A ten year old bully from Utah got a taste of her own medicine when her stepmother made her wear ugly thrift shop clothes to school after discovering she was constantly picking on another student on account of her wardrobe.
Bullying is a hard-to-fix problem in schools, but a mother from Murray, Utah seems to have come up with a very effective way of making her daughter realize the seriousness of her actions. Last Wednesday, Ally, whose last name was not revealed in order to protect her daughter’s identity, received an email from one of Kaylee’s teachers, explaining that she had been bullying another classmate because of how she dressed. This had been going on for the last three weeks, and according to the teacher, the bullied girl was now refusing to come to school anymore. Aware of the long-term effects of bullying, Ally decided to confront Kaylee about it and make her understand her behavior could have serious consequences. Only the young girl seemed to have no remorse for what she had done, and that prompted Ally to approach the problem differently. “I thought this is a perfect moment for us to really teach her, this is right, this is wrong, which path are you going to take? And then it’s her choice,” the woman said.
Photo: Fox 13
Kaylee would take the other girl to the playground every day, call her names and tell her she was a slob and that she dressed like a sleaze. “Someone not wanting to go to school anymore based off of something that one other little person said to them. I mean, that’s huge, that’s damaging,” Ally told Fox 13, so she decided to give her daughter a taste of her own medicine. Although she wasn’t Kaylee’s biological mother, she and her father had been in a serious relationship for several years, so she thought it was her duty to educate her on the issue of bullying. So Ally went to a local thrift shop, bought about $50 worth of clothes she knew Kaylee wouldn’t be caught dead in, and hung it on the bathroom door for her daughter to wear the next day, along with a pair of old sneakers. “I died. I did,” Kaylee said, admitting that she even cried the first time she laid eyes on the outfits.
As expected, in the two days Kaylee was forced to wear the unflattering clothes, she became the target of her colleagues comments, who started talking behind her back. But on Friday, after school, she wasn’t angry. Like her mother hoped, she had learned her lesson, and when her sister asked her why she should not bully people, she answered: “Because it’s stupid and it’s mean. It hurts them.” Ally admits it was tough seeing her daughter struggling during those two days of humiliation, but she is happy the experience taught her a valuable lesson. “If she chooses to be a bully after this, then at some point in her life, she’s going to be on the other side and she’ll know what it really feels like. And I think now that she knows what it feels like, and she doesn’t want to be that person anymore because she knows how hurtful it is,” she said.
