Social media parenting is taken to the extreme with new viral videos such as a father making his 4-year old exercise in the snow and the newest viral video of a dad shooting his daughter’s laptop as a punishment for posting foul language on Facebook. Not only do we have those viral videos, but an older video of a mother putting hot sauce in her young boy’s mouth who was recently sentenced in August of 2011 for child abuse.
All of these cases have been filmed and uploaded to Facebook or YouTube. Which leads to the debate: are these things better left behind closed doors? One of the first publicized cases of abuse hit the airwaves in 1994, when Michael Fay was caned in Singapore as a result of confessing to vandalism. This sparked an outward cry and law changes against how parents disciplined their children. The “spanking law” put forth by the federally funded Fourth National Incidence Study (NIS-4) and was widely adopted by many parents. NIS-4 defines “physical abuse as a form of maltreatment in which an injury is inflicted on the child by a caregiver via various non-accidental means, including hitting with a hand, stick, strap, or other object.”
Since spanking has become a taboo action over the past 15 years, parents are forced to be more creative with means of punishments. Punishments such as grounding or taking privileges away from kids have increased as a popular form of punishment, but it does not work as well on teenagers as “time-outs” work for toddlers. In this father’s case of banning his teenage daughter from Facebook, the punishment failed because she was able to access Facebook through other sources.
With grounding slowly becoming less effective in a high tech world full of cell phones, text messages, tablets, social media, and laptops, parents are having to get creative with forms of punishment. The mother with the hot sauce was child abuse according to the Alaska law and was sentenced to 3 years of probation. On the flip side how was she going to teach her child to not misbehave without the spanking law? She may have taken creativity to the extreme, but she really did no physical harm as as defined by NIS-4.
The boy who was told to exercise in the snow has been highly criticized but his parents will not face any legal action due to Chinese cultures and customs. He is very proud of how he treats his son and will continue with his proclaimed “Eagle” parenting style. The father told CNN, he does not care about the criticism because he is pushing his child to be a strong member of society. The “Eagle Father” claims “We don’t expose [our children] to nature enough and they get weaker and less competitive compared to foreign children.”
The “Eagle Father” may not have to worry about foreign children’s upbringing with the recent applause that an American father is getting for a video message he posted on his daughter’s Facebook Page. In his video he shows his creative child rearing, by taking his handgun and shooting his daughter’s laptop. This viral video is getting rave reviews from parents all over the United States.
There is little criticism of him overreacting to a teenager’s statements by using a gun to prove his point. Nobody seems to be concerned about him shooting his daughter’s laptop point blank, and then advising parents in the video to “put a boot in their kids [butt]”? It seems that the action of shooting the laptop, and then posting it on the daughter’s Facebook account, does more psychological damage than a simple spanking ever could.
With the videos, all of these children will now have to deal with not only an alleged child abuse past, but documentation of it happening. The little boy with the hot sauce will carry the burden of becoming a media sensation for his mother’s transgressions. The Chinese boy likely will have to answer to his future employers about the video of him as a child with only his underwear on.
Meanwhile, the teenage daughter now has some great footage of her father shooting her laptop that she can someday show at her wedding reception, just before the father-daughter dance. Parents teach their children that anything that goes on the internet stays there forever, and being overly open about personal lives and parenting styles through video and social media can have negative effects on a child’s upbringing and future more than the abuse itself.