Mom Praised By Teachers For Filming Her Son Getting ‘Old School Discipline’ At Home After He ‘Destroyed’ His Classroom
What her son really needed was emotional guidance.
Kindel Media / Pexels When kids act out, they’re usually trying to express an underlying issue that they don’t know how to navigate on their own. It’s a parent’s responsibility to help their kids recognize and name their emotions, not punish them for not yet knowing how to handle hard feelings.
A mom was praised for filming her son getting ‘old school discipline’ at home after he ‘destroyed’ his classroom.
The original TikTok video was removed, yet other creators have stitched and dueted the footage, offering their own perspectives on the mom’s harsh form of punishment, which could easily be seen as abuse.
The young boy was filmed by his mom, standing against a wall holding a pile of books, in a misguided attempt to discipline him after he apparently “decided to go to his school and destroy the classroom.”
The mom can be heard continuously telling her son to “put your arms out” and stay still as the boy cries and asks to rest.
Content creator Katelyn Belle duetted the video and offered her opinion on the mom’s discipline. “That kid is doing things because he doesn’t know how to identify his emotions," she said. "He doesn’t know how to express them. He doesn’t know how to communicate them.”
“You want to know why he doesn’t know how to do that?” Belle asked before answering her own question. “Because his parents aren’t teaching him.”
Another content creator and educator who goes by Gretchen Sprinkle online echoed Belle's sentiment.
"That video breaks my heart," she said. "He absolutely deserves logical consequences for his actions because the behavior that warranted that punishment was absolutely unacceptable. But as an educator and as a parent, one thing that I always keep at the forefront of my brain is that all behavior is a form of communication."
When kids act in a destructive way, they need emotional guidance, not physical punishment.
In her TikTok, Belle explained that kids enter the world “with no idea how to function in it.”
“They don’t understand anything that’s going on in their tiny bodies,” she said. “They don’t understand the turmoil they feel on a day-to-day basis. They don’t understand how to identify emotions, let alone communicate them.”
“It is your job as parents to teach them those things,” Belle declared. “Putting your kid up against the wall and making him squat and putting himself in pain to the point where he is screaming and hyperventilating that he’s in pain … That is not how you fix these behaviors.”
“That is how you raise a child to fear you as their parents,” she added.
Authoritative parenting might seem like a caregiving style that teaches kids how to behave, but really, it teaches them to disconnect from their inner worlds in order to protect themselves from further harm.
Belle revealed that her perspective comes from the way her parents treated her, saying, “I cannot fathom wanting my child to fear me to the point where I traumatize them, because that’s what my parents did to me.”
She noted that it didn’t matter if the mom in question put her hands on her son or not; what she did was abusive. She emphasized that kids need to learn how to be compassionate and empathic humans; they aren't born knowing that on their own.
Instead, this mom and her “old school discipline” are modeling the exact opposite of empathy and compassion, and her son will keep acting out until he feels seen, heard, and held for who he is.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture analysis, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.