With the dawn of the Internet has come many new fads that quite a few people will probably regret documenting in just a couple of years from now. Some people, however, have no say in the Internet legacy they leave behind. Some people are recorded without their knowledge, or while under heavy influences and end up becoming social media sensations in the blink of an eye, without their consent or understanding.
One such group of un-suspecting media sensations are children, who due to a new, harmful phenomenon in parenting techniques, end up remembered eternally for some of their most embarrassing moments.
Think back to the worst thing you have ever done, whether you were caught or not. Think about the consequences that either befell upon you, or would have been brought to the table, had your parents discovered your wrongdoings. Depending on the generation you grew up in is the picture you will draw of that stomach churning moment of your parents revealing all that they know. You may picture being beat with a belt, or screamed at for hours, or simply sent to your room with your favorite possessions being confiscated and hidden in some sort of drawer. If you are child belonging to a parent in the current generation, however, you may have an extremely different fear of consequence.
Parents are known for embarrassing their children, to the point where it has become a staple in mainstream comedy and media, making frequent appearances in classic sitcoms and movies. The fact that parents can be embarrassing by bringing out the baby pictures or dancing oddly while chaperoning your school prom is something that is accepted. For the most part, the embarrassment is accidental, and the parent in question is oblivious to the behavior that turns their offspring a deep shade of scarlet in the cheeks in the presence of their peers.
Embarrassment with many parents today, however, has been carefully crafted into a weapon to use in the teaching and punishing of their children.
Many articles have cropped up on social media and major news networks telling the stories of parents who felt it was appropriate to publicly humiliate their children as a consequence for their actions. The examples are endless. There was a Denver mother who caught her daughter posing in lingerie on Facebook and claiming to be nineteen, and released a video with her daughter crying in the background, forcing her to explain that she is not a nineteen-year-old “freak” interested in older men. In a similar case, a father of a 10-year-old who was posing online as fifteen with a boyfriend put bows and barrettes in her hair, put her in a shirt that proclaimed boldly “I am 10 years old”, and made her wear a Sofia the First backpack, and posted pictures online. In a more devastating example of the problem, a 13-year-old killed herself after her father recorded himself cutting off her long, gorgeous hair, as he informed her that these were the consequences of her actions, and asked her how many times she had been warned about her choices.
These public shaming videos are becoming more and more popular, and they tend to receive mixed reviews. Many parents love the idea of teaching children lessons this way that are permanently recorded, so that the child can never argue that they have forgotten. Many feel that parents who shame their daughters who hide secret, sexier identities on the Internet are even larger champions, as they argue this protects the young girls from sexual predators online.
The permanence of these videos, however, is what upsets the people who hate them. Throughout time, many different parenting techniques have run their course, and often what was considered fine one decade has been ousted by the next. Physical violence in the forms of caning, spanking, or other methods, used to be expected of parents, but these have now been outlawed in the states as forms of physical abuse.
It has been succinctly argued by many that these shaming videos are a form of mental and emotional abuse. Making mistakes is part of growing up. Yes, children posing as sexier, older versions of themselves for the world to see wasn’t quite a problem of the past the way it is now, but the Internet has affected the rising generation in a way their parents wouldn’t believe or understand. Shouldn’t parents be investigating not only how their children hid these actions from them, but also what drove them to them? Shouldn’t the pressure be on investigating the intense sexualization of children in this generation, rather than on shaming the children who succumb to influences outside of their direct control?
All people growing up are going to make mistakes. A token line of many parents is “Don’t bother lying to me, I know all of the excuses in the book, because I wrote them.” When parents of this generation made a mistake, their punishments were confined to the home, present in the knowledge only of themselves and any caregivers involved. How can any parent think it is okay to engage the community in the public shaming of their child who has simply made a mistake the way everyone else has a million times before? It may take a village to raise a child, but choosing the World Wide Web as your village is probably not the wisest choice.
Children should absolutely be appropriately punished by their parents or guardians for their mistakes. However, sharing that punishment with the world is humiliating to the point that there can be permanent damage to the child. Not only will that child, especially if he or she is at an age where their peers have easy Internet access, be tormented relentlessly by their peers, they will lose all trust in the parents who are meant to protect them, not use their mistakes as a way to gain Internet fame as cruel parents posing as progressive ones.
Parents’ voice on social media when it comes to their kids should be confined to talking about their accomplishments, sharing memories about them, and posting cute pictures. Once that line has been crossed into a realm where parents are free to use social media liberty to endlessly torment their children as some sort of catharsis exercise or a dabble in the God complex, there is an immediate issue.
Children need to trust their parents, and when each time you are called by your full name into the living room you are afraid that meeting will end up on the Internet forever, that trust may never exist fully again.
