Patricia Grisafi
Parenting is hard, and I say this as a parent. Kids do naughty stuff and are sassy and not always on their best behavior. There’s got to be consistency and proper consequences for bad behavior. But there should never be violence, which some parents are definitely weird about. Have you ever seen message boards with folks defending hitting their kids because “they were hit and turned out fine”? Hitting is NEVER acceptable, and you know what? I’m sorry you got hit, that wasn’t fair. Please don’t turn around and do it to your kids.
One mom on TikTok may not be hitting her child, but she’s certainly behaving in a way that many see as abusive. In a video, Katarina Rodriguez shared an “unconventional” method of “punishing” her 5-year-old son. Some viewers are calling her actions traumatic.
“My 5-year-old doesn’t want to listen in school,” Rodriguez said in the video. “Where he makes destructive noises, doesn’t listen, thinks that he doesn’t need to settle down when he comes from the playground.”
“We’re gonna run. We’re gonna run in 104 degrees,” she added.
Then Rodriguez and her son ran, with her turning the camera on him. Was she trying to shame the kid? It’s just incredibly unsettling and weird.
“This is the first time that we’re gonna run for his sad faces that he gets at school, and he thought we were just going to run to the mailbox, so he took off running. Sprinting. Now he’s dying,” she said, before asking him if he would behave in school now.
“Yeah,” he replied, still running and panting.
Later, Rodriguez tells viewers that “We’re not gonna hit. We’re not gonna spank. We’re gonna discipline. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
Later, after people criticized Rodriguez’s parenting choice, she tried to defend the strange disciplinary tactic that she made public.
“Not that it’s anyone’s business, we’ve tried other disciplinary actions of grounding, taking away things, corners, whatever, and if those things work for your kids, great. Didn’t work for mine,” she said.
Did you try talking to him?
Rodriguez said that she understood sitting in a desk was going to be difficult, but that her son needed to be respectful to his teacher and peers by behaving appropriately. Then, she said that forcing her child to run in extremely hot weather was “working.”
“If I can scare him with the fact that we’re going to run if you do not have a good day and be respectful and nice and kind, so be it,” she said. “It beats my hand stinging from whooping his ass.”
And that, folks, is what being a parent is all about. Scaring your child in various ways so you don’t have to exert yourself by beating them.
Rodriguez then said again that the parenting “techniques” she records for the public are not the public’s business. She also insisted she is “raising a man.” Sure, a man who will most likely need therapy in the future.
As of now, Rodriguez has put her TikTok account on private.
Featured Image: TikTok