When it comes to parenting, there’s generally an agreement that decisions are to be made together. They may not all be huge decisions, and some might even seem like the solutions are so obvious, they don’t require any sort of discussion.
But just to avoid any sort of future argument, it’d be best to make the decisions together, no matter what. And that definitely goes for deciding on your child’s punishments.
Co-parenting becomes a bit more difficult when the couple are no longer together.
For instance, how can you issue a grounding when your child spends half their time at their mom’s house where she doesn’t believe they deserve the grounding?
One dad decided the easiest way to get around this was to just not tell his daughter’s mom about his decision on how to punish her.
According to Cafe Mom , the unnamed dad found himself in the position of issuing a punishment to his 16-year-old daughter, but he knew his ex-wife wouldn’t approve of what he wanted to do to teach her a lesson.
In a since-deleted Reddit post, the dad explained he had learned his daughter made fun of a bald girl at her school.
This girl she made fun of had lost her hair due to chemotherapy treatments. Apparently, his daughter not only made fun of this other girl but also pulled her wig off her head.
The dad said this was not how he raised his daughter, and he felt “truly disgusted” to hear about her actions.
When she showed no remorse for what she did, he gave her two options for her punishment.
She could either have her dad throw away all her electronics without any chance of them being replaced, or she could go to the hairdresser and get her head shaved.
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It should be noted the first option was the dad’s way of coercing his daughter into picking option number two, somehow the lesser of two evils.
Of course, the daughter picked to have her head shaved.
Oh, and she wasn’t allowed to wear a wig to school, forced to sport a bald head around her classmates as a little extra punishment.
When the mom found out about this, she definitely wasn’t happy.
“Her mother went ballistic at me, saying it will make her the target of bullying,” the dad wrote in his post.
But, he added, this was essentially the point of the punishment — “teach her some compassion.”
He asked Reddit if he went too far with his punishment, and most people seemed to answer “yes.”
“Your daughter sucks for bullying that girl obviously,” one user wrote. “But you went too far with this punishment.”
Another accused him of “child abuse” while someone else claimed his daughter is a bully because he is a bully.
“I seriously doubt this is the first time you used abuse and humiliation to ‘teach her a lesson’,” they wrote.
But there were also some who applauded the dad for his punishment.
“This is an appropriate punishment for that behavior that will hopefully result in one child being compassionate and thinking empathetically before they start bullying people,” one user wrote.
The dad told Cafe Mom he stands by his decision, and that his daughter is upset with him, but still hasn’t shown any remorse for what she did.
“If she shows genuine remorse I’d get her a temporary wig of some kind,” he said, “but as I say she hasn’t done that yet.”
