saintfan

Taking the laptop away, in my opinion, would have been sufficient. A little public humiliation might also have been in order, but he's doing precisely what he is railing at her about. No?

He really is showing her...that, what, two can play that game?

I recall a story my grandpa tells about my great grandpa. He tells a story about leaving the gate open repeatedly and getting lectured about it. And he told me one time:

"You know son, the thing about paw paw is that he could shame us boys so bad that being shamed was worse than just about anything else he could have done." In the end...the moral of the story...is that my grandpa and his brothers understood that it embarrassed THEM when they embarrassed HIM.

Now, I have two children. They are 6, girl, and 2, boy. I know it's an uphill battle and I know that sometimes the best laid plans can go awry. But I'm thinking that SOMEbody might not have figured out how somebody else is wired if it has to escalate to such a point that the GROWN UP is railing away AT HIS OWN DAMN DAUGHTER...ON FACEBOOK...and putting 6 bullets into a freaking laptop computer as a way to SHOW HER that HE can do it too. Man it must be miserable to live in that home, right?

When I got my ear pierced when I was 17 my mother threw everything in the house at me...if it wasn't nailed down she picked it up and threw it at me, running through the house screaming and crying, "What have I raised!"

Dudes that strengthened my resolve. I was keeping that earring hell or high water...until my grandpa sat me down and explained to me why he didn't approve, necessarily, and what my consequences would be if I chose to keep it.

I took it out at the end of that conversation. Sometimes I wish I hadn't. It didn't really hurt anything, and I wasn't rebelling against my family by piercing my ear. In the end though, I chose to respect my family, because he made me see, with words, the whole picture. Nothing was said that day that couldn't be taken back. Nothing was done that couldn't be undone.

All my step dad (one of the greatest men I will ever know) had to say when me and my mother were really having problems because she was paranoid and I was, well, a teenager, was this:

"You've never really seen me get mad. You don't want to." I took him at his word because, you know, he was so calm and level headed all the time...just to hear him say that, you know, that he could even get mad, in a tone I'd never really heard before...you know...that was enough.

See, kids are going to be kids. There are going to be moments. But it's pretty clear to me that the man in that video doesn't have his daughter's respect...at all...and I'd wager she doesn't have his either...

And after watching that video he wouldn't have mine either. I don't know him. I don't know his daughter. And no, I don't know the whole story either. Was she using facebook to become a prostitute, or to sell drugs, or to cheat on tests, or was she venting about what every kid on the face of the planet vents about from time to time? I don't know. Certainly she deserved, based on her facebook post, some consequences I have no doubt. But we can be pretty sure it didn't start there. We can be pretty sure that facebook is a symptom of whatever the real problem is between that girl and her dad/parents. And I can only hope and pray that as my kids make me angry enough to take my pistol and bust a few caps in their laptops...that I don't actually do it. That by the time they're are old enough to understand what consequences really are...that I can levy those consequences in a civilized way...

C'mon Man...