Crime & Punishment

This week, an Alaska mom was convicted of misdemeanor child abuse for punishing her adopted son by forcing him to take cold showers and putting hot sauce in his mouth. The case has received much publicity, in large part due to the fact that it appears the mother videotaped her poor parenting choices in an effort to become a guest on the "Dr. Phil Show".

The fact that a video exists of this whole episode is the only reason it came to light and was brought into a courtroom. Most controversial discipline tactics may receive hushed condemnation or stunned reactions, but unless the behavior of a mother or father is clearly criminal, it is usually a private, family matter.

This got me thinking.....are we stumbling into a world where even bad parenting is regulated by law? Or, is this a case of poor parenting stepping over the line and entering the criminal realm? There are loads and loads of bad parents out there -- one was just acquitted in Florida of murdering her toddler -- but if we jail parents for controversial behavior, we'll have to build an awful lot more prisons.  I'm not a lawyer (nor do I play one tv), so I can't really speculate on the legalities involved in this particular case. I've seen the videotape that aired on "Dr. Phil" and I think, at the very least, this is a mother who was clearly at her wits end. But ironically, what comes across even more is that her behavior is much worse than that of her child. How could she not have noticed this before submitting the tape to a nationally syndicated talk show?

This is an five-year-old we're talking about here.  While this mother did have several of her own biological children (in fact, she made her own 10-year-old daughter film the incident in question), this boy was adopted from Russia and presumably has had a tough time acclimating, as many adopted children often do. I'm sure most of us can relate to the frustrations and annoyances of life with a preschooler, but unduly harsh tactics just don't work in the long-run and often just scare kids into submission. This woman needed much more help than a tv therapist like Dr. Phil could provide and I do often wonder how these producers can, in good conscience, put people like this on their shows. In a way, our reality-loving tv culture of voyeurism and exploitation also bears some of the blame for fostering an environment where this sort of behavior is tolerated and even encouraged as a way to get a ratings boost. (For the record, even when it aired, Dr. Phil referred to the clip as "over the top.").

If the sole reason for this videotape was to make this mom "famous," she's gotten her wish -- though I seriously doubt it's the sort of attention she originally intended. This case has been commented on to death already and I just viewed a segment on Sean Hannity's show on Fox where guest Bill Cunningham actually condones the beating of kids as long as it's done "appropriately and with love." First of all, what does that even mean? When is it ever appropriate to "beat" a child? And second, who gets to pick and choose when violence is warranted? Is there a rule book out there that I don't know about? Do we as adults really need to physically lash out at kids in order to punish them, or do we do this as a way of getting out our own aggression. And if the latter is true, who really needs a "time out?"

This woman may now spend a year in jail for a bad decision she chose to publicize. I don't subscribe to punishments like spanking and washing mouths out with soap, but I know some people who were raised with that and I can certainly understand that some parents see that as a deterrent. And for the record, while I do frown on these methods, I do realize that they often do not rise to the level of actual child abuse. But when we chose punishments that serve merely to humiliate and hurt kids, what are we teaching them?

In the end, the court has chosen to punish the party who really deserved it. Let's hope the message this sends is one that discourages the actual parental misbehavior and not just the recording of it.