Step by Step | Correcting Attitudes

We've had a terrible week; everything has really gotten out of hand. My son has been acting quite rudely at school, and he's also been very distracted and keeps losing his things. He's had a week full of punishments and chores to do. Today was the only day he wasn’t in trouble because he finally behaved himself… But it hasn’t been easy. I’ve been really worried about things I’ve seen that I don’t like at all, and if I don’t correct these behaviors in time, he’s going to grow up thinking the world is his oyster.

For a while now, my son has been losing his crayons, erasers, and pencils—and even when he doesn’t lose them, he wears them down quickly by sharpening them like crazy. We’ve spent a fortune on pencils, but I’ve had enough. I threatened to punish him, and this time he didn’t lose them, but he did bring them back super short, so I had to punish him anyway. I thought the pencil was our only problem, but then I found out about other things.

It turns out he had a “best friend,” but overnight he became closer to another classmate he met a week ago at a park. From that moment on, he decided he would simply replace his current best friend with this new friend—and he has every right to choose his own friends—but he started treating his old best friend badly just because the new one doesn’t like that boy. The boy came up to me one day and told me that my son treated him badly, swore at him twice, and gave him the middle finger. I was shocked because my son never swears.

The more I looked into it, the more outraged I became. My son told me he didn’t want to be friends with that boy anymore because he has a new friend, and that the other boy was POOR… POOR… What? As if we were rich—and even if we were, that doesn’t give us the right to call ANYONE “poor.” I don’t know where he got that awful comment from, but that was what finally pushed me over the edge, and the punishment was harsher. He cried a lot, and I didn’t hit him; I just took away his favorite toy and made him think I’d thrown it away. I talked to him at length and explained why it’s wrong to say those kinds of things about other people.

I'm starting to think that his new friend is the one telling him those awful things. I really don't know, but I'm not going to let him go down that path. The punishments are getting worse and worse. Yesterday he spent the whole day bored, without a cell phone, without a computer, without TV—just doing homework. Today he finally behaved better, so we let him play on the computer for a while, but we have a lot of work to do to keep him from acting so rudely and impulsively.
Hmm correcting the son and younger behavior and attitude is our responsibility for their later beautiful life 👍🌹