Father teaches daughter a lesson about facebook...

[rbnyc]

210. I hadn't realized the clip in the OP...

..was edited. I saw the one you linked earlier on fb.

I totally agree that she doesn’t need her own laptop, and that she should appreciate what she has and what her parents do for her. I think going to the library is a great idea.

But I don’t think the way to teach a 15-year-old respect is for her to go off and live on her own and see how hard it is. She’s a child and she needs to learn respect, the benefits of hard work and the consequences of laziness and ingratitude in an environment where she is still essentially safe, will have her basic needs met, and be loved.

My son is 7. I don’t have a teenager yet and I admit I get a little scared when I envision it. My son is already being picked on by kids because I won’t let him bring his iPod to school (a gift from Grandpa for which I have strict regulations.) There is often conflict over chores and work and getting enough play time and down time. I want my son to have things I never had, but I don’t want him to be spoiled. I want him to think I am wonderful, but I always want to set limits and I have to enforce things that make me the bad guy. It’s not easy being a parent.

And maybe some kids have bad wiring or are influenced by so many things that are outside a parent’s control or for any other number of reasons behave really badly. But when my son behaves badly I know I have the responsibility to give him the tools to do better.

I’m not even sure what this girl did was so terrible. She complained about how much work she has and that she’s not anyone’s slave. That sounds like a typical kid complaint. She did use a tool that had been generously provided by her dad to publicly humiliate him. That’s rude and disrespectful. The fact that he found out about it because he was investing time and money on his generous provision obviously really cheesed him off. I think his response was really about his ego. I don’t think there’s very much for her to learn from it except that she can’t trust her dad to model good behavior.

My son has chores and responsibilities. He has to earn privileges. There are just and predictable consequences for poor behavior. As I said, there is often conflict around all this. I do remember my son complaining about his share of the work. We sat down and talked about all the work there is to be done, how much I do and how much his dad does. We talked about his skills and what he is grown-up enough to do. We talked about how much time there is in the day and what all our priorities are. And I gave him a menu of chores to take on in addition to a couple of non-optional chores (like cleaning up after himself.) He picked the ones he wanted to do and now he really owns them and he does a great job. My hope is that we will continue in this manner and I will never feel like I have to destroy property with a handgun and post it on the internet.

Some people see this guy as a hero because he backed up his word and is executing consequences. Those are good things, as long as the word you are backing up isn’t a rash and senseless one, and as long as the consequences you are executing are proportionate to the behavior and are in the context of consistently enforced expectations and are not manic, angry and egocentric.

This guy is a dumb ass, and how he is a famous dumb ass bolstered by a gaggle of yahoos who think he dun good, like most of the people who make up public life in America.