No Justice, No Peace!

Some of you were SO kind yesterday, expressing concern that Tommy had been put through an undue amount of interrogation and trauma regarding the "dammit" episode. Some of you, of course, found the whole thing pretty hilarious and understood completely how the teacher, principal, Scott & I all concluded what we did before The Truth being revealed! I really appreciate all of the feedback, whether it was "HA! Been there!" or "Children need to be respected and believed."

For those in the latter camp, the back story on my darling boy is a little complicated when it comes to The Truth. He is not generally a bold faced liar, but he is definitely open to the idea of finding reasons... even imaginary ones... to explain his behavior. One of the things we are working on is helping him see that some things just happen and they are nobody's fault. (And hard as it is to swallow, many are our own darn fault!)

He has the unfortunate habit taking an initial (real) conflict with another kid and then concluding that All That Is Wrong With the World can be traced to the actions, thoughts, presence, shirt color, shoe size... (you get the idea) of that child. For ever. Eternally. Always. That.Kid's.Fault. And, when we eveeeennnntually correct his thinking about said child, T manages to find Contestant 2 (3, 4, 5) to take his or her place. Good times. Gooood times....

While you could give T points for creativity (it's not easy to find a way to blame your tripping up the stairs at home on a classmate who is 5 miles away!), overall this is a very difficult trait for us to handle.

I'm trying to take Monday's incident as a real-life "Boy Who Cried Wolf, (Dammit)!" Perhaps this concrete example will be one we can go back to when the subject comes up again.

Which it will.

Undoubtedly.

And unfortunately....

So, if you could pick one person to blame all of the world's ills upon, who would it be? Right now my vote is Snookie. Or whoever invented the Snuggie. I don't know. Something to do with someone starting with the letters S and N.....

P.S. I'm almost finished with a pretty great book on the topic of Explosive Children. I don't think T is explosive, really, but he shares many of the traits of the kids in the book. I'll write more about the ideas in the book soon. It is definitely giving me a new strategy for how to talk to him and reach solutions to his problems... even those that I don't happen to think are actually problems! Stay tuned!