Wednesday, May 22, 2013

A Lesson in Self-Control

Some people's parenting.... Some woman punished her daughter by sending her to school wearing ugly clothes. Read about it here. The jist of the story is that the daughter had been making fun of another girl's outfits at school. She told her that her shorts and tank top made her look sleazy and was teasing her about it for almost a month. The school deemed this behavior to be bullying and told the parents about it.

The step-mom didn't think grounding her judgmental daughter was enough since the daughter stood by her convictions that the classmate was dressed in poor taste and deserved to know about it. The step-mom decided to bring her to the thrift store and bought a few of the outfits that her daughter deemed ugly.

Then she made the daughter wear these outfits to school. Then she took pictures of her daughter wearing these outfits and posted them on Facebook.

The girl was so embarrassed and was obviously teased like crazy by her classmates. She felt so bad, she apologized to the girl she was bullying and thanked her mom for teaching her such a valuable lesson.

Barf.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is a much better punishment than making your kid hold a grammatically incorrect sign on the side of the road for a few hours, but it's still a terrible punishment and I don't think it really fits the crime.

When you get down to it, the daughter's crime was her lack of self-control. She opened her big, fat mouth and made hurtful comments to another person's face. If she had self-control, she would have kept her hurtful comments to herself, or maybe shared them with a friend when they had a moment of privacy so they could giggle and gossip out of earshot.

She is entitled to think that the girl's wardrobe is sleazy. She is not entitled to tell her that. That is the lesson she needs to learn.

Dressing her up in hideous clothing and sending her out into the world isn't a punishment and doesn't teach her self-control. Maybe she'll stop bullying that girl forever, maybe she'll finally realize what it feels like to be on the receiving end of teasing, but she wasn't being teased for being herself. She was being teased for wearing a costume to school which is totally out of the ordinary and a one-time deal. It's not an organic life-lesson.

What would I do if it was Tesla? I would probably give her a normal punishment like taking some privileges away and we would definitely talk about what it means to be tactful. I wouldn't force her to apologize, but I would request she do it. I would never publicly shame her by sending her to school in a ridiculous get-up and taking pictures to post online and blackmail her with later. People are sick.

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