Just skimmed through.. and posting at spee.d
Well, I and citylover are clearly in a minority by some considerable margin..
I'm not feeling overwrought at all, to whoever said I was, btw. and I don't think I was projecting. But I was rather taken aback by the outraged tone of some posts: the anger seemed to increase as the YABUs hit critical mass..
Also I am genuinely surprised how many seem to extrapolate from the OP's and my post that we are bringing up our children to hold support staff in contempt, and to believe that it's someone else's job to clean up their messes.
I don't believe that is the case. If anything, my own ds would be more painfully bludgeoned into conformity by my going on and on and on about his very poor behaviour.
I also in RL veer quite definitely towards punitive parenting - though I aspire to the idea of teaching by example.
But I don't, fundamentally, believe that a child of 7 needs to put his hand in the loo (which he's been told since he was about one to be very wary of doing, because it's dirty and unhealthy) to learn that what he did was wrong.
I think the shcool risked upsetting the child - esp one who is acknowledged by them to have probs with the loos - to a degree beyond the seriousness of the crime.
An older child would be emotionally capable of 'taking the consequences'. A seven-year-old might not be. I wouldn't risk it, myself.
It is not pleasant to put one's hand into piss. But whereas for an adult, it is (I really do acknowledge) disgusting, for a young child it might (and again, I acknowledge that this is a possibility, not a certainty) be disgusting, humiliating, even traumatizing.
I think that it is quite possible to make a child understand they've behaved badly by pointing out that someone else is having to do something very unpleasant to fix their mess - without making them do it themselves. I myself remember feeling very very certain that I would not be doing something quite similar again, as a reaction to the expression of extreme disappointment on her face). A 7 year old is still quite a young child, remember - and in many other circumstances we would all be saying 'but he's still just a baby..'.
So my bottom line (as an adult) is not to do with who should do what in Life, or having no respect for those who do the clearing up - it's that there is a difference between how adults experience a situation, and how children do.