My 16 year-old daughter flipped the bird

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I think if the parent was sincerely concerned about a kid’s development of conscience or just wanted the kid to talk to a priest asap and didn’t know how else to go about it, it wouldn’t rise to the level of “abuse of a sacrament”.
Upset parents are often not thinking things through to that level. They just blow their stack and want a magic bullet to fix their kid’s misbehavior right now.

It’s not good parenting IMHO, though.
 
CCHcolonel said:
Because 16 year old boys don’t listen and a good dose of fear is needed to keep them in line until they actually can use their brains.
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If the 16 year old boy prefaced his contempt of a female teacher with the insult ‘sweetheart’ would you call that the act of a brainless twit needing a whipping?
 
“Bullying” is a term that does not have much meaning anymore, it is extremely subjective. Some people may find a teacher who is stern to be a bully, others may see the same words as impactful.
 
CCHcolonel said:
Whipping is a colloquial term for anything from a swat to the side of the head to spanking etc. it doesn’t necessarily mean taking a whip to someone.
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I have to say that I have never heard the term used in that way. To my mind “whipping” means whipping or flogging in the manner familiar to us from slavery, prisons, the Royal Navy, etc.

Even accepting your definition of whipping, however, would you wish to swat a soldier on the side of his head or give him a spanking? Again, if you would not feel comfortable administering this form of punishment to US armed forces personnel, why do you advocate using it in a domestic setting? Or perhaps you would like to be able to administer spankings to soldiers (let us say up to the age of 21)?
 
Physical punishment for a grown child does nothing good. It is just an evil opportunity for the parents to take their anger out on someone.

Go limit their Internet usage or something.
 
JohnStrachan said:
to her grade 10 religion teacher. What would be an appropriate consequence?
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You’ve received enough ideas on consequences. Even though they’re contradictory, you at least have some options from which to choose.

My only concern is that a one-time consequence isn’t always a good preventative.

Is she normally oppositional with authority figures, or was this an exceptional event?

Also, do you know the full context? Years and years ago, my sister got turned in and reprimanded for flipping off the school bus driver before she and her friend walked out the emergency exit. It sounds terribly juvenile and rebellious, until you learn that she and her friend were the last two on the bus, and he’d asked them to take their tops off for him! 😳

Maybe your daughter’s teacher didn’t do anything that outrageous. But when adults do something unreasonable, unethical, or at worst illegal, the teen-style defense mechanisms aren’t always rational.
 
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Grandparents know. They might crack up at her attempt at explanation. That would be counterproductive.
Grandparents also tend to be less upset by what their grandchildren do than if their child had done it.
 
CCHcolonel said:
US armed forces personnel are adults who joined the military of their own accord, not through a draft or other forced service so corporal punishment is not necessary.
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I still don’t really understand you. Are you saying that historically it would have been right to impose corporal punishment on men who joined the armed forces through conscription? That seems to be what you are arguing. You will know better than I do that the last conscripted men in the US military began service in 1973 and the last conscripted man to remain in the US military retired in 2014.

Of course, you will be familiar with the historical use of flogging in the Royal Navy. It was argued that draconian measures were required because, as you say, sailors were typically pressed men, not volunteers. In fact, the use of flogging in the British armed forces was widely believed to be counterproductive, as it tended to spoil a good soldier and make a bad man worse (another version has it that it made a bad man worse and broke a good man’s heart). This sentiment was held more than 200 years ago.

You seem to think that a child a somewhat akin to a conscripted serviceman, and I suppose there is some truth in this: a child did not ask to be born and did not volunteer to subject himself to the norms of the society in which he is forced to live. Your solution to this problem is that the child must be subjected to corporal punishment. The fact is that the scientific literature on this subject has found time and again that corporal punishment is ineffective and harmful.

If you speak to almost anybody who attended a British public school up until the end of the last century they will report that corporal punishment was frequent and severe. The fact that they were so often punished repeatedly for exactly the reasons rather seems to show that the punishment was ineffective. You will also find that men educated at British public schools often suffer emotional problems such as depression and difficulty making healthy relationships with other people. There is also often a strong sexual undercurrent to their experiences of corporal punishment.
 
Brendan_64 said:
A vocation is for life, it defines who you are.
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I think for some teachers that description would apply to their professional life. You may have read the novel To Serve Them All My Days. I certainly know teachers like that: teachers who have given forty or fifty years’ service to a single school, sometimes educating two or three generations of the same family. I even know people who have gone on to become teachers at the school they went to as children, devoting almost an entire lifetime to one institution, sometimes sixty years or more. You must know the sort of teacher who spends his Saturdays coaching sports teams, his evenings conducting an orchestra or directing a play, and his holidays leading school trips. In such a case teaching surely becomes more than a job and could rightly be called a vocation.
 
Hoosier-Daddy said:
Shocked at the replies… But not suprised.

Ask her? Try to explain to her? find out why? um What!?

You asked what consequences are appropriate. trying to find out someone’s motives and asking them why is not consequence.
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Sure it’s a consequence. Trying to explain behavior can be more than a harsh consequence. Because perhaps there is no explanation.

On the other hand, teachers aren’t always fair. Sometimes high school teachers should not be teaching. This is just the harsh reality. Sometimes the 16 year old is right to be upset, and she just doesn’t know how to express herself. I really think it is worth digging into the motivations.
 
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I would not allow “might” to deter you. IME, “might” rarely happens. Anyway, I was just musing, not making a serious suggestion.
 
po18guy said:
Just musing here. You could “sentence” her to explain, in plain English, what that means - to her grandparents.
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That would be a bad move. It may send the message that the grandparents have authority. Not a message I would want to send. Also sort of disrespectful. We have a family pact that family business stays in the four corners of our nuclear family. I don’t agree with shaming children when they do the wrong thing, and by putting their business out there to the grandparents that is what would happen.
 
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I’m in the camp of “find out why she did this”: for the following reason: does your daughter have a habit of cussing, or was this a one-time thing? The reason I ask is that it could reveal one of two things:
  1. If a one-time thing, perhaps there was a memory of abuse that was triggered by something the teacher said.
  2. It may not be a one-time thing, in which case the daughter is developing (if not already has developed) a “potty mouth”. It could also be a deeper sign of rebelliousness and self-destructive behavior in other areas of life, whether it be alcohol, drugs, sex, or may be a sign that she already has one foot out the door.
 
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JMMJ said:
I don’t agree with shaming children when they do the wrong thing, and by putting their business out there to the grandparents that is what would happen.
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On the contrary, sometimes shaming is the only thing that works, especially if the shaming is of the form of “you let your grandparents down” and she values her grandparents’ respect, which could lead to a conversion of heart.

But again, I would not do that until I found out the whole story.
 
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Having “been there; don that” in raising 3 kids, who admittedly tested me in many ways, but nonetheless turn out okay, I’m left asking, why do we ask what is appropriate? Determining what is appropriate is the price of being a parent, and asking someone else what to do, who does not have much more information that a couple of short sentences on a social media website seem to be just a bit of a cop out.

If you want your daughter to face up, its got to be for her to face up to what you know is the right thing to do, not others.
 
Norseman82 said:
On the contrary, sometimes shaming is the only thing that works, especially if the shaming is of the form of “you let your grandparents down” and she values her grandparents’ respect, which could lead to a conversion of heart
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I have to disagree. I have plenty of experience with raising children and never shamed any of them. Either they already knew what they did was wrong, and they already felt bad about it, because I had raised them properly… Or they had no knowledge of what they did was wrong and it was an opportunity for education. In either instance, me shaming them would have done no good whatsoever. I don’t understand why Catholics seem so big on shaming.
 
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I am a grandmother and I would struggle to keep a straight face.
This is serious and should be treated with whatever consequences work for her. The consequences that worked for each of my seven children were unique to the child. That said if this is the worst thing she has done at sixteen her parents are doi g a good job.
 
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