You’re right. I remember all the times my mum got so mad she couldn’t speak either…
guess the dog ate this one
Yeah, and then, you KNEW you were in big trouble…
Sometimes my mom got so mad, she would start yelling out the names of my brothers till she got to the right one.
I don’t know, my mother isn’t any prize, let me tell you.
DAMMIT! I had this beautiful post…Arrgh! I even previewed, and everything! Hamsters be damned!
Ok. Basically, this is what the post said:
Last week, a set of 9 year old twins reported that a bald white guy with a dragon tattoo tried to kidnap them. They said he got out of his truck, and that he had a knife when he tried to grab them.
Then, across town, another little girl reported something similar this weekend. So, people started freaking out. Cops spent hours combing neighborhoods and answering calls about potential sightings. A kidnapper on the loose? Very scary.
All three girls were lying.
They all finally admitted yesterday that they made the stories up. When they showed the kids on the news yesterday, they were laughing and playing in their respective yards. I’m sorry, but if those were my kids, they sure wouldn’t be playing in the yard. In fact, they’d be lucky to get sunlight in their bedrooms, where they would be spending the entire summer. No tv, no phone, no toys, no nothing. Just a bed and clothes. And a lot of time to think about what they did.
Did their parents not teach them that if you lie, you get in trouble? And apparently they never taught them anything about respect for the law. The county has said that there will be no charges against the kids, but that they need counselling. COUNSELLING? I’ve grown up with kids that weren’t punished for breaking the rules. They got ‘counselling’. And let me tell you, most of those kids grew up to be ASSHOLES. These kids were 9 years old. That’s old enough to know the difference between right and wrong, dammit. These kids are going to be thinking, ‘oh, I made up some BS story, and people bought it, and I got on tv, and didn’t even get in trouble!’
What if someone tries to kidnap these kids now? Do you think their parents are going to believe them? I would think they would be extremely embarassed right now. (And rightfully so.) And I don’t think it’s just the parents’ fault, but they’ve got to share some of the blame.
I’m not a parent, and I certainly don’t advocate child abuse. But if those were my kids, they wouldn’t forget about what they did. I would really think about beating their asses black and blue, but they’d end up sitting in their room all summer.
But I really do think those kids need a good spanking.
Skerri, I hear you. There is NO WAY IN HELL I’d ever have gotten away with something like that as a kid.
I wonder if one of the kids didn’t freak out from guilt, and the parents offered a plea bargain to all of them to 'fess up?
When I was in junior high, a cousin of my best friend showed up late from school with a story about being grabbed on the way home and raped. Threw the town into a total uproar- this was not the kind of thing that happened there. Kids who normally walked to and from school with their friends suddenly found themselves walking with their parents (nothing more mortifying than THAT in junior high…), the area where the girl was grabbed (formerly an after-school hangout) was proclaimed off-limits, and- even worse- several people were brought in for “questioning” based off the physical description.
Since this girl was the cousin of my best friend, I got all the details of what was going on in the investigation… apparently the police were pretty close to making an arrest, and it brought forth a bit of conscience in the girl. She admitted it was all a lie.
The police issued a formal apology to the men whose lives they’d totally fucked up, the family issued an apology to the police, and the town slooooooooowly went back to normal.
I do agree that the children in Skerri’s story need some consequence other than a few counselling sessions. I doubt this will be true in this case, but I can say with absolute certainty that the hell all the kids put the cousin through for the rest of her school years was worse than any punishment her parents could have come up with. Perhaps the neighborhood children will exact their own type of justice- alienation can be an awful thing at that age.
-BK
IMHO, the deal should’ve been worse. As is “If you fess up, you’ll only have to spend the summer in your room with no light, TV, phone, etc. Don’t fess up, and it’ll be alot worse than that.”
I’ve always taught them that lying was the one thing I absolutely can not stand. I recommend these kids be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Fuck that “not pressing charges” bullshit, let 'em learn what it’s like to fuck up big time. They’ll be better people for it.
And of course, that second paragraph should start “I’ve always taught my children that lying was the one thing I absolutely can not stand.”, who are no relation to the kids in question.
Damn last-minute edits.
Remember the panic that ensued when Susan Smith sent the police chasing off after some mysterious black carjacker? There are no consequences for lying anymore…wasn’t there a school teacher that resigned because she failed her students for plagarizing a report and the school board refused to back her up?
You don’t know how much I wish a judge would order these brats to wear signs that say “I’m a BIG OL’ LIAR!” all summer. Or better yet, for a year, so all their classmates will point and laugh.
But then, of course, the kids will eventually turn around and sue the county for emotional scarring or some other bullshit. And my tax dollars will be hard at work paying off some kid that lied.
This whole situation just makes me livid. Police officers had to chase around some phantom kidnapper because some little kids were bored. A lot of manpower, effort and money were wasted. I don’t understand why people think that lying is ok, we’ll just slap you on the wrist and say ‘bad kid’. Send these kids to juvenile hall, make them donate all their creature comforts to disadvantaged kids, or SOMETHING. I mean, don’t we make rules and consequences for a reason?
You don’t know how much I wish a judge would order these brats to wear signs that say “I’m a BIG OL’ LIAR!” all summer. Or better yet, for a year, so all their classmates will point and laugh.
But then, of course, the kids will eventually turn around and sue the county for emotional scarring or some other bullshit. And my tax dollars will be hard at work paying off some kid that lied.
This whole situation just makes me livid. Police officers had to chase around some phantom kidnapper because some little kids were bored. A lot of manpower, effort and money were wasted. I don’t understand why people think that lying is ok, we’ll just slap you on the wrist and say ‘bad kid’. Send these kids to juvenile hall, make them donate all their creature comforts to disadvantaged kids, or SOMETHING. I mean, don’t we make rules and consequences for a reason?
Man oh man would I have been in DEEP kimchi if I’d ever pulled anything like that. Seriously, if any child of mine tried to get away with that kind of hideous lie, I can’t even imagine how I’d punish them, but it would not be a fun summer, I can tell you that.
Besides, my mother has a Dragon tattoo.
I would not be surprised if somewhere in that general area, there is a bald white guy with a dragon tattoo. I can only imagine the public hysteria - and the inevitable and permanent damage to his reputation (regardless of actual innocence) - that would have occurred had a man fitting the description been spotted.
When I was about ten, I stole five dollars out of my stepfather’s wallet. When caught, I was grounded for a month (in the summertime), and it was pure hell. But I didn’t really get grounded for the money - I got grounded because I LIED about it. That was five bucks. This is potentially a man’s life. And the parents think “no harm, no foul” and let their little sweetums go right back to playing?
Am I the only one reminded of the Salem witch trials by this story? Weren’t they started by a group of teenage girls as a prank?
Oh man. My kids would be in SO much trouble. They’d be looking at public apologies, written letters of apology to everyone involved (including letters to the editor in the paper), hard labor around the house, and volunteer work mowing yards, trimming rosebushes, and picking up dog poop in the yard of the nearest dragon-tattooed man.
At the LEAST.
~karol
That’s it!! We’ll make them study The Crucible. Punish them with overwrought allegory. ::shudder::
Hmm, now that I think about it, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea.
The girls (or perhaps the parents) should be forced to pay back the police for the money that they spent on the wild goose chase.
Yeah, there was a report about it on 60 Minutes or one of the other “news magazine” shows. The teacher had given a class of around 30+ kids an assignment to find and identify various types/species of leaves. The kids are juniors in high school, I think. While she was grading the papers, she noticed that some of the writing seemd “too advanced” and so she searched on the Internet and sure enough, nearly half the kids had directly plagarized. She failed them for the assignment which meant that a good peortion of the kids would have failed the class.
Then the asshole parents get into it. You know, the ones who think that little “Todd and Britney” are the most gifted children to ever walk the earth.
Uh-huh.
If the kids are so gifted, then why did they plagerize?
Anyway, on the show they interviewed some of the 'rents and their basic bleats and screeches ran along this line: The teacher had never told the students what exactly plagerism entailed, so it was unfair of her to fail them.:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
They are in 11th FUCKING GRADE!!! I knew what plagerism was when I was in 9th grade.
Forcing the parents to pay hurts them more than the children, which is not, IMHO, the ideal situation here. You’re still punishing some one else for their actions. Instead, have the girls perform community service activities for the rest of the summer. That way the girls bear the brunt of the punishment while the parents bear a smaller portion of it by being responsible for dropping them off and picking them up.
Regardless, I seem to recall being taught in elementary school that copying some one else’s work was the quick way to a failing grade. So, regardless of what the teacher called it after the fact, the students in question knew it was wrong at the time.
I fucking hate “my-kid-can-do-no-wrong” parents. They give the rest of us a bad name.