The best part of the Facebook Laptop Dad is his defense of the housekeeper.

[Cleita]

173. Look I grew up with discipline. I went to Catholic school in the forties and fifties.

Yet, even when the discipline often bordered on the abusive, the most violent thing I ever saw a nun do was to tear up a homework paper of another student because she thought the student hadn't done the work herself but cheated. If I misbehaved at home I was disciplined by not being allowed to go to the movies on Sat. afternoon. (We didn't have TV then.) I was an adult before I drove a car because I was not allowed to drive the family car period let alone get the keys taken away. However, I was never abused. If there was a big problem and as a typical teenager I fought with my parents, they would sit down with me and talk to me to figure out where I was coming from and then we would come to a working arrangement between us.

Honestly, we didn't have Facebook back then but many of my friends kept diaries where they wrote about stuff about their parents or siblings that irked them not to mention discussing them with their friends. I heard a lot of the goings on in other people's homes from my friends, and often the parents found out, but none were "disciplined" for it not in that way. The diary was considered private as was personal mail and no one I ever knew had a parent who violated that privacy. I have a step daughter my husband and I shared custody with and eventually had to take her in full time because she was dealing with an alcoholic mother, who did take advantage of her, expecting her to do the housework and cook for herself and then pick her off the floor and put her to bed when she was too drunk to do it herself.

When she moved in with us, all I asked her to do was to keep her room tidy and take care of her clothes, which she did with no problem. Her father, not me, set curfews and other rules, which she kept most of the time, but no one beat her up or started a control war if she slipped once in a while. She's a fine woman today and I live with her and her husband today.