
Punishment
Why Children Steal and What to Do About It
Practical steps to eliminate stealing.
Posted May 23, 2019 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

Parents who have a child who steals from them typically respond by imposing a punishment. If your daughter has taken money from your wallet or "borrowed" some of your jewelry, a common response is to take away her phone or internet access for several days to "teach her a lesson."
A secondary response is to put your wallet away in a drawer or to lock the bedroom door to prevent access to your belongings. Unfortunately, both actions often fail to teach the child anything and do little or nothing to stop the pattern of stealing.
If you really want to address the problem of stealing with your child, look at the world through their eyes. In their worldview, money or possessions are not things that a person earns by their own efforts. Instead, these things are given to you by people in power, most often their parents.
Parents will argue with me on this point by indicating that they try to teach their children from a young age that you must work in order to get things (e.g. you do these three things and you will get this much of an allowance this week). This makes perfect sense to the adult. Unfortunately, it does not really translate into interactions with your child.
For example, take the adolescent who has earned enough money from doing chores to buy a videogame. They are happily playing away at it for hours each night and not doing their homework. Eventually, their grades drop, and so you intervene and take away their possession, telling them that they cannot have it back until they raise their grades to a passing level. What have you really taught the child?
As an adult, I would understand your intent, but from the child’s perspective, all you have done is exert your ultimate control over everything. You set up the chores, established the allowance, allowed them to buy something, and now you have taken it away since you were displeased. The lesson learned is that the parent is in control of the child's lives and they, in reality, are powerless.
Now comes a time when they feel they need money, they do not have any, and you do and will not give it to them. Why shouldn’t they steal it from you? All they are doing is the reverse of what you did to them. You “stole” the videogame from them. Now they are reciprocating. When looked at this way, the efforts you do to hide things from them are now just a challenge in part of a game, as far as they are concerned.
If this reasoning makes sense, there are activities that you can do that are effective in eliminating stealing and teaching the lessons you really want your child to learn. You have to establish some guidelines agreed to by all parental figures involved with the children. If you follow these, then you greatly enhance the probability of eliminating stealing for good.
1. Do not give things to your child that you might want to take back.
Say, for example, that your child wants a phone, but obviously cannot sign a contract for one due to their age. You can get one for them, but you must make it clear that it is your phone assigned to them to use exclusively, and not theirs to do with as they please. Restricting its use is well within the agreement you have made with them, and you will not be thought of as stealing it from them should the need arise to restrict access to it.
2. Make punishments for bad or poor behavior reasonable and think of them as a teaching opportunity.
Pretend that your child has been taking money from your wallet. Instead of hiding the wallet, set it out in plain sight of everybody on the kitchen counter and assign them the responsibility of making sure that it is safe. Tell them that if money is missing, there will be consequences to pay, regardless of who took the money. The consequences should be phrased such as the following: “There is $2 missing from the wallet. It was your responsibility to make sure the wallet was safe. Your punishment is to wash three windows and clean two sinks. But I’ll tell you what: if you want to apologize, tell me what you should have done to ensure that the wallet was safe. Then you only have to wash one window and clean one sink.”
The child will be motivated to have the lesser punishment and will have to come up with their own apology (i.e. they will "own" the words) and see you as a positive rather than a negative person, as you will be perceived to be cutting them slack. The punishment is doing something beneficial for the whole household rather than reinforcing to them their powerlessness compared to you.
3. Be consistent and persevere.
If you and your significant other do this sort of activity with your child repeatedly over time, a lot of the resentment that children develop from the struggle for power with their parents will evaporate. Stealing will cease and become a thing of the past.