Woulda coulda shoulda. It doesn’t matter. They are where they are now and have to deal with the now. I didn’t see any indication that this is something dad does on a regular basis. So maybe his son will be scared straight and reluctant to do dumb shit with those peers at school. So one of the variables may change.
This is what I’m thinking. Not the MB tie-in, tho.
“OK, you’re such a badass? How about ol’ Dad gives you a bitch beatdown, and then you go pop a cap on somebody been dissin’ you?”
This has happened a few times among my friends in my youth. Results were mixed. Can’t say that it really hurt any of them.
The father may know more about his son than all of the people on here who think badly of him.
Wrong; otherwise, there would be a lot more of it. Older people would be in gangs. More housewives would be joining in.
I think this is what the father was going for. Regardless of whether he was right or wrong to do what he did, I think he was freaking out at the prospect of his son joining a gang, and this seemed like a good idea at the time. Make his kid look like a wuss so the gang(s) won’t want him. His social life might suffer for a while, but at least he won’t (be as likely to) end up dead or in prison before long.
Any modern society that has a high concentration of unemployed young men with limited prospects and limited hope will have unrest. In some places it manifests as revolution or war. Here we get gangs.
Old people and (most) women have a different set of prospects, sources for hope and outlets for anger in these conditions. That said, there are plenty of elderly people and women involved in gangs, but they usually don’t fill the high-visibility street solider roles.
You think there’s not adult gangs? They certainly exist in other, usually poorer, countries out in the open. The Mexican drug cartels, for one.
And in this country, the economic phenomenon is real. Drug cartels again, among others. Maybe they don’t look like youth gangs, but organized crime has a distinct advantage over random roving gangs of thugs among adults (bad 80s B movies, notwithstanding).
And there’s a pretty fair correlation between poverty and foot soldiers in such organizations.
As for the father, I don’t really have a good basis for judgment. Even if humiliation is the game, that could just as easily rebound on the father instead. I doubt it’ll work, in any case. A kid who responds positively to it is probably not in a hugely desperate situation either. And if the kid actually is in a desperate situation, no amount of violence short of appalling physical devastation is going to stop him.
Have any of the armchair warriors here been in this dad’s place? Unless you have, you** really **don’t have enough information about the situation to judge. I’m grateful that I’ll never be in such a position myself. I wouldn’t dream of judging him for it. The only thing I think is safe to say is that he’s probably doing the best he can.
Sometimes your best isn’t good enough to stop someone you love from ruining their life, though. Frankly, there’s not a hard line between childhood and adulthood. You don’t have to pass a test, be smart, be resilient, or be capable of taking care of yourself before becoming a parent. Plenty of people who can’t take care of themselves try (and fail at) taking care of their children.
I suppose that most people who’ve had this conversation (or similar) with their child has likely failed them critically many times, in many ways. But then, this dad’s father may have failed *him *even worse. So maybe this really is the best he can be *expected *to do. Each generation fails their children slightly less than the one before it, and eventually we as a species improve.
Just… damn, people. Try not to be so judgmental for a minute or something. Walk a mile, one man’s poison, and all that jazz.
If this wasn’t taped and up on YouTube, I’d have nothing to judge. If you put your interesting parenthood choice out for the world to see, people are going to have opinions.
What is he saying later in the video when he’s says “over here, we banging XXX and XXX, XXX and XXX”. I can’t figure it out for the life of me.
That makes no sense. How does the video get online if the guy who owns it doesn’t put it there? Sure, after it’s online, other people can do what they want. But, before that, no one but those who have physical access to the video device can do anything with it.
Also, for what reason does a “wake-up call” need to be recorded? He’s recording the punishment for it to be seen by someone. He said as much in the video, deliberately talking to his intended audience. How is he supposed to let the gang see it he doesn’t put it online?
As for my opinion of the video: The first slap I can accept. He was trying to get him to put up his hands and fight. I could see that sort of thing happening with someone intending to box. The second one, I cannot accept. He was just slapping him at that point. It was corporal punishment, and that is inappropriate for a child of his son’s age.
I also notice that the kid was remarkably well-behaved, which makes this seem much worse. He just stood there waiting for them to set up the camera. And he didn’t respond to his father at all until he slapped him.
I will say it was not nearly as bad as this thread, including the OP, led to me believe. Excluding the second slap, which was in anger, this seems remarkably like the idea of forcing a kid to smoke cigarettes in order to teach them to not smoke.
I will say this, though. If the father really can stand up to the gang with just boxing, it’s not really that much of a gang. Surely, if they did take him up on it, it would be with guns. That’s the one part that makes me think the father did do it to brag to other parents. The father should be pretty scared right now if this is a real gang.
That’s why this shit wouldn’t work in general.
Hello? Hacking. Have you been alive the last couple of years? Dozens of female celebrities have had their phones hacked and their boobie pics released to the cloud.
Jesus, from the talk here I thought the video/scene would be horrendous.
To me it seems like he’s a father furious, and a naive boy.
Didn’t the wheelchair drug lord in Breaking Bad, when he was a a father of two young boys, pretend-in-earnest to drown one son until the other physically attacked him (his father), at which point the father was satisfied that he was gangster-worthy?
Compare and contrast. The father in this vid knew that wasn’t going to happen, and was satisfied. Plus a challenge light slap or two is not the most fierce provocation for the would-be candidate, as gangster or satisfactorily-instructed son, and is again benign.
The thing of having your father challenge you to prove your manhood/gangsta hood by challenging him to beat/best you is the stuff of psychiatry seminars. But there are worse fates indeed (and anything, including each poster’s upbringing, could supply the same stuff. Have you ever been scared shitless while being dressed down by your father or mother? Spanked as a baby, or had your hands pulled away? Or anything? So you don’t spank your kids, or wouldn’t. Fine. It doesn’t seem like it happens often to that young boy. Or ever., but I don’t know. And stayed silent, helpless, and maybe felt tears of helplessness and misery well up like this boy? If you say no, then you are not remembering well.
Even if you never were a black man with a decent home but used rough language when furious. With a seemingly remarkably gentle son stepping outside of his league.
This was my first thought.
IMO, the answer would be no. He would be seen as weak. They’re gonna kick his ass.
The dad could have quite literally saved his kid’s life with what he did and by posting the video.
Most studies have shown that kids join gangs to belong somewhere. They feel isolated, alone, unloved at home or in their regular social/family circle, and the gang becomes a substitute for the family they wished they had. The gangs give them a place to belong and in a weird way love that they feel they are missing at home. Reality is that the gang is just using them.
I served for several years on our State’s gang task force. Have fostered gang members in my home, because they had no family.
I understand the father’s motivation in the video, but I do not agree with his methods.
Or he might have quite literally killed him by driving him into the warm embrace of the nearest gang.
I don’t think either scenario is particularly likely, and it’s kind of silly to speculate.
Plenty? how many? Let’s see some cites. Also, being a mom to a memba doesn’t count as being in a gang…
And, why do you say ‘modern society’? Haven’t older societies had gangs? I think that ‘having limited prospects and limited hope’ is a matter of interpretation of one’s character, in *this *society.