Imagine getting an email from your 10-year-old daughter's teacher telling you that your daughter has been relentlessly harassing another student about her clothing, so much so that the other student no longer wants to come to school. What would you do? You would probably start off by having a serious talk with your child about her bullying someone else, right? That's what Ally, a mother in Utah, did when she found out via email about her daughter's misbehavior. But when her daughter, Kaylee, showed no remorse for what she had done, Ally knew she had to do something more, so she got creative.
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Ally is Kaylee's stepmother; she has been in a long term relationship with Kaylee's father who has custody. "She would take her out on the playground and call her names, and tell her she was a slob and tell her she dressed like a sleaze," Ally says, describing what Kaylee was doing. "Someone not wanting to go to school anymore based off of something that one other little person said to them. I mean, that's huge, that's damaging."
So what did Ally do? She went to a thrift store and bought about $50 worth of clothes she knew Kaylee would not like. The next morning Kaylee found out that she would be wearing one of the horrendous outfits to school, to give her a sense of compassion, and a taste of her own medicine.
Originally, the plan was for Kaylee to dress in the thrift store clothes until the end of the year, but after two days when Ally saw that Kaylee had learned her lesson, she was allowed to go back to wearing her regular clothes.
Normally, I am not a fan of humiliating children as a form of punishment, but in this case I do think it was appropriate and effective and I don't think the motive was humiliation. The motive behind this punishment was empathy. Kaylee experienced firsthand what it feels like to be ridiculed for your clothing. When her sister asked her why she wouldn't bully people anymore, Kaylee responded, "Because it's stupid and it's mean. It hurts them."
Image via Fox13Now.com
