PARENTING December 29, 2003 Issue

Truth-telling and satsumas

By Fenella Bennetts

I didn't know what to do. I had been locked round the kitchen table with our son and daughter for the past hour, trying to figure out who was telling the truth—and getting nowhere. We were due to leave home any minute for our family Christmas treat—to see the Nutcracker ballet in London. The children had been looking forward to this moment for weeks. But we had to get to the bottom of something first.

At holiday time we always had a large bowl filled with juicy satsumas (like small oranges), which we all dipped into from time to time during the day. But there was one rule: The peel was not to be flushed. My husband had had to spend hours unblocking the drains after this happened just once, and he felt keenly about the subject. And yet this very afternoon there had been another satsuma incident. Who had put peelings down the toilet? No one else could have. It had to have been one of our children.

I questioned them together. I questioned them separately. And they both staunchly denied having done it. I wasn't angry, I wasn't impatient, and I wasn't threatening. They shouldn't have been afraid to own up.

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