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Nearly all my grown kids have earned my trust to the extent that they’re allowed to dig in my purse, as we call it. Some of my other little sticky fingered hoodlums best not get near it.
I have some kids that must have been born honest. Even one who moved in at age 13, he went through a lying spell, but basically he’s been as honest as I could have ever asked a son to be.
I have other kids who steal just to steal. Searching a room I found a baggie full of AA batteries. What for? There’s nothing battery operated in his room, he’d simply been swiping them from the TV remotes for no reason at all. Other kids will steal snacks that they simply could have asked permission to eat. I only say no to snacks, before dinner, but they’d just rather steal.
I’ve seen the stealing ease up years and years later. I’ve seen the behavior go away as well. One of my sons, now 21, used to steal money constantly for the entire first year he lived with me, then he stopped. It never happened again after age 7 and he became one of the stars in our family, a super achiever. If I knew how the behavior could be changed, I’d bottle and sell the solution.
It aggravates me as bad as my meanest goose pooping all over the driveway. It’s so irritating.
About the time my geese turned 10, I fenced in a solid acre for them to roam and my driveway cleared up. Why couldn’t it be so easy with my children?
Why does it takes years and years of therapy? Or decades of my commitment through some very troubling testing behaviors? Why is this so?
Kids, like my darling young’uns, came out of backgrounds of severe lack and scarcity. There was never enough food, shelter was iffy, and possessions were left behind resulting in a bunch of nervous Nellies that trusted no one, although I naively believed they’d see my smiling face and melt.
Didn’t happen.
They saw my gullible face and set about pushing all my buttons for a very long time.
I have to take a deep breath often, call some older kids for reassurance that I’ll make it through this bunch, and then I keep on going. Repeating the same thing for a very long time, I slowly see progress only to get hit upside my head by other stuff that I didn’t see coming.
We’re in a pickle at the moment, something for me to slog through and hopefully use someday to hold someone else’s hand through a similar experience. That’s what I’m telling myself right now to get through it in one piece.
When you figure out the magic answers, please let me know. We have dealt with stealing for 8 years, with no end in sight. It is a major button pusher for me as well. And like you, if the kids would just ask, they can usually have it.
Fortunately, I only have one stealer who doesn’t live her most of the time right now, but when he is home, I am “on guard”.