Hot Sauce Mom and Child Abuse
The Dr. Phil TV show featured a story about a mom charged with child abuse in Alaska for supposedly subjecting her son to the rather cruel punishments. She’s been dubbed Hot Sauce Mom because she “washed his mouth out” with hot sauce and routinely made him take cold showers for some lies she claims he told.
This is so wrong, on so many levels. This crazy woman seems more like a “Monster Mom” instead of the euphemistic “Hot Sauce Mom” that she’s now known as, and provided a glaring example on the Dr. Phil show, of child abuse.
What sort of medical problem would have been created if that hot sauce had gotten into that little boy’s windpipe? You know how torturous a bit of water in the lungs can be with the violent fits of coughing and gagging it can trigger. But imagine hot sauce! One could make the case against Hot Sauce Mom that this is child endangerment.
True, Hot Sauce Mom finally recognized how utterly nastily she was brutalizing her son, and sought help for her serious problem. But nearly a third of Americans approve of this sort of child abuse, and that’s scary because that means that nearly a third of Americans don’t realize that there are much more effective disciplinary measures one can take besides overly forceful tactics like hot sauce in the mouth. Clearly, ignorance poses clear dangers when misinformed people are raising defenseless children. Heaven help the children. Come on folks!
I never cared for punishments that dominate, intimidate, or in Hot Sauce Mom’s case, frighten children into submission or capitulation. Now admittedly, there may be a place for these extreme sorts of corrective measures. But mostly, either unknowing or just plain evil people people way overuse them. Case in point: I had house parents in school who ruled via fear-mongering tactics like this (except they used soap instead of hot sauce). I was afraid of them, all the time, which meant that even when they treated me well, I could not open up fully and enjoy the good times with them. I’d just keep wondering how long it would be before I’d do something they didn’t like.
As a once-child who grew up in the shadows of these constant threats of retribution, let me say that this is certainly no way to raise a kid, unless your objective is to keep him afraid of you. You might indeed get him to behave better by scaring him. But this is a false-positive, and does not teach him the more lasting lessons of why it’s more appropriate to behave than to misbehave. So if he does behave, it will be because he’s terrified of what you’ll do to him, not because he understands the hows and whys of good behaviors. The immediate and apparently-good results that intimidation forms of child abuse produce, eventually give way to highly insecure and troubled teens and adults. Thus, we need to stop overbearing people like Hot Sauce Mom from disciplining their children through fear.
February 20th, 2011 at 1:03 pm
You can blow out a candle with a hurricane too, and yes, that would definitely extinguish the candle perhaps most every time, just as the threat of hot sauce or soap will scare the kid into behaving as you would have her behave. But is this enough to conclude that sicking a hurricane on a candle is the most efficient, least damaging way to douse the flame? Is turning a hurricane loose on the candle really the best solution, when all you want to do is just to put it out? Is dumping hot sauce into a kid’s mouth against his will really the best way to teach him not to lie? It comes down to this: Why shout, when the proper words whispered will effectively communicate what you wish?