The Bunker Blog

Diane Lyons caught her 6-year-old daughter, Shiane, shoplifting stickers in her local Carrollton, OH, Discount Drug Mart. What does mom do? She promptly turns her daughter in to the manager. Not only that, but she calls the police, who arrive and put the little girl in the police cruiser to try to teach her a lesson.

I’ve read a lot of buzz about this. The news story indicates that Lyons considered asking about the reward, but decided not to do so. Because of that, there’s a lot of swirl that maybe Mom was just trying to get a quick buck by turning her daughter in.

I disagree. If that was all she wanted, she could have stopped at alerting the manager. It was the store’s policy, not a police policy. And, lest we forget, she said that she decided not to go through with asking about the reward.

No, I think Mom just wanted to teach the little girl a lesson. We may question how far she went to do so, but hey, I say at least she did something other than make excuses for the kid. Let’s face it; a lot of  parents would have either done absolutely nothing, or worse, would have rewarded the kid by buying her the thing she was attempting to steal.

But Lyons did no such thing. She made it very clear to Shiane that stealing is wrong, and that it is a BIG deal. She let her know that Mom would never uphold her in theft, and that even her own mother would turn her in for stealing. Now, I ask you, what message do you think that 6-year-old got from that experience? 

For the hundreds of stories about parents using their kids to shoplift, about adults using kids to steal or even about adults running off and abandoning their kids to get away after shoplifting, we finally get to write about somebody with some parenting skills. You may make fun, you may say that Lyons went too far, you may even believe that she did it for the attention or even for the reward. I say Good Job, Mom. There should be more parents who do not tolerate theft from their kids out there.

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