April 7, 2025 • 15 mins
Justin and Kylie respond to a heartfelt question from a mum who’s at her wit’s end with her highly creative—but very destructive—three-year-old. From nail polish on couches to crayon art on every surface, they explore what’s developmentally normal, why punishment may backfire, and how parents can redirect energy with connection, supervision, and playful problem-solving.
KEY POINTS:
-
Destructive behaviour in young children is often a sign of creativity and a desire to explore.
-
Supervision and engagement are key to reducing mischief.
-
Each child is different; parenting approaches should adapt to each child’s needs and the family’s season of life.
-
Redirection and empathy are more effective than blame and punishment.
-
Quality time and creating opportunities for appropriate creative expression can help children feel seen and understood.
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE:
“Kids don’t lie the way adults do—they tell us what they wish the truth was.”
KEY INSIGHTS FOR PARENTS:
-
Your child is not bad. They’re curious, creative, and still learning.
-
Meet big messes with calm, not shame. Use redirection to teach without damaging trust.
-
Invite cooperation by focusing on problem-solving together rather than punishment.
-
Blaming doesn’t teach responsibility—connection does.
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
-
I’ll Do Better Tomorrow, I Promise by Maurine Reynolds Adamek
-
“Lessons Learned” Substack by Beck Delahoy—Blame and Shame Doesn’t Solve Anything
ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS:
-
Create safe, designated spaces for creative play—paper, washable markers, etc.
-
Increase supervision during high-risk moments (e.g., when things go quiet!).
-
Spend intentional quality time daily, even in short bursts.
-
Use imaginative redirection—like the “wicked mouse&rdqu
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Today, A tricky question. A three year old who draws
on everything is destructive, takes two walls with a hammer
and more. Oh my goodness, what do you do when
as soon as you turn your back, the kids get
up to mischief? Hello and welcome to today's Happy Families Podcast,
Real parenting Solutions. Every day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast,
we are Justin and Kylie Coulson, and every Tuesday we
(00:29):
answer your tricky questions family relationships, well being, discipline screens.
If you want to submit a tricky question, all you
have to do is go to Happy Families dot com
dot a U, scroll down to the podcast section, click
the record button, start talking. It's that simple. Or you
can send us an email. Podcasts at happy families dot
com dot You with your voice note we love hearing
(00:51):
your voice. This time no voices, Kylie. I'm going to
share this one. It's a long one and I'm going
to read it out from Shannon. Here we go. Hi,
I'm desperate for some help, but please don't judge me.
I have a three year old boy turning four in January.
I'm far from the best pairenting example, and I wish
I could be better, but I'm struggling. I have two
other children, a girl five and a half and a
(01:12):
boy seven. My three year old has taken to damaging
our house and it has become quite frequent. The other
two may have drawn on something once, they had to
scrub it clean and they never did it again. The youngest, however,
I feel like I've really messed up in his upbringing.
So a while back he took to a wall with
a hammer out. Then nothing much. He's drawn a couple
(01:34):
of little things on the wall here and there, but
nothing too major. Then two weeks ago he scribbled luckily
with a whiteboard marker on my older kid's toy cupboard
and bin. He was made to get it off. Then
last week I found he had gotten a stamp and
stamped all over the drawers and cupboard runner of our
spare room. This again, luckily came off with wipes and
he was made to clean it up. He's scribbled and
(01:54):
etched into our wooden coffee table with a pen. We
then went away for almost a week. When we got
home last night, I spoke to him about the drawing
on the coffee table and then discovered he had drawn
with text on our couch again, he was made to
clean this off. We can't get the coffee table stuff
off or out without sounding it back. He's been spoken to,
(02:15):
yelled at, not the great parenting parts, Sorry and isolated again.
I know many would not agree. Sorry. Then this morning
I sat at the couch to find he has now
drawn a big square outline in the coffee table with
a different colored pen. He must have done this last night.
Sometime this morning while I was mowing lawns. He's gotten
his sister's nail polish. I don't know how, and I
(02:36):
have glitter nail polish on my couch and the mat.
And now, after having a shower, he's brought the bucket
of fire ashes inside and tipped them all over the
hall and everywhere around it. I'm glad that you find
it funny. Shannon is just falling apart here and you're laughing.
As I said, I'm in no way as a model parent,
but I'm seriously struggling. My daughter did go through a
(02:57):
damaging phase, but not as bad as this. I just
don't know how to get him to stop. Can anyone
please provide any help? Please? And thank you? Shannon, Shannon.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
I'm not laughing at you, I promise, but I'm going
to give you the best parenting tool for this that
you will ever experience.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
And we haven't prepped this. I've got no idea where
you're going with this. I've got so many answers and
you've just dived straight in.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
You need to buy a copy of I'll Do Better Tomorrow,
I promise. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah, our Friday episodes all about this.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Need this, yep. So a couple of things stand out
to me.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Okay, why don't you go first?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Huge. I remember a story that Wally Goddard shared with
us about his son Andy.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
So if you've missed the story about Wally Goddard, He's
a man who has been my mentor for the last
twenty years and is just one of the wisest parenting
people on the planet.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
He's a professor and family education.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, the guys, he's just he's just a gem of
a human being. As well.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
He was babysitting his eldest son.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Well no, no, no, he was being dad. He was
looking after while mum was out. We could do this
all the time. Every time you bring up dads looking
after the kids, you call it babysitting.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
He was at home with the kids while was gone,
thank you, and he may not have been supervising as
well as he could have.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
That is a pattern that I picked up with Shannon's email.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
And after a little while, realizing that things had been
very quiet for some time, he walked into the lounge.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Trip It's always a problem, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (04:37):
And Andy had painted on their brand new cream carpet.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah. I think it was red paint as World that
he used on the brand new cream cut and.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It wasn't small. He did like a poster sized picture
of a house and a family and sun shining in trees,
the whole bit. And this story just endeared me to
Wally in one fells whoop when he looked at Andy
and he said, Wow, Andy, that is such a beautiful picture.
(05:10):
Maybe next time we could find some paper to do
it on so that we can keep it and people
won't walk all over it. And when I think about
everything that Shannon sharing, there's a few things that stand
out to me. Number One, usually our kids don't do
this if we are supervising them in significant ways. Number Two,
(05:34):
if that is the challenge, then we can actually get
ahead of the problem because this is coming as a
result of either boredom or a desire to be active
and move and learn. He's a three year old, so
we're dealing with cause and effect right now. He's seeing
how his world changes and modifies as a result of
(05:54):
his actions. That's huge. But last of all, the recognition
that all all of our children, regardless of the fact
that we believe we are parenting them all the same,
are different and the way we parent them is different
because of the season of life we're in, the fact
that this is number three in a picture of a
(06:17):
family instead of being the first child, a totally different
season of parenting, and then adding an extra child, and
now we have a third child. It changes everything. So
this isn't about bad parenting, and Nora, is this about
a bad child? This is literally about a three year
old exploring his world in wonderful ways. We're just not
(06:40):
loving it, right. I remember when Chanelle and her cousin
they would have been around the same.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Age, so Chanel is our eldest daughter.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
They had been really quiet and my sister in law,
your sister Karina, and I went looking for them. We
couldn't find them anywhere. They had found nail polish, and
they had hidden behind the lound room curtains and not
only painted their toes which were beautiful bright red, they
had painted the floorboards as well. And they were just
(07:10):
having fun. So as a parent, I could look at
that and go they were being so naughty. They were
exploring their world. They were looking in to see how
it all works. And my last thing, yeah, my last thing.
It looks like and sounds like to me that you
have an artist in the making, and if we can
tap into that, he's going to create some amazing things,
(07:34):
but he needs some guidance.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
So you've kind of come full circle with the artwork.
If we bring it back to the story that Wally
told us, and that is that once he said, Andy,
that is such a creative drawing that you've like the
way he didn't get cranky, he didn't make a big
deal about it. You said, well, that's such a creative drawing.
I'm so excited that you loved drawing. And then he
(07:55):
and Andy together they cleaned it up and Andy wasn't
in trouble. Instead, they just cleaned it up and Molly said,
you can draw any time, and you can draw with
almost any material. You want, but we want to make
sure our drawings are on paper, so we can hang
them up on the fridge or on the wall.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Everyone can see.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
We can look at them and enjoy them all the time.
And we don't draw on the car, but we draw
on the on the cardboard or on the paper. And
so he provided that additional scaffolding, that additional opportunity for
Andy to feel validated for drawing, but be redirected to
the right place after the break. I've got a couple
of other ideas that that I think you're going to
be really useful for your Shannon to help with the
(08:33):
newfounded banksy that you have in your home. Okay, so
a couple of things as I thought about Shannon's email
to us. The first just related to supervision. It seems
like this little three year old guy, he's doing this
stuff when he's not being supervised, and so it makes
(08:55):
me wonder about quality time, how much time, And it's hard.
There's so much going on at the time. Parents are exhausted,
but three year olds are demanding. There's no way around it.
We are currently dealing with an eighteen to twenty month
old granddaughter and we are remembering just how at that
point in your life. It's a different kind of exhausting
to having big kids.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
It's the kind of my gender goes out the window.
That's right, There is nothing else.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
You've got to be there for them. You've got to
be present for them. That's it. The second thing that
I want to emphasize is what's going on here is
developmentally normal and appropriate. It doesn't mean it's okay, but
it's completely normal.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
And it doesn't mean that he's destructive, absolutely not not
a destruction.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
No, we're not putting any kind of personality, characteristics or
attributes here. This is just a creative kid looking for
an outlet, not supervised, and he gets attention when he
does this as well. Right, So we've got to make
sure that we've got an environment set up where he
can draw, he can have positive attention regularly, and he
can also understand what the limits are. I don't love
the whole we make him clean it up thing unless
(09:55):
we're doing it together. And it's not a punishment, but
rather there's the redirection. So I wanted to emphasize that.
And while there are a whole lot of other things
that I could share, I am going to share something
from a really lovely, lovely writer by the name of
Beck Delahoy. Beck has a sub stack that's called Lessons Learned,
and she shared this about a year ago. In fact,
I've just dragged it up here on the Internet and
(10:18):
it was on March the sixth of twenty twenty three,
so a year ago. Two years ago, same, same, two
and a bit years ago. But it's an article that
she wrote that has stayed with me for more than
two years. And I just love what she says. So
I'm going to share this and we will link to
Beck Delahoy's sub stack. This is called blame and shame
(10:41):
doesn't solve anything, and I want to read this to you.
She says. I have six occupants living in my house, me,
my husband, and our three children, and a wicked mouse.
The wicked mouse first came along a few years ago
when my oldest was a preschooler and learning not to
draw on walls. Sound familiar, Shannon. One day crayon just
(11:04):
appeared on the wall, but my son assured me that
he didn't do it. It was the wicked mouse. This wicked
mouse gets up to all sorts of mischief. Sometimes the
wicked mouse leaves rubbish on the table. Sometimes the wicked
mouse pulls books off the bookshelf and leaves them on
the floor. The wicked mouse has been known to unroll
all the toilet paper whenever there is an overwhelming amount
(11:26):
of chaos or mess. It was probably the wicked mouse
who contributed to it. A few months ago, the wicked
mouse got up to mischief for the first time in
a while. I'd gone upstairs where mister five had been
quietly playing at his age. Silence isn't always a sign
of getting up to no good. Thankfully, I discovered that
there was orange crayon on every imaginable surface. There were
(11:49):
orange squiggles on the tiles, on the shower glass, on
the toilet lid, around the edges of the bath, on
the chest of draws, on the toilet brush, even on
the plug. Nothing in the bathroom untouched. It was as
though an experiment had been done to see which surfaces
a crayon would work on. The answer, it works on
all of them. Interestingly, the orange crayon had even been
(12:12):
used to leave a message on the child bathroom floor,
five letters spelling out mister five's name. There were only
two possibilities to what had happened. Either my five year
old had gotten creative with a crayon or the wicked
mouse was trying to frame him. Now, I probably don't
need to say this, Beck Delahoy says, but the wicked
(12:35):
mouse doesn't really exist. And it's not that my son
was lying when he first blamed war drawings on a
wicked mouse. Young children, especially preschoolers, don't really lie, at
least not in the way we might do as adults.
They just tell us what they wish the truth was, so,
my son, when blaming the wicked mouse, was really saying
that he wishes that someone else had drawn on the wall,
because he already knew that he really shouldn't have done that.
(12:58):
I could call him out as a liar. I could
shame and blame him. I could punish him for what
he'd done so that he'd learn his lesson. But instead
of blaming and shaming, I had a different tactic. I
called my son upstairs, and this is what was said me.
You wouldn't believe what the wicked mouse has done. Come
look with me. The wicked mouse drew all over the floor.
(13:20):
What a cheeky mouse, mister five. Oh no, the wicked
mouse drew on everything. Me, what are we going to do?
Can you help me clean it up? Mister five? Okay me,
here's a scrubber. Let's get to work. She wraps it
up by saying this. My son then spent the next
(13:41):
thirty minutes helping me identify every spot that had been
drawn on, and for mysterious reasons, he seemed to have
a very good idea about where the wicked mouse had scribbled.
He personally scrubbed out at least half of the drawings,
diligently working with me until every spot of orange was gone.
Would he have been so helpful if I had blamed him?
(14:01):
Probably not. He probably would have felt so ashamed that
he would have hidden his feelings behind defensiveness and anger.
I probably wouldn't have been able to engage his cooperation
at all. But he shouldn't have gotten away with it.
You might think, the thing is he didn't get away
with anything. The consequence was the same, He still needed
to help clean up. By not blaming him first, though,
(14:22):
he learned some really important lessons. We can find solutions
without finding someone to blame first. I can be part
of the solution, even if I'm part of the problem.
I don't need to make others feel bad when something
has gone wrong. I can focus on problem solving. We
can teach our children without blaming them. They can learn
(14:42):
to be responsible for their actions without being shamed for them.
I think every family of young, destructively curious kids would
benefit from having a guest come and stay. It may
be a wicked mouse, a cheeky frog, or a silly pigeon.
I can't wait to hear what sort of mischief they
get up to. So like I said, beautiful article from
(15:03):
beck de la joy on lessons Learned and Shannon I
reckon that might help really appreciate the tricky question. If
you'd like to submit a tricky question, just go to
happy families dot com dot A. You scroll down to
where it says podcasts, click the record button, start talking,
and we would love to answer your questions on the podcast.
The Happy Families podcast is produced by Justin Rulant from
(15:24):
Bridge Media, and you can find more information and resources
to help your family thrive, flourish and be happy at
happy families dot com dot au
Today, A tricky question. A three year old who draws
on everything is destructive, takes two walls with a hammer
and more. Oh my goodness, what do you do when
as soon as you turn your back, the kids get
up to mischief? Hello and welcome to today's Happy Families Podcast,
Real parenting Solutions. Every day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast,
we are Justin and Kylie Coulson, and every Tuesday we
(00:29):
answer your tricky questions family relationships, well being, discipline screens.
If you want to submit a tricky question, all you
have to do is go to Happy Families dot com
dot a U, scroll down to the podcast section, click
the record button, start talking. It's that simple. Or you
can send us an email. Podcasts at happy families dot
com dot You with your voice note we love hearing
(00:51):
your voice. This time no voices, Kylie. I'm going to
share this one. It's a long one and I'm going
to read it out from Shannon. Here we go. Hi,
I'm desperate for some help, but please don't judge me.
I have a three year old boy turning four in January.
I'm far from the best pairenting example, and I wish
I could be better, but I'm struggling. I have two
other children, a girl five and a half and a
(01:12):
boy seven. My three year old has taken to damaging
our house and it has become quite frequent. The other
two may have drawn on something once, they had to
scrub it clean and they never did it again. The youngest, however,
I feel like I've really messed up in his upbringing.
So a while back he took to a wall with
a hammer out. Then nothing much. He's drawn a couple
(01:34):
of little things on the wall here and there, but
nothing too major. Then two weeks ago he scribbled luckily
with a whiteboard marker on my older kid's toy cupboard
and bin. He was made to get it off. Then
last week I found he had gotten a stamp and
stamped all over the drawers and cupboard runner of our
spare room. This again, luckily came off with wipes and
he was made to clean it up. He's scribbled and
(01:54):
etched into our wooden coffee table with a pen. We
then went away for almost a week. When we got
home last night, I spoke to him about the drawing
on the coffee table and then discovered he had drawn
with text on our couch again, he was made to
clean this off. We can't get the coffee table stuff
off or out without sounding it back. He's been spoken to,
(02:15):
yelled at, not the great parenting parts, Sorry and isolated again.
I know many would not agree. Sorry. Then this morning
I sat at the couch to find he has now
drawn a big square outline in the coffee table with
a different colored pen. He must have done this last night.
Sometime this morning while I was mowing lawns. He's gotten
his sister's nail polish. I don't know how, and I
(02:36):
have glitter nail polish on my couch and the mat.
And now, after having a shower, he's brought the bucket
of fire ashes inside and tipped them all over the
hall and everywhere around it. I'm glad that you find
it funny. Shannon is just falling apart here and you're laughing.
As I said, I'm in no way as a model parent,
but I'm seriously struggling. My daughter did go through a
(02:57):
damaging phase, but not as bad as this. I just
don't know how to get him to stop. Can anyone
please provide any help? Please? And thank you? Shannon, Shannon.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
I'm not laughing at you, I promise, but I'm going
to give you the best parenting tool for this that
you will ever experience.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
And we haven't prepped this. I've got no idea where
you're going with this. I've got so many answers and
you've just dived straight in.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
You need to buy a copy of I'll Do Better Tomorrow,
I promise. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah, our Friday episodes all about this.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Need this, yep. So a couple of things stand out
to me.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Okay, why don't you go first?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Huge. I remember a story that Wally Goddard shared with
us about his son Andy.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
So if you've missed the story about Wally Goddard, He's
a man who has been my mentor for the last
twenty years and is just one of the wisest parenting
people on the planet.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
He's a professor and family education.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, the guys, he's just he's just a gem of
a human being. As well.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
He was babysitting his eldest son.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Well no, no, no, he was being dad. He was
looking after while mum was out. We could do this
all the time. Every time you bring up dads looking
after the kids, you call it babysitting.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
He was at home with the kids while was gone,
thank you, and he may not have been supervising as
well as he could have.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
That is a pattern that I picked up with Shannon's email.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
And after a little while, realizing that things had been
very quiet for some time, he walked into the lounge.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Trip It's always a problem, isn't it?
Speaker 2 (04:37):
And Andy had painted on their brand new cream carpet.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah. I think it was red paint as World that
he used on the brand new cream cut and.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It wasn't small. He did like a poster sized picture
of a house and a family and sun shining in trees,
the whole bit. And this story just endeared me to
Wally in one fells whoop when he looked at Andy
and he said, Wow, Andy, that is such a beautiful picture.
(05:10):
Maybe next time we could find some paper to do
it on so that we can keep it and people
won't walk all over it. And when I think about
everything that Shannon sharing, there's a few things that stand
out to me. Number One, usually our kids don't do
this if we are supervising them in significant ways. Number Two,
(05:34):
if that is the challenge, then we can actually get
ahead of the problem because this is coming as a
result of either boredom or a desire to be active
and move and learn. He's a three year old, so
we're dealing with cause and effect right now. He's seeing
how his world changes and modifies as a result of
(05:54):
his actions. That's huge. But last of all, the recognition
that all all of our children, regardless of the fact
that we believe we are parenting them all the same,
are different and the way we parent them is different
because of the season of life we're in, the fact
that this is number three in a picture of a
(06:17):
family instead of being the first child, a totally different
season of parenting, and then adding an extra child, and
now we have a third child. It changes everything. So
this isn't about bad parenting, and Nora, is this about
a bad child? This is literally about a three year
old exploring his world in wonderful ways. We're just not
(06:40):
loving it, right. I remember when Chanelle and her cousin
they would have been around the same.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Age, so Chanel is our eldest daughter.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
They had been really quiet and my sister in law,
your sister Karina, and I went looking for them. We
couldn't find them anywhere. They had found nail polish, and
they had hidden behind the lound room curtains and not
only painted their toes which were beautiful bright red, they
had painted the floorboards as well. And they were just
(07:10):
having fun. So as a parent, I could look at
that and go they were being so naughty. They were
exploring their world. They were looking in to see how
it all works. And my last thing, yeah, my last thing.
It looks like and sounds like to me that you
have an artist in the making, and if we can
tap into that, he's going to create some amazing things,
(07:34):
but he needs some guidance.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
So you've kind of come full circle with the artwork.
If we bring it back to the story that Wally
told us, and that is that once he said, Andy,
that is such a creative drawing that you've like the
way he didn't get cranky, he didn't make a big
deal about it. You said, well, that's such a creative drawing.
I'm so excited that you loved drawing. And then he
(07:55):
and Andy together they cleaned it up and Andy wasn't
in trouble. Instead, they just cleaned it up and Molly said,
you can draw any time, and you can draw with
almost any material. You want, but we want to make
sure our drawings are on paper, so we can hang
them up on the fridge or on the wall.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Everyone can see.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
We can look at them and enjoy them all the time.
And we don't draw on the car, but we draw
on the on the cardboard or on the paper. And
so he provided that additional scaffolding, that additional opportunity for
Andy to feel validated for drawing, but be redirected to
the right place after the break. I've got a couple
of other ideas that that I think you're going to
be really useful for your Shannon to help with the
(08:33):
newfounded banksy that you have in your home. Okay, so
a couple of things as I thought about Shannon's email
to us. The first just related to supervision. It seems
like this little three year old guy, he's doing this
stuff when he's not being supervised, and so it makes
(08:55):
me wonder about quality time, how much time, And it's hard.
There's so much going on at the time. Parents are exhausted,
but three year olds are demanding. There's no way around it.
We are currently dealing with an eighteen to twenty month
old granddaughter and we are remembering just how at that
point in your life. It's a different kind of exhausting
to having big kids.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
It's the kind of my gender goes out the window.
That's right, There is nothing else.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
You've got to be there for them. You've got to
be present for them. That's it. The second thing that
I want to emphasize is what's going on here is
developmentally normal and appropriate. It doesn't mean it's okay, but
it's completely normal.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
And it doesn't mean that he's destructive, absolutely not not
a destruction.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
No, we're not putting any kind of personality, characteristics or
attributes here. This is just a creative kid looking for
an outlet, not supervised, and he gets attention when he
does this as well. Right, So we've got to make
sure that we've got an environment set up where he
can draw, he can have positive attention regularly, and he
can also understand what the limits are. I don't love
the whole we make him clean it up thing unless
(09:55):
we're doing it together. And it's not a punishment, but
rather there's the redirection. So I wanted to emphasize that.
And while there are a whole lot of other things
that I could share, I am going to share something
from a really lovely, lovely writer by the name of
Beck Delahoy. Beck has a sub stack that's called Lessons Learned,
and she shared this about a year ago. In fact,
I've just dragged it up here on the Internet and
(10:18):
it was on March the sixth of twenty twenty three,
so a year ago. Two years ago, same, same, two
and a bit years ago. But it's an article that
she wrote that has stayed with me for more than
two years. And I just love what she says. So
I'm going to share this and we will link to
Beck Delahoy's sub stack. This is called blame and shame
(10:41):
doesn't solve anything, and I want to read this to you.
She says. I have six occupants living in my house, me,
my husband, and our three children, and a wicked mouse.
The wicked mouse first came along a few years ago
when my oldest was a preschooler and learning not to
draw on walls. Sound familiar, Shannon. One day crayon just
(11:04):
appeared on the wall, but my son assured me that
he didn't do it. It was the wicked mouse. This wicked
mouse gets up to all sorts of mischief. Sometimes the
wicked mouse leaves rubbish on the table. Sometimes the wicked
mouse pulls books off the bookshelf and leaves them on
the floor. The wicked mouse has been known to unroll
all the toilet paper whenever there is an overwhelming amount
(11:26):
of chaos or mess. It was probably the wicked mouse
who contributed to it. A few months ago, the wicked
mouse got up to mischief for the first time in
a while. I'd gone upstairs where mister five had been
quietly playing at his age. Silence isn't always a sign
of getting up to no good. Thankfully, I discovered that
there was orange crayon on every imaginable surface. There were
(11:49):
orange squiggles on the tiles, on the shower glass, on
the toilet lid, around the edges of the bath, on
the chest of draws, on the toilet brush, even on
the plug. Nothing in the bathroom untouched. It was as
though an experiment had been done to see which surfaces
a crayon would work on. The answer, it works on
all of them. Interestingly, the orange crayon had even been
(12:12):
used to leave a message on the child bathroom floor,
five letters spelling out mister five's name. There were only
two possibilities to what had happened. Either my five year
old had gotten creative with a crayon or the wicked
mouse was trying to frame him. Now, I probably don't
need to say this, Beck Delahoy says, but the wicked
(12:35):
mouse doesn't really exist. And it's not that my son
was lying when he first blamed war drawings on a
wicked mouse. Young children, especially preschoolers, don't really lie, at
least not in the way we might do as adults.
They just tell us what they wish the truth was, so,
my son, when blaming the wicked mouse, was really saying
that he wishes that someone else had drawn on the wall,
because he already knew that he really shouldn't have done that.
(12:58):
I could call him out as a liar. I could
shame and blame him. I could punish him for what
he'd done so that he'd learn his lesson. But instead
of blaming and shaming, I had a different tactic. I
called my son upstairs, and this is what was said me.
You wouldn't believe what the wicked mouse has done. Come
look with me. The wicked mouse drew all over the floor.
(13:20):
What a cheeky mouse, mister five. Oh no, the wicked
mouse drew on everything. Me, what are we going to do?
Can you help me clean it up? Mister five? Okay me,
here's a scrubber. Let's get to work. She wraps it
up by saying this. My son then spent the next
(13:41):
thirty minutes helping me identify every spot that had been
drawn on, and for mysterious reasons, he seemed to have
a very good idea about where the wicked mouse had scribbled.
He personally scrubbed out at least half of the drawings,
diligently working with me until every spot of orange was gone.
Would he have been so helpful if I had blamed him?
(14:01):
Probably not. He probably would have felt so ashamed that
he would have hidden his feelings behind defensiveness and anger.
I probably wouldn't have been able to engage his cooperation
at all. But he shouldn't have gotten away with it.
You might think, the thing is he didn't get away
with anything. The consequence was the same, He still needed
to help clean up. By not blaming him first, though,
(14:22):
he learned some really important lessons. We can find solutions
without finding someone to blame first. I can be part
of the solution, even if I'm part of the problem.
I don't need to make others feel bad when something
has gone wrong. I can focus on problem solving. We
can teach our children without blaming them. They can learn
(14:42):
to be responsible for their actions without being shamed for them.
I think every family of young, destructively curious kids would
benefit from having a guest come and stay. It may
be a wicked mouse, a cheeky frog, or a silly pigeon.
I can't wait to hear what sort of mischief they
get up to. So like I said, beautiful article from
(15:03):
beck de la joy on lessons Learned and Shannon I
reckon that might help really appreciate the tricky question. If
you'd like to submit a tricky question, just go to
happy families dot com dot A. You scroll down to
where it says podcasts, click the record button, start talking,
and we would love to answer your questions on the podcast.
The Happy Families podcast is produced by Justin Rulant from
(15:24):
Bridge Media, and you can find more information and resources
to help your family thrive, flourish and be happy at
happy families dot com dot au
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