Mom Makes Daughter Wear A Humiliating Shirt For Weeks After She Tried Claiming 'It's My Body'
Humiliation as a form of punishment is NEVER the answer, nor is it the way to get your child to respect you.
A user on Reddit made a post to the subreddit “r/ParentsAreF--kingDumb,” highlighting a Facebook post that they saw from one of their own friends on the platform.
The mom posted about an argument that she had with her daughter, likely regarding the clothes that she was wearing, and decided to share the punishment that she had given to her.
The mom made her daughter wear the same humiliating shirt for weeks.
The Facebook post reads, “If you see my kid wearing the same shirt and pants for the next week or two, just know she had a closet full of clothes until she decided to say “it’s my body she can’t tell me what I can and can’t wear.”
“Bye bye clothes, hello respect,” reads the end of the post. This confession to authoritative parenting was followed by a photo of the t-shirt mentioned, that read “This is my only shirt…Thanks to my smart mouth. #momshousemomsrules.”
Photo: Reddit
Yes, because humiliation has always been a proven method for commanding respect from your children — this is sarcasm. According to an associate professor of social work at the University of Michigan who spoke to Live Science, Andy Grogan-Kaylor, humiliating punishments have always been shown to do more harm than good.
“The research is pretty clear that it's never appropriate to shame a child, or to make a child feel degraded or diminished,” he said, emphasizing that these kinds of punishments can cause children to develop anxiety, depression, and aggression in their futures.
Humiliating your child is never the answer to any parenting problem but this seems like more of an attempt to reclaim control over her child than any attempt to regain her respect.
Parents are constantly fighting with their kids over the clothes that they wear, and if they aren’t fighting their own kids? They’re fighting teachers and schools who try to dictate what their kids should be wearing.
People claimed that the man should call CPS on his Facebook friend for the post.
Naturally, everyone wanted to see the parent get in trouble for the awful way that they were treating their child, but the man who made the post didn’t seem to think it was worth it.
After one person shared their own experience with abuse and made a claim that this likely isn’t the only thing that child has to deal with, he shut them down, saying “I think you are projecting your own situation into this a little too much,” adding that “I think coming to Reddit hearing one tiny Facebook post out of context and advocating for CPS and the swat team to swoop in is a bit premature.”
Earlier in that same thread, the man claimed that he didn’t see this incident are “real neglect,” and said that if this were some case of risking child safety, he would consider it, but “CPS is gonna look at this [and] see no issue.”
Other people made the argument that forcing the child to wear only one pair of clothes for weeks was “real neglect,” but he didn’t seem to agree. According to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, this doesn’t seem to fall under child abuse or neglect.
Photo: Reddit
A case could be made that this is emotionally abusive, but according to them, it’s “often difficult to prove” and needs a tangible sign of mental damage.
“I think this falls under stupid parent decisions that will bite them in the a-- juice,” the poster wrote in the comments. Hopefully, he’s right and this parent’s decisions don’t come back to haunt her worse than that.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.