old can't appreciate the notion of his parent being in quite straitened financial circumstances.

I don't think you've overreacted, OP, and I'm very sorry all your savings are going up the swanny.

This thread is absolutely nuts. OP is excessive in her reaction. Anyone that can't see that is just... The DS is TEN YEARS OLD. The OP has parental responsibility, and that when you have that it means that you have to clean up the messes our kids make. It's part of the job. Should he be appropriately punished... sure. Some of you want to send a police officer to have a chat? Or take all his pocket money till he's 16? Some people have mentioned selling his stuff? WTF? Their was no motivation, no manipulation, no sadistic tendencies. He did something stupid! Repeatedly for sure. But I am not surprised he's rolling his eyes when the OP is reacting in the way she has. I am rolling my eyes at the whole bloody mess.

Who can say they haven't done something stupid? I am convinced some of the parenting advice on this website comes from non-parents. Being this angry and emotional a day after the event is not a healthy reaction! And people saying she will recover? Of course she will recover! Its a broken shower door, a hole in a dressing gown and minimal smoke damage (she slept in it overnight ffs. This wasn't the towering inferno.)

Oh OP, I read this earlier today and just wanted to give you a huge hug. Good move to have him stay at grandma's for a few days while the smoke clears (so to speak😁).

If their dad will get them whatever they want for Christmas, for goodness' sake let him! Children aren't stupid. I would save your money for wonderful experiences together with them (even if it does feel at the moment like the latest one was ruined; I'm sure you had good times at the glamping too and hopefully in years to come that's what you'll all be able to look back on). Your kids will know - even if they don't show it for some time - you worked hard and scrimped and saved to give them everything you have. When you look back on your childhood, do you remember what you got for Christmas, or special times you had with your family?

Also: is there nothing he can do to earn a little money? Depends on the sort of place you live but kids on our street are often selling drinks/unwanted toys etc from a table outside their front doors. Obviously it will be a drop in the ocean of what you need to pay back, but might help him see the enormity of paying for a few hundred pounds of damage once he's spent a couple of hours (which will feel like an eternity) flogging lemonade and seen £3 back 😁

Hope you're enjoying some rest!

I agree @Fts676

How would we like to be treated if we made a stupid mistake? Or had an accident?

Oh OP I can understand you being annoyed!

Sleep on it tonight, don’t make any rash decisions. Let your 10 year old reflect too.

I do understand about your savings etc (I am a single parent too) and how utterly annoying that might be. I have faith that the owner will try to sort out as best as they can with minimal cost.

Like someone said up thread… you will at some stage laugh about this in the future and will become a family story.

for what’s is worth I can imagine my ex husband doing the same and he is a grown man, not a 10 year old boy.

And no more locking bathroom doors for the foreseeable!

For all the posters saying he is 10/only TEN/small child etc. do they not realise that this is the age of criminal responsibility??

Granted this isn’t a criminal matter but a child of that age is classed by law to be mature enough to understand that there are consequences for actions

OP you are not in the wrong at all and I do agree that once you have had gathered your thoughts you need to explain to him that he was responsible for damage that has to be paid for and that means you may have to sell some of his items to do it (whether you actually do or not is your choice but he does need to realise that you cannot damage someone else’s property with no consequence)

Wow he made a mistake and will learn from it.

sending your own son away for making a mistake at 10 is an overreaction on your part and quite frankly embarrassing.

as long as it’s not a regular occurrence you punish him with the no screen and move on.

grow up.

This thread is absolutely nuts. OP is excessive in her reaction. Anyone that can't see that is just... The DS is TEN YEARS OLD. The OP has parental responsibility, and that when you have that it means that you have to clean up the messes our kids make. It's part of the job. Should he be appropriately punished... sure.

I completely agree but I’ve noticed on a few threads now how some MNers are obsessed with punishing kids, which is pretty sick and concerning seeing as there are real people behind the screens.

What’s ironic is if OP posted that it was her that unintentionally broke something or made a mistake like there often is and her DH was annoyed, they’d be falling over themselves to tell her how the sun shines out if her ass and that her DH is completely in the wrong.

If OP came on here and said she broke the shower door by accident and her DH was so angry that he couldn’t stand to be near her and blamed her for wasting the money so they’ll now not be able to afford Christmas and ruining other peoples holiday and he wanted her to go and stay at her parents because she didn’t show enough remorse - there would be absolute outrage and posters would say it’s abuse and to LTB.

OP you need to pull yourself together, you’re reaction is disgraceful

15 ways adults have set fire to their homes because they were stupid.

ruinmyweek.com/reddit/dumbest-fires-reddit/

I'm sure there are loads more. People who panic and are stressed screw up. They make stupid decisions. Mostly they aren't catastrophic but occasionally they have real world consequences.

The OP's did a stupid thing. Actually he did several stupid things. But not because he was evil or thought it would be funny or wanted to see what happened. But because he panicked. And punishing someone for panicking and making a poor decision is shit.

He's not one of Jamie Bulger's killers so please stop with the age of responsibility stuff. It's grim and inappropriate

A ten year old child is not necessarily considered fully responsible for his actions. Criminal responsibility is introduced at 10 years old so that the justice system has an opportunity to identify potential patterns in criminal behaviour and step in. It is ultimately concerned with the protection and welfare of the child and the parent is still considered responsible for the child. I am not from England but looked up this Government webpage.

www.gov.uk/if-my-child-gets-in-trouble-with-police

There is more information out there about it. Criminal responsibility from 10 years old is very young compared to most of Europe.

Anyway this isn't about criminal responsibility. Just didn't think it should be used as a benchmark.

Op, you know how when you have a baby and you think “I hope I don’t do anything awful and fuck them up”? Well, your moment is now and luckily you’re being given some time to make your decisions.

Don’t send your 10yo son away for making some silly mistakes. This shouldn’t even need to be said. He’s your little boy. Make this into the thing you can look back and laugh about together, not the thing he’s telling his shrink about.

Try reading again. He wasn't trying to get out of the bathroom. He was trying to close the shower door to stop the water spraying out while he waited for it to heat up. So he wasn't scared and he didn't panic - he just forgot that the door was supposed to slide and decide to bash it until it did what he wanted. You've added the bit about him being scared and panicked to suit your narrative, but that's not what happened.

I’ve read a lot of the posts on here and your own posts, OP, and there’s a fundamental mismatch. You have pointed out that you were shouting at him to stop, to let you in, etc and 1. He didn’t and 2. He kept banging at the door until it broke while you listened. You’re angry because at that point, no, it’s NOT an accident.

The wood burner is the same. You’ve told him in the past a million times, he knows not to do it at home, yet he did it here.

Yes, they probably weren’t malicious acts. This is true. But no, they weren’t accidents, and you feel angry, because you don’t feel they were accidents. You tried to stop him; he didn’t stop in one case. In the other, he’s had tons of instruction and ignored it.

If he was in a panic and made a mistake, okay. It doesn’t make it an accident; it just explains what happened. A reason for your actions doesn’t somehow erase those actions. If I hit you, and I did that out of panic, it still does not make me hitting you an accident.

But yes, it is your responsibility to teach your son that he can’t just hold up the phrase, “It was an accident,” like a magic shield, and that means he no longer has any responsibility for any damage he’s caused, or any consequences, and doesn’t need to feel any remorse, especially when you asked him to stop, he continued an action, and it caused damage.

Someone mentioned that 10 is the age of criminal responsibility and they’re right. Not because he’s done anything criminal, but because he’s old enough to be held responsible for his actions. And he did choose an action. And he’s showing no remorse.

So tell him the truth. Tell him you now have to pay for the damage he caused and you can’t afford Christmas, and he’ll have a nice Christmas with his father but you’ll have nothing, and if he tries to roll his eyes and say it was an accident again, let yourself get mad, and explain it’s not an accident when you say, “No! Stop!” And he keeps doing something until an expensive object breaks. If he had rented his own room as an adult, rolling his eyes and saying, “It was an accident,” after pushing against a sliding door so hard it broke off its rails, wouldn’t have impressed the yurt owner or most other people - she likely would have charged him even more for damages than she’s charging you. He needs to know this.

He was trying to close the shower door to stop the water spraying out while he waited for it to heat up

Agreed

So he wasn't scared and he didn't panic

He did panic. Water was going everywhere. He was trying to shut the door and couldn't figure out how to do it because he was panicking.

No other explanation makes sense. He was acting irrationally the whole way through. So either he's a psycho or he was in a state.

Or maybe he thought he knew better than his mother who was trying to tell him what to do? I appreciate that he is a child, but 10 year olds are perfectly capable of being pig-headed and not listening to what they are being told. I'm not sure why you think the only options are psycho or in a state.

I agree. I'm at risk of sounding like a complete idiot here but it is fairly clear that he was panicking.

Some of these posts sound like the closing arguments of Perry Mason, trying to twist and turn and ensure that everyone understands that this wasn't an accident! That this was so much more than an accident and there were clear choices made and the boy needs to understand that and repent! People need to calm down.

To the posters who are saying that the OP is overreacting to an accident by a 10 year old, I am copying from the OP:

I am so, so angry with him though and I can’t see that fading anytime soon. He’s sorry that I’m cross with him but keeps trying to justify what he did and doesn’t seem to particularly think he did anything wrong because it was an accident (it was stupidity and he could hear me shouting to him to stop before I managed to get to him to physically stop him).

I don’t know what to do. I’ve take. His screens away but he’s perfectly happy sat in his room reading books. I’m tempted to send him to stay with my mum for a few days. He wouldn’t consider it a punishment but I’m so angry with him I’m frightened I’m going to say something awful to him.

Please be gentle on me. I’m sobbing writing this I don’t know what I’ve done wrong to end up with a kid who genuinely sees nothing wrong with this type of behaviour and seems to have no concern about the huge cutbacks we’ll have to make if I need to pay for the damage he’s caused.

It is not that he made a mistake (we all do), it is that he is denying he has done wrong, sees nothing wrong with what he is done and is unconcerned by the financial loss he has caused his mother, who is visibly upset. A 10 year old should have a better sense of right and wrong and respect for his mother's feelings to show contrition to her and apologise to the owners.

I would react in a similar way to the OP - that would be in the heat of the moment like someone smashed an item I had been working hard on (savings) but once I have cooled down, I would still be deeply disappointed the child's reaction. I would want him to go away for a while to think about it.

OP has not come back to answer whether the child normally takes responsibility for his behaviour and whether his reaction is in keeping with or out of character.

I do think it’s a bit worrying that posters are ‘reassuring’ the OP that her anger is ‘justified’. When they haven’t really taken in that the OP is absolutely seething and is being OTT herself in the whole this will ruin us and could have devastated people etc…

That is a LOT for a 10 year old to take on board, the sheer weight of his mother’s resentment and anger.

Of course the 10 year old should have been firmly, and calmly given consequences, like no screen time for a bit or whatever. And most importantly time to take in what they’d done, and then able to apologise and realise what might have made them do it in the first place (panic probably) so that they learn to be better equipped not to do it again.

But OP is not asking us for tips on how to get through to her son, she wants to be told that a prolonged and angry punishment is OK. When it’s not.

Of course it was an accident in the sense that he didn't mean to wreck the place or almost burn the place down - but some people are making out that he was a terrified kid locked in a shower cubicle who bashed his way out to safety.

it’s clearly not what he did but his lack of consideration afterwards.

he should write an apology letter to the owner.

But OP is not asking us for tips on how to get through to her son, she wants to be told that a prolonged and angry punishment is OK. When it’s not.

@CherryBlossomAutumn you are extrapolating. What is your basis for saying that the OP is asking to be told that a prolonged angry punishment is ok? She has sent him away for a few hours to his grandmas which he was happy to go. She needs some time away from him, which shows she is trying to regain control of her emotions.

Have you never been angry because something you were working on for a long time was destroyed by someone by accident who showed no contrition?

kids are idiots, you’ll calm down and this will be one of those stories you tell years later. When we were about that age my friend was swinging a golf club round his head and accidentally let go….it went straight through the windscreen of a neighbour. The neighbour was a police officer in CID, he came out as it was his 1 week old company car, grabbed said mortified friend ‘right pal, let’s go and see your Mum and Dad…’. I’ve never forgot that!

Log burners in the middle of a yurt are a bloody stupid idea and kids shouldn’t be anywhere near them. An accident waiting to happen. You could be cross at him, but really I’m surprised you and the owner aren’t questioning why kids were allowed to be unsupervised in that scenario. The shower door sounds really annoying as well.