zoom

babyslime:

karnythia:

moniquill:

Unpopular opinion time:

No.

This is not ok.

If you have fucked up so badly at parenting that your kid is making posts like the above, property destruction and implied violence aren’t appropriate responses. This is not how functional adult people behave.

Hannah, in the video, doesn’t respect her father.

Given that her father invades her privacy, undermines her personal agency, and doesn’t have basic trust for her….I fully comprehend why she doesn’t. Respect is earned and taught. If Hannah posts giant, frustrated rants about her chore load, it probably implies that she doesn’t feel that her efforts are appreciated or that she’s an integral member of the family or household (alienation and over individuation is a huge problem for teens; it’s part of the formation of adult identity separate from parents and kind of a huge trap.

Teenagers are frustrated because their lives are absurd. They’re expected to have adult behavior with no adult agency. Maturity and decision making are learned skills. If parents don’t like the way their teens are behaving, they need to ask themselves where that behavior was learned. If she feels entitled, what have you been doing -her entire life- to communicate the real value of what she has and should be grateful for? If she refers to the woman who cleans for you as ‘the cleaning lady’ is that because she’s noted that you treat that woman that way? Asking for payment for work is not unreasonable; it’s an understanding of capitalism. A less asshat response than ‘are you out of your mind’ would be a basic rundown of the costs of the household in terms of food, heating, etc and what percentage of that Hannah should reasonably be responsible for. Given that she has no economic agency of her own, expressing to her that her chores are a means of repayment for that.

I grew up -poor- and my parents were still giving me an allowance by the time I was ten because that’s how you teach kids how to manage earned income. I received a dollar a week (upgraded to five dollars a week when I was 12) for completing a list of chores. If they weren’t done, I didn’t get paid. Just like you don’t get paid at a job if you don’t show up. My parents also stopped buying luxury items for me around that age and made me buy them myself with earned and saved income from my chores, babysitting, recycling cans, making crafts and selling them, whatever. My parents helped me find jobs and gave me suggestions about what I could so to earn money. If Hannah is fifteen, she cannot legally obtain most forms of employment; has she been educated as to what economic opportunities are available to her? Because as a parent EDUCATING HER IS, IN FACT, YOUR JOB. You got her an application and made her apply? Did you take her with you and teach her the process of how to obtain applications and where to look for places that are hiring? Did you make sure the place you got the application from accepts underage employees (most do not) or walk her through the application process in terms of how to make herself an attractive applicant?

‘When I was your age I’d moved out of the house, lived on my own, went to college while in highschool, worked two jobs, was a volunteer fireman’…. Uh….huh. And you didn’t manage to impart any of this work ethic on your children, apparently. Also: You grew up in a very different economy, as a man. I’m willing to bet you had parents or other helpful adults who made you aware of the opportunities available to you. You are judging your daughter for having a different outcome than you had, when she sure as shit didn’t have the same input. 

Hannah is acting out in the most trivial of ways: Ranting and commiserating with friends. and even THAT outlet is being denied her. All the people above who liked and lauded this: Would you think it was awesome if Hanna was an adult woman who’d posted a frustrated rant about her significant other, and this was the significant other’s response? Or would you consider this to be emotional abuse and a redflag for accelerating relationship violence? Because that’s what this is: Emotional abuse. This is abusive parenting (looks like it’s in the wake of/a response to earlier emotionally negligent parenting, too).

If your kid is a spoiled brat? It is not the kid’s fault. Kids aren’t born spoiled brats. Parental behavior causes this. This man is reaping the seeds he has sewn, and because he’s unsatisfied with what his efforts have yielded, he’s responding with aggression and punishment and social humiliation.

That is -fucked up-. You are a -shitty parent-. You are not training your child to be a functional adult.If you child lacks life skills, if your child does not respect you, if your child cannot think critically or understand the value of money or comprehend the importance of maintaining a household THAT IS YOUR FUCKING FAULT. This kind of extreme behavior is SERIOUSLY too little too late, and an act of aggressive desperation because YOU FUCKED UP.

If I were advising Hannah in this situation? I’d be helping her figure out ways to get the fuck away from these people and hook her up with resources that would teach her actual life skills.

Worth noting? This dude is shooting in what is clearly a residential area. That is unsound (though not necessarily criminal in his locality) behavior. This is not something to be celebrated. Property destruction and implied violence are not things to be celebrated. Emotional abuse in response to shitty teen behavior that results from bad parenting in the first place is not something to be celebrated.

This whole fucking family needs to get to family counseling STAT.

I don’t believe shit this dude is saying for a host of reasons including the bullets he put in her computer. Applaud if you want to, but I bet a video camera focused on her day to day life would tell a very interesting (and fucked up) story about unrealistic expectations.

Yeah I agree… this made me uncomfortable. Supremely uncomfortable. What the fuck kind of appropriate reaction is this?! Your daughter made some whiny rant on Facebook so you BLEW HER LAPTOP AWAY WITH YOUR GUN!? I mean… seriously? Can’t you just like sell it to someone else who might have needed it? Or something less violent?

I realize the rant was disrespectful, but it’s nothing really THAT different from every other entitled teenager at some point. I said shit like that. Not to my parents face, of course, but to my friends when I was pissed at them. Then they’d say how their parents were awful fuckfaces who didn’t know them, and then we’d get on with our lives having ranted in a safe and healthy manner.

If this is how he reacts to pretty typical teenage mouthing off, it makes me worry about how he’d react to the bigger things: having sex, experimenting with drugs, staying out all night at a party, making the “wrong kind” of friends, coming out as gay or trans*, switching religious affiliations, denying God or maybe even becoming friends with someone who isn’t a good, white Christian.
I know parents like this and they’re fucking scary. My father in law is one of them. That came to a head one night when I was visiting my now-husband-then-boyfriend and was sick and jetlagged at 11pm at night, trying to sleep. The TV was so loud I could hear it through my earplugs, and after my husband walked out to ask his dad to turn down the TV, he screamed at him that he was a selfish brat who shouldn’t ever tell him to do things in his own house, then lunged and began strangling him.  We left the house that night to stay with his aunt, and left the country a day after that. They never had a good relationship again, and his father remained an immature and reactive prick to this day. This shit never ends well. Your teenagers may be annoying, demanding, entitled and selfish but it’s still your job to parent them, talk to them, help them, guide them and support them.

And, you know, be advised of what’s within the realm of typical teenage behavior. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure, “my parents are dickwads for giving me too many chores” said among friends, where she was fairly certain her parents wouldn’t see, is probably within normal bounds.

This is so sick and gives me flashbacks to the kind of emotionally abusive disorganized mixed message parenting I got as a child.

I deleted the ignorant applause of this creep’s disgusting behavior, so here’s the link to the awful video.

And he litters. :(