Bad Parenting

Last night my oldest daughter was having a big breakdown. We had sent her to her room for doing it "one more time" right after she was told to stop. She starts whining and carrying on and so we tell she's done for the night and to go to bed. She goes into a bigger meltdown and saying she's not going to do anything and we start taking privileges away from her but she does go into her room.

I go up there a couple minutes later and she's torn her bed apart with everything on the floor, her mattress on floor leaning against the bedpost and her standing on the frame. I tell her that she better have that put together when I get back in a few minutes or she's going to lose more privileges and she's going to be stuck on her bed all day Sunday (except for church, of course).

I close the door and she goes into a bigger meltdown and she starts yelling that she's going to start breaking things. I opened the door and I told her that if she starts breaking things that I'm going to start breaking her things. She's like "what?" I said her radio, lava lamp, whatever. She goes, "I don't care about any of that." I look around and I see her favorite stuffed animal, Bella, from Build-A-Bear that my sister got for her and I tell her that I'll rip Bella's head off if she breaks anything and I close the door.

Well, Tina comes up to talk to her and calms her down and then comes talks to me that I can't do that or make threats like that. Apparently, I really scared her and she thought that my sister would be mad at her if I did that. Of course, my wife is right.

To make a long story short, all three of us talked it out. Suzanna apologized for her behavior and we set her consequences. I also apologized that I should never have threatened that and that I should have never told her that but I did tell her that if she ever did start breaking things in her room that I would remove everything from her room.

Another lesson in parenting - Don't threaten to tear the head off of stuffed animals. It's not nice. Plus, it was a lie because I don't think I could do that to my daughter.