My Daughter Used to Be a Normal Teen, but then She Took a Bullet in the Laptop.
Comments (1) (This is a guest post from the Man-Child Messiah Blog, I enjoyed it along with his other posts, so I offered him to cross post here. If you enjoy it, go read his blog and follow him on twitter.)
Bad parenting is a thing that gets a lot of press these days, which is really kind of baffling considering the man-bites-dog nature of journalism. Bad parenting is about as dog-bites-man as you can get, but I digress, for some reason we’re all fascinated with horrible parents. I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Tiger Mom having 19 kids and counting or something to that effect. I really don’t know because I don’t care about that garbage.
This video has been making its rounds on the Internet as of late, leaving a lot of this horrible parenting nonsense in its wake. If you watched it, you’ll see that it’s just some guy sitting in a lawn chair in an open field complaining to the Internet about what a bratty child he has raised because she posted mean, disrespectful things about him on Facebook. This goes on for a few minutes and just when you’re probably wondering how the heck this boring crap has netted 22,000,000+ views he pulls out his gun and unloads it into his kid’s laptop.
So this guy has become an icon to terrible parents across the country who are convinced that their problems are all the fault of their children as opposed to the result of rigid adherence to terrible methods of parenting. I’m not so much saying anything about the father in the video, I don’t know anything about him personally. I’m talking about the people who have flocked to this video as a big epic battle cry against those damn entitled kids of theirs. Millions of terrible parents across the country rejoiced as they lived vicariously through this man and wish they too had the balls to destroy the technogizmos they blame for all their familial problems instead of just owning up to the fact that they don’t know how to engage their kids anymore and have given up trying until it’s suddenly the 1950s again. It’s neo-Luddite garbage being used to try and validate their failed parenting.
If you don’t believe me just go read the comments on the video. See how many people are encouraging the dad to go after her cell phone next. See how many are complaining that kids today have too much because all they had in their day was whirly gigs and Pick-Up Sticks. The times aren’t going to adapt to your parenting people, so you may as well adapt your parenting to times. Change isn’t always about compromising the values you feel are important, sometimes it’s about presenting those values in a way that’s functional and accessible in the modern world. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find that Facebook and iPhones are gone, so stop living like it might happen.
Okay, so let me level with you; I was raised by tough, stern parents. They were never afraid of technology and they never blamed it when their parenting came up short, which was rare if ever. My parents have embraced technology even if they have never fully understood it to the extent that my siblings or I have. They never used it as a baby sitter; technology was a reward. As long as my grades were good, they didn’t care if I spent 12 hours a day on the weekend playing my Game Cube back in 7th grade because I had busted my ass feeding livestock to buy the damn thing and was still working to buy the games to play on it.
If your kids are entitled brats who don’t want to work for what they want and spend all day on their iPhone being belligerent, I don’t feel sorry for you, I wonder how they got the damn iPhone.
Author’s Note: I was originally going to focus on the dad and how much of an asshole he is and I was going to say “fuck” a lot and call him “Dickhead Dad”, but the comments and reaction to the video were far more compelling for me to write about. I don’t know if it necessarily jibes with the overall direction of the site nearly as much as the original idea for the article does, but I don’t think I could have written that article in good faith after seeing the stupid bullshit the video spawned. Don’t worry though, next time I’ll be writing about some idiot talking about movies. I’ll even try to get that out extra fast to boot.
