Kylie Rancor
If you weren’t on Twitter over the weekend, you missed the wonderful discourse surrounding “Bean Dad,” a man the majority of users ripped apart after a lengthy anecdote regarding refusing to teach his 9-year-old daughter how to use a can opener.
The gist of it is that John Roderick, a musician and podcaster who tried really hard to get Twitter to refer to him as “Apocalypse Dad,” was so busy with a jigsaw puzzle that when his young child asked him for food, he told her to figure out how to make some beans all on her own. Upon realizing he had never showed her how to use a can opener, rather than do so, he then insisted she figure it out all on her own and would not be allowed to eat until she did.
Roderick shared this story over the course of 23 horrendously self-indulgent tweets, and clearly thought it would be an amusing anecdote about “teaching” his child to be independent. Instead, both the wording and the fact that he let a kid go hungry for six hours because she couldn’t figure out how to use a can opener had Twitter absolutely livid.
After doubling down despite the backlash, Bean Dad eventually deleted his account entirely, but you can read through his tweets for yourself here:
Once it became apparent that the general Twitter consensus was against Roderick, and plenty of explanations as to why, exactly, this was such a terrible way to parent a child had already been shared, the conversation took on a much lighter tone.
Which is to say, people mocked the crap out of Bean Dad, and rightfully so.
It’s impossible to grasp the scope of the Bean Dad discourse in one article, as it truly dominated Twitter in the most wonderful way, but we’ve rounded up some of the best tweets putting Bean Dad in his place. Read them, read the original saga, read the pushback about why his parenting style sucks, and never, ever, ever be like Bean Dad.