A photo was posted to a Facebook page for an Ohio teen that has a red ‘X’ over the girl’s mouth and the following sentence: “I do not know how to keep my [mouth shut]. I am no longer allowed on Facebook or my phone. Please ask why.”
The mother of the girl, Denise Abbott, said that her daughter Ava, who is 13, was not showing respect so she decided to use Facebook as a way to punish her daughter and make a point.
“I decided to do something that I know would totally impact her, and that the next time she started that, she’d think ‘I don’t want my face all over Facebook again with a red ‘X’ over my mouth,”’ Abbott said.
Abbott said she does not regret the punishment she handed down to her daughter because she knows that her daughter can handle it.
“You have to adapt your parenting skills with the times,” she said. “It’s a lot more difficult to find an appropriate punishment and actually stick with it, than to act like a child and try to ‘get back’ at them for being mean to you.”
Parents seem to be getting more inventive when it comes to putting together their children’s punishments these days. This incident involving Abbott brings to mind the North Carolina father who decided to shoot his daughter’s laptop with a gun, record it, and then post the video to Facebook. This all happened after his daughter, 15, wrote disrespectful messages about her parents on the internet. The father, Tommy Jordan, received national criticism for what he did but to this day he continues to stand by his actions. Jordan’s daughter, Hannah Marie, said that she understands why her father did what he did even though she felt he overreacted.
“I feel like I deserved it because I was mean to my mom and spoke disrespectful to her in front of my friends,” said Abbott’s daughter.
