80 threads and nobody has shown the language of mental health.
Nice folks, but you cannot express what you do not have.
That is a few thousand words like shame, habit, awareness, support, rules, resolve, etc. 1000s of words and how they connect.
The only way to achieve that imperfect language is select books and support groups for practice. It takes a decade at current human advancement.
Such as, addressing the police part. Different control structures are eg the family, work, police. Using the police control hierarchy means a breakdown in the others like family. This family is broken, but normal. Thereafter, the police must intervene because the adults avoid books.
The real family issues are access to feelings, rules, resolving conflict, habit, demonstrated expectation, self worth, communication, support, discipline, abuse, neglect, deception and on and on.
The child does not have the problem, the parents do. If parents wish to avoid books & groups, I will see their children in groups, the smart ones, as they get healthy. The rest are gambling with life.
Some of the most messed up people I’ve known were the children of psychologists and ministers.
Yogi Berra famously said, “There is no difference between theory and practice but, in practice, there is.”
Many have pointed out that even in a single family the outcomes diverge from kid to kid starting with Cain and Abel.
Parents run the gamut from loving and giving to cold and strict to uncaring and indifferent. At some point it is the kid who must decide what kind of person to be and stop blaming his “situation”.
Thank you for your post; now I understand more where you are coming from but I do not share your analysis in some points.
Children need to function in both the family and in society. Those are different pools. In many case what is accepted or allowed in the family is not allowed outside; sometimes the reverse is true.
When a young child steals it is generally not about acting out or rebelling or looking for attention. Certainly those cases exist but normal well adjusted children test the world by taking what is not theirs and parents work to help them understand why this is wrong. The strength of the child’s wants or desires vs the strength of the parental imprinted moral code is at issue. Furthermore in addition to and separate from the individual’s familial moral code there is society’s code of consequences to contend with.
I raised my children to take heed of the fact that they lived in a larger world than our family with consequences that we as their parents could not control. If they broke society’s rules they would pay society’s price. This is a separate lesson from lessons about morality and honor. There are many things that are not against the law that are still dishonorable. Those areas of morality are covered by parental conduct, discussions and by pointing out the issues as they arise.
In this context I think the OP did exactly the right thing by drawing aside the curtain slightly, enough to show his/her daughter that there is an authority outside the parents with consequences for certain behaviors. Giving children information like that makes them better able to control their actions themselves. When the urge to take the money, glittery object, gum unpaid for, they will have knowledge of the weight of consequences to set against the urge and help them make the right decision.
Great...