This YouTube was the hit of the internet last week.
A father frustrated with his daughter’s inappropriate and disrespectful Facebook post takes extreme disciplinary action.
If you don’t know what this contains stay till the end.
Only in the US.
Thanks to Phil Johnson for posting this copy with a few expletives deleted out.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to an online article which reproduces a very detailed release from the people involved about the aftermath of the situation.
In part:
Q: How did your daughter respond to the video and to what happened to her laptop?
A: She responded to the video with “I can’t believe you shot my computer!” That was the first thing she said when she found out about it. Then we sat and we talked for quite a long while on the back patio about the things she did, the things I did in response, etc.
Later after she’d had time to process it and I’d had time to process her thoughts on the matters we discussed, we were back to a semi-truce… you know that uncomfortable moment when you’re in the kitchen with your child after an argument and you’re both waiting to see which one’s going to cave in and resume normal conversation first? Yeah, that moment. I told her about the video response and about it going viral and about the consequences it could have on our family for the next couple of days and asked if she wanted to see some of the comments people had made. After the first few hundred comments, she was astounded with the responses.
People were telling her she was going to commit suicide, commit a gun-related crime, become a drug addict, drop out of school, get pregnant on purpose, and become a stripper because she’s too emotionally damaged now to be a productive member of society. Apparently stripper was the job-choice of most of the commenters. Her response was “Dude… it’s only a computer. I mean, yeah I’m mad but pfft.” She actually asked me to post a comment on one of the threads (and I did) asking what other job fields the victims of laptop-homicide were eligible for because she wasn’t too keen on the stripping thing.
We agreed we learned two collective lessons from this so far:
First: As her father, I’ll definitely do what I say I will, both positive and negative and she can depend on that. She no longer has any doubt about that.
Second: We have always told her what you put online can affect you forever. Years later a single Facebook/MySpace/Twitter comment can affect her eligibility for a good job and can even get her fired from a job she already has. She’s seen first-hand through this video the worst possible scenario that can happen. One post, made by her Dad, will probably follow him the rest of his life; just like those mean things she said on Facebook will stick with the people her words hurt for a long time to come. Once you put it out there, you can’t take it back, so think carefully before you use the internet to broadcast your thoughts and feelings.
It sounds like it was a bonding/learning moment for them, so in the end, it was a positive outcome. I guess he knew his daughter well enough, or at the very least, better than those 100’s of ignorant commentors. When I saw the video, I thought it was a little more spiteful than the ideal parenting style, but overall a good message. There is no “right” way to parent, really, anyway.
Well, there’s plenty of ‘wrong’ ways to do it, but I think you’re right in observing that these two certainly seem to have a pretty strong relationship.
From an Australian perspective it’s very weird watching someone take out their pistol and put five hollow points into a computer.
Haha! Culturally, I bet.
I guess I wasn’t totally clear on my comment on there not being a “wrong” way to parent. I assumed that abuse and neglect would generally be excluded from “parenting techniques” LoL.