He apparently exhausted them. So he took away a couple of her luxuries... publicly; just like she disrespected her parents - publicly. His dose of tough love will help assure that this child will one day actually BE THERE for her parents in their old age, despite what her childish brain believes now... just like millions of other former brats down through the ages. Also, I love that he charges her for his repair work -- icing on the cake, dad
I haven't actually watched the video and have no intention of doing so, nor do I mean any hostility in writing this. But I find the whole affair troubling and symptomatic of a far larger problem; namely, the mindset by which certain subcultures seem to maintain their social cohesion. I'll start by saying I'm not "siding" with either the parents or the daughter here. This isn't about who's right, it's about how all players are part of the same problem and that their solutions all seem to rest on "more of the same", reinforcing the very ideas and outlooks that led them here. That's one reason I dislike the parents' response; not because their daughter wasn't poorly behaved, but because they're just reinforcing the message and unable to see that they're the same, only with "bigger guns" (so its apparently "okay"). This is sadly common, in my opinion; people are by nature highly conservative (that's not a political statement, it covers "liberals" and "conservatives" alike) and think that if your donkey won't move when you bash it over the head with a stick, it's best to bash it with a sledgehammer and see if that works. So often the response to social problems is to just assert the old ways harder in the mistaken belief that it will serve as a patch on your sinking ship; instead you'll just punch through the hull. And this isn't about one family in my opinion; this is about their culture as an entirety and its manner of holding society and family together. Do communities in these places actually hold together through love and mutual support or by intimidation, obligation and imposition? Saying "well, the parents tried everything else and this is a last resort" is a justification I find highly suspect. Did they try everything else, or did they themselves embrace a selfish, domineering outlook from the start, only to be offended when their child eventually embraced the same? To be frank, this is something I've noted about these (sub)cultures - there's nothing actually keeping people together other than moralizing efforts to control. The natural urge to social cooperation is reduced and the natural drive for selfishness is enhanced, and such a society can only function so long as people reinforce each others' behaviours in an overt, assertive way. Hence why this part of the world has so many political or religious extremists, I imagine, and why so high a percentage of the populace are in prison. Imposing on each other, demanding that other people acknowledge obligations, responsibilities and duties while in no way yourself acting in a manner that recognizes the need for communal support. The unspoken message is "my needs and wants first, all the time, and "go me!" when I assert them", but when, surprise, surprise, the young take that message to heart, the elders have the spoken message: "no. MY selfishness is fine and good and proper, but yours is wrong, wrong wrong. YOU must submit". And the thing is, it's of course right and proper that parents have control and authority over preadult children and assert that authority when they feel they must. The problem, in part, is that technically the parents here are not doing anything at all wrong; but their social mindset is such that the parenting is lost amid a ideology that embraces selfish assertion and aggressive imposition on others. No wonder the young rebel - they're being raised amid messages of selfish aggressiveness, but when they immitate they're suppressed. I've seen something reasonably similar play out in my own experience, observing the teachers and other students at my old school. The teachers (who often had my sympathy) moaned that the students just weren't listening to the message, and I was thinking "but they are. The problem is, the message that comes from your mouths is not the message being sent by the society they live in and the systems you are a part of. So it's dismissed as not worth listening to, being clearly at odds with all the unspoken lessons they've learned". I sympathised entirely with what the teachers went through with some of these students, but they didn't seem to realize that the young, while they like to look "rebellious", are rarely anything of the sort. They are picking up the message quite well. The government tells you to say "green", but the students can see quite well that the wider context of society is yellow. So you can say "green" until you're blue in the face; they won't listen because it doesn't match what they're being "told" every day, all day from other sources. You'll be bypassed entirely. Is the child in this case a self-centred "brat"? I have no doubt. I'm sure her behaviour was shameful. But where did she learn that from? A (sub)culture that promotes an almost primal, aggressive selfishness while maintaing cohesion and stability only through the constant reinforcement of controls on other people's behaviour. The word "respect" is a favoured one in these (sub)cultures, I notice. It comes up an awful lot - demands of "respect". Entitlement lies at the very heart of the concept of respect - when there is no real attachment, humility or wisdom, there is the demand that others show "respect" to you. Even SPOCKED says: suggesting that the father's own eventual gratification is his motive (though I don't see how this is supposed to make her less likely to say "f**k it" and leave them to rot. Would she be right to do so? Unlikely. Should I care either way? They're all symptomatic of the same problem). The daughter is what her society and parents made her whether they like it or not. And again, while they will quickly insist that everyone and anyone else stand up to their responsibility (particularly if it involves an obligation benefiting them), you'll not see them imposing such on themselves. And their flawed solution is, as is so often the case, "more of the same". It's aggression, bullying - he or she who imposes the most control or power, wins. If parenting is coupled with humility and cooperative ethos, then when authority is asserted it is effective. I for one would obey my uncle instantly if he gave me The Look, in part because most of the time he wasn't imposing or controlling at all. How can a social structure built on obligation, moralizing demands, mutual public humiliation and pushing for number one remain stable? People will claim that the father is teaching his daughter not to be selfish and entitled, but in my opinion that's not so. He's just reinforcing the unspoken lesson while hoping he can assert control over her and "win" by throwing the harder punch. The lesson she'll learn is either "I must submit" or "selfishness is still good, but I need to assert power and control more effectively if I am to reap the benefits". Or both, which will make her dangerous indeed.
Better examples of parenting. Father forces daughter to eat feces http://sg.news.yahoo.com/girl-forced-to-eat-feces-by-father.html
I genuinely apologise if you find I'm "pontificating" (though how you would conclude so without reading it I don't know), but you don't have to read it or anything on the board if you don't want to. So why the comment? I'm quite familiar with the details and the case (even were I not, the OP and others have described it); I simply haven't watched the footage.
I'm "siding" with the father given the "facts" we have here. I see a man who's been patient with his rebellious teenager daughter and has tried everything before with little to no result. He strikes me as the selfmade type of person who's achieved success through hard work and he's very proud of that and would like his daughter to follow in his footsteps and being a typical teenager of her age doesn't dream of it and that drives him nuts. I think the main reason why he blew up was the perceived disrespect he got.. he goes out of his way to accomodate her (like any good parent does) and gets mostly shit, backtalk and insane behaviour in return and he just snapped. Now shooting a laptop is way out there.. overreaction by my standard but i agree with the underlying message of "I've tried everything.. now let's do some shock and awe and see if it works".
I don't necessarily disagree with you. I guess I'm just looking at it on another level. The problem I have is that if your child is acting like this you've already failed, and attempts to repair the damage, whether I agree with the methods or not, are secondary to the primary concern of why the children end up like that. And when questioning how the young end up, the eye should look to the elders and what they are teaching. The important point is that teaching is far, far more than simply telling children what to do or not do. It's in everything they pick up from you and society as a whole, implicitly as well as explicitly, in the attitudes, behaviours and assumptions you demonstrate. If a parent thinks raising a child is a matter of just saying "do" or "do not", while ignoring the fact that everything they say, do, everything they are, informs the child's worldviews, then they're being short-sighted. I'm not saying "everything children do is their parents' fault", but I am saying that it bothers me when parents turn around and act like the child came out of nowhere...where did she learn everything she now is? What messages and assumptions are you demonstrating, and how do they match up to the words that come out of your mouth or the behaviours you dictate? Are the implicit lessons and the explicit ones matching, or is the order of the day "Do as I say, not as I do, and be as I tell you to be, not what I am"? The problem as I see it is that these children are not being raised according to a stable model. It's an unstable model that then has a load of scaffolding and patches and controls placed onto it to stop it imploding entirely. It's setting up a way of seeing the world and then imposing limits to that worldview, setting it against itself. Teaching "come here" only to shout "stop, no further!" at sometimes arbitrary moments. It will either explode or collapse. Perhaps in the girl we see the collapse, and in the father the explosion?
Personal experience tells me that kids can go many ways and no input can change that. I've seen kids from broken homes turn out just fine and the opposite, i.e. stable home with caring parents and the kid is a true bastard. Good parenting is not easy and everyone makes mistakes.. maybe the mistakes were made early on by this father and it spiralled out of control and maybe not. It's hard to tell without indepth knowledge of the family and their characters but i wouldn't rule out exceptional bitchiness on the daughter's part (i've seen some true godawful teenage girls that were so mean and disrespectful that it took effort not to react or react the wrong way) but i'm also careful about the dad since we only know his side of the story. If however the facts are like presented then i'm on the dad's side.. though with less gun violence.
You're quite correct, and I apologise if what I said appeared to dismiss that, as I see it might well have done given my (very) "general" focus. I do understand the sympathy for his position, very much so, though I think the problem is "of our own making". Then again, I tend to view things in terms of the wider responsibility, and it's helpful for others to be there to balance me out. As you say, there are so many layers of opinion and perspective, and mine tends to go "wide" as often as it does "intimate". Sometimes too far either way. While I said "if your child is like that you've already failed", I will add that failure certainly isn't in and of itself shameful, particularly because sometimes things are stacked against you. The parent may have been a very good parent and still fail, because, as you say, children are different, and some may well be terrors regardless. Although, again, there's the fact that parents aren't the only adults teaching; the society as a whole teaches too.
If you didn't watch the video, then you don't know anything about that which we are discussing, so you have no opinion. Come back after actually, you know, WATCHING THE VIDEO, and maybe you might have a leg to stand on.
The girl sounds like a spoiled little brat in serious need of a reality check. I completely agree with the father safely using his firearm to destroy his laptop. He never should have put it online though, deal with that shit in-house.
Mostly because discipline should be a private matter and not about showing it to potentially millions of people and publicly humiliating your kids. Are you really using the argument "the kid acted immature so the parents should do the same"?
She is a 15 year old girl who posted in on Facebook in such a way that only her friends saw it. He says at the very beginning that she had try to hide it. He on the other hand was an adult who decided to stoop the the level of a 15 year old. Not only did he post it on her Facebook page, he decided to go more publicly thn she did by posting it on YouTube as well, as well as on his own Facebook page and on his blog.
Doesn't seem that way at all to me. To me, his act of shooting the computer was just to tell her that if he was going to provide her with a computer, put time and money in to maintaining it, and then she was going to show absolutely no gratitude for that and instead use that computer to disrespect him, then she couldn't have it any more. He just picked a particularly dramatic way of saying that.