I have a daughter, and a couple of years ago, she buried her mobile phone in the sandbox at school.
She buried her mobile phone deep in the sand, too deep to hear it ring, and then she couldn’t find it. She dug and dug, and then she panicked, and she blamed another girl. She said the other girl had buried the phone in the sandbox.
Pretty soon lie piled on top of lie, so we ended up with a Richard Nixon/Bill Clinton type situation, where the lies were far worse than the original crime. When we finally unraveled it all, I had to apologize to the other girl’s mother.
And I punished my daughter, who was old enough to know better. I took her screens away – her online games and her YouTube access – for a month.
I am an adult bully
The Danish parents around me were horrified.
The idea of punishment, in Danish eyes, is old-fashioned and maybe a bit criminal in itself. From the Danish point of view, almost all problems can be solved by talking about them.