The pain of 75 sentences

Ah, sentences.

When I was in grade school, one of my teachers' favorite penalties for bad behavior was to assign "sentences" -- you know, where a student goes up to the blackboard and writes 50 or 100 times something like, "I will not throw spit wads at Sally Ann," or somesuch.

Tonight I decided to take a page from my old-school playbook and penalize one of my children in similar fashion.

My daughter, age 8, temporarily lost her senses and tore up a drawing done by her older sister.

Said older sister was pretty peeved and demanded to know how I was going to handle the situation.

I thought for a minute and asked the offending party to bring to me something she'd made. My original plan was to give it to her sister to shred, sort of an eye for an eye resolution.

But when my daughter brought me a little paper cat with stick-on jeweled eyes that she'd made some months ago she was much too cavalier and too happy about it.

It was obvious she wasn't giving up anything of real value and that bothered me.

No penalty is any good if some sort of sacrifice isn't involved. I needed to see remorse, and judging by the look on my daughter's face she wasn't feeling any at all.

I set the paper cat aside and reassured my older daughter that a just verdict would be forthcoming. Our toddler had fallen asleep just as my husband and I were preparing to take the kids out for supper so I opted to stay behind while he and they went on ahead.

My 8-year-old unwisely decided to stay with me and gaily set about gathering colored pencils, paper, and glue to make a new craft.

As I sat down to begin my evening's writing, I had a revelation. If she had the energy to sit down to a craft project, she had the energy to write sentences!

I got up and went to the table where she was just beginning to lay out her latest project and coolly informed her she'd be doing something else instead.

"You're going to write a sentence for me," I said matter of factly. "It's going to say, 'I will not tear up other people's artwork.' And you're going to write it for me 75 times."

Jumping up with a scream like she'd been set on fire, my daughter immediately began to cry and protest. I remained calm and told her that if her antics woke up her little brother she'd have to write the sentence 150 times so she'd best settle down and get busy.

Busywork. That's my daughter's currency. She must be busy, but productively so, at all times and cannot stand to do something repetitive or mundane.

I'm the same way. That's why I get that the sentence-writing penalty is extremely effective.

I used this technique once before when she was about six and had decided to draw a mural on a freshly painted wall using a washable marker that did not wash off. That time I assigned 50 iterations of "I will not write or draw on walls again." It worked and she never wrote or drew on a wall again.

As I sit here writing this 'blog, my precious little girl sits at the table nearby writing sentences. I am very unpopular right now, but that's okay because the last thing I want to do is to raise a child whose respect for other people's things has not been properly cultivated.

I'm banking on the fact that someday she -- and the world -- will thank me just as I now thank the schoolteacher who made ME write sentences the day I purposely stepped on and broke new crayons that belonged to a fellow 4th grader.