The Joy of Guilt

The past two weeks we've had a bit of trouble in our home. Nothing to serious but annoying nonetheless. And you know - it's just a slippery slope and that nothing serious becomes something else. Lucky for me I like to lay on the guilt and it currently still works. Yes, I am thankful for guilt. Insert evil laugh.

Jackson is having a difficult time with his homework lately. I'm not sure what it is but mostly it's just that he isn't finishing it. This leads to getting after school detention of sorts, they call it ZAP. It can be good, it lets kids get help if they need it and it does show that the teachers are on top of their missed assignments. All fine and good if I wasn't asking him if he finished his homework and he wasn't saying yes. We all know what that is...when someone says something that isn't true. It's a bad three letter word.

Flash forward to today. The boy goes off to school only to call me an hour later and tell me he has ZAP. I promptly went in to his room and took his iPod, his PSP, his gameboy, any other form of entertainment that was in there. When he came home I asked for his phone and he responded "I know, I'm grounded."

I then stood in the doorway of his bedroom and told him he has a week to get it all together. To get his homework done and prove to me that he deserves all of his stuff back. I told him he had to earn his iPod and phone back and that it would probably be a lot easier to earn those "things" back but it might take some time to earn my trust back and that I hoped he thought that was more important than texting his friends. Yep, the guilt. And I layed it on thick. We'll see if it worked.