Mother Blasted After Punishing Daughter For Cheating By Getting Rid Of Her Dog

Mar 23, 2023 by apost team

Helping a child navigate through school can be a challenging task for a parent. It’s not unusual for many parents to use positive or negative reinforcement tactics in the hopes their children will be better motivated. However, one mother took that strategy to the extreme when she attempted to get her daughter to buck up academically.

The mom recounted her attempt to get her daughter to focus better on school on Reddit in May 2020 to get the community’s feedback on whether or not she had gone too far. She started off by saying that she had been frustrated by her daughter’s lack of motivation for a long time and wanted things to change.

“My daughter has always been that smart kid who relies purely on that to go from grade to grade. She never does her home(work), never pays attention in class and studies the very morning of a test. Miraculously she still (gets) good enough marks in all her subjects except for history,” the mom wrote.

She said things began looking up when her daughter was given a new assignment.

“A couple months ago she had an essay coming up and I spoke to her and said that she needs to do a whole a lot better in it than she did in her last history test (37%). She blew me off so I told her that if she didn't at least get above 55% I was going to give her dog away to the boy next door. Still she didn't take me seriously but agreed that she'll even get an 80. We laughed about it and when the results came back she got 78%. We laughed about it and took her out for a celebratory lunch out with her father,” she recalled.

However, the mom was in for a rude awakening not long after. In the post, she continued:

“Today I was cleaning up in her room and found this box filled with old papers and tests from the previous year. After looking through a few I saw an essay which looked familiar. I read it and felt that there was something off so I took it and asked my daughter if I could re-read her one. They were almost identical. When I confronted her about it she lied and said it was her first draft. Finally at the end she said it was Debbie's (an older friend of hers) who wrote it for the same assignment a couple years back. I did get upset and shouted at her before she went off to her room. No sense of regret or feeling bad about it.”

Enraged by the duplicity, the mom went through with her initial threat.

“So I took her dog and went next door to give it to our neighbors. She's been crying ever since and her father is calling me an a*****e but I feel like she needs to understand that there are consequences for every action,” she wrote.

The mom then asked the members of the forum if they thought that she had overreacted in the situation. She was in for quite a bashing, with almost everyone agreeing that not only had she crossed the line, but she had set a terrible example for her daughter, who would most likely be scarred for life by her mom’s emotional abuse.

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Reddit users came together to blast the mom for her heartless treatment of their family pet.

“You showed her a pet is not a lifelong commitment and easily disposable. What would giving away a dog teach her about cheating?? Like have her call the teacher and apologize but this is kind of like mental abuse,” one reader wrote. Another said, “Giving a dog away? This is not some toy you can confiscate or throw in the trash, this is a living being with emotions. Grow a heart.”

“A pet is part of the family not a toy or thing,” one user commented. Another wrote, “Pets are not bargaining tools. They are not a privilege to be removed. You also took this dog away from its family. I can’t even comprehend how horrible this is.”

Many also slammed the mom’s actions as disproportionate and harmful to her daughter.

“There's got to be a better parenting method than emotionally wrecking and torturing your kid,” a user wrote. Another commented, “you should probably work at the whole parenting thing. What is actually the cause of your daughter's performance in school? What you describe is, in general, a situation in which she may have some form of ADD or ADHD.”

Another user remarked, “While your daughter deserves punishment, not only have you traumatized your daughter, you traumatized an innocent dog. There are so many better ways you could have handled this.”

The readers were almost all unanimous in their admonishment of the mom’s actions and urged her to bring the dog home. One user noted raised a suggestion for a better way the situation could have been handled and said:

“If you wanted her to learn that there's consequences for every action you should have notified her teacher about the plagiarism.”

What are your thoughts on the mom’s actions? What do you think would have been a better way for her to motivate her daughter? Let us know, and be sure to pass this along to other moms and dads out there to get their views, too.