Racking up nearly 12 million views on YouTube over the last 72 hours, a North Carolina man named Tommy Jordan, father of a fifteen-year old teenage girl named Hannah, decided to respond to his daughter’s complaints about their family life. His daughter posted a lengthy rant about her parents on Facebook and attempted to hide the post with the privacy settings Facebook provides for all users. However, her father somehow ended up with a copy to her diatribe and decided to film a video response called “Facebook Parenting: For the troubled teen”. He had recently spent over $100 as well as several hours of his time upgrading her laptop, thus the actions on the video were very much an emotional response to what he perceived was a lack of gratitude on her part.
Within the video, the daughter’s profanity-laced complaints were mostly focused on the amount of chores she had to do around the house as well as the lack of money she received for that work. Jordan expressed disappointment in her lack of interest in finding a part-time job while she’s attending school.
Jordan’s response to her sense of entitlement in the past was to ground her and remove the laptop as well as a cell phone from her possession. Since that previous punishment didn’t work, he decided to take her laptop out to a grassy field and fire nine exploding, hollow-point rounds into the black, shiny notebook with his .45 caliber handgun. Not only does the daughter have to earn her own money to purchase a new laptop, she also has to pay her father back for each bullet that he valued at $1 each.
When asked if the punishment was effective on his Facebook page, Jordan stated “I think it was very effective on one front. She apparently didn’t remember being talked to about previous incidents, nor did she seem to remember the effects of having it taken away, nor did the eventual long-term grounding seem to get through to her. I feel pretty certain that every day from then to now, whenever one of her friends mentions Facebook, she’ll remember it and wish she hadn’t done what she did.”
Since the release of the video, Jordan and his family have received an enormous amount of attention from the media and has even received an offer from CBS in regards to some form of show, likely an interview or reality-based series. In addition, Jordan has received attention from the police as well as social services. According to a post on his Facebook page, local law enforcement met with Jordan and social services is interviewed the child today. Jordan posted “Now I’m letting my daughter have her interview with Social Services, so they too can be satisfied that I don’t yell at her, beat her, traumatize her, lock her in a closet without food, deprive her of basic human rights, make her cut the grass with scizzors, hunt for her meals in the wild with only a spork, or otherwise fail to provide for my daughter.”
Comments on Jordan’s public Facebook posts have ranged from other parents supporting the decision to people concerned about the safety and well-being of the child. While the rapid success of the video has caused Jordan to take his phone off the hook for the weekend, Jordan is attempting to use this public forum to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. At the time of this article, he’s raised over $3,000 in the past two days since the video went viral. He’s even received a job offer for his daughter from an ice cream parlor and coffee house located in North Carolina.
The idiots on here amaze me sometimes.
This is actually a very good lesson to Hannah! Your lucky that this was your father who found your public rant on facebook. His video responce went viral and that just shows more that everything that goes on the internet is public. What if this was later on in life and you ranted about your boss in a status. Your boss finds it and now you lose a job. Because you lose a job you cant pay rent and buy food. A laptop was all that was lost in this video and a good lesson learned. Nothing is private anymore. People gotta be careful about what they put on facebook.
You are so right. It is a good lesson to learn when there are no real consequences other then embarrassment and loss of a laptop. Were it done in the workplace this could have ended in termination.
That’s a legit review on the video
Must be American
Meagan Smith from digitaltrends.com said:
I have known people who were given nearly anything and everything they wanted without having to work much for it and not become bratty. I have also met people who had very little in material goods and had to work their butts off for it and be very grateful for it. The common denominator in the people I met who where grateful, no matter their material situation, is that they felt appreciated by their parents. If you want a person to not appreciate what they have tell them how lazy they are. Tell them how easy they have it and brag about how much harder you had it. Children like things, but what they need is support. I can’t tell for sure if this man regularly went on rants about his daughter being lazy, but that is certainly the vibe I felt. What she did was wrong, and she deserved punished, just not by the father being immature too and humiliating her.
And another point, to me it sounded like she thought she was having a private conversation with all her friends all at once. It was delusional of her to think it was private but on a moral bases, it wasn’t like publicly humiliating her parents was her objective. Teens use to write notes to each other about their negative feelings about their parents. If a parent read what they knew was a secret note to a friend and then punished the teen for complaining about them to a friend, the parent would look bad. He hacked into a private message.
he’s a great father if the chores where just those, not even like you’d be breaking your back over it, hey young big bad ass teen’s if you can’t do a simple job then don’t wear that fake belt over your greedy bellies
LOLZ i love how teenagers rant on about their parents, hell i did and i got marks to prove that scars on me didnt just hurt me just as the words and respect not owed to parents
Not something entirely new… A few months ago here in Bulgaria a father was caught on tape doing pretty much the same thing in a different way.. While at the beach he took his daughters laptop, smashed it in a trailer and then threw it in the sea. I support their ideas, but not the way they express them.
take it away!!! Why smash it, when you can take it away and use it as a reward for accomplishing the goal for which you took it in the first place.
I think that’s awesome, especially considering the whole history – he had recently spent time and money upgrading her laptop for her, and she had often complained of her “small” allowance and chores and he had previously often just taken her laptop away for awhile and grounded her and that didn’t make an impression on her. My momdid something similar one time – I didn’t pick up my toys one too many times, so she bagged everything that was out and gave it away to a community center. It made an impression! Sometimes teenagers need some drama or else it doesn’t sink in.
some kids just learn the hard way. teenagers need to figure it out that the world doesn’t owe them ANYTHING. if they grow up thinking that everybody ‘owes’ them something, they are gonna have a tough life.
I have known people who were given nearly anything and everything they wanted without having to work much for it and not become bratty. I have also met people who had very little in material goods and had to work their butts off for it and be very grateful for it. The common denominator in the people I met who where grateful, no matter their material situation, is that they felt appreciated by their parents. If you want a person to not appreciate what they have tell them how lazy they are. Tell them how easy they have it and brag about how much harder you had it. Children like things, but what they need is support. I can’t tell for sure if this man regularly went on rants about his daughter being lazy, but that is certainly the vibe I felt. What she did was wrong, and she deserved punished, just not by the father being immature too and humiliating her.
And another point, to me it sounded like she thought she was having a private conversation with all her friends all at once. It was delusional of her to think it was private but on a moral bases, it wasn’t like publicly humiliating her parents was her objective. Teens use to write notes to each other about their negative feelings about their parents. If a parent read what they knew was a secret note to a friend and then punished the teen for complaining about them to a friend, the parent would look bad. He hacked into a private message.
While I disagree with this man’s methods (surely, he could have disposed of the laptop for money, with the proceeds going to charity), I can understand his frustration. The sense of entitlement among todays children is truly appalling. And the same goes for their indiscretion. My aunt and her husband had to renew security codes, cancel credit cards, and more, after her stepdaughter posted such information online. And enough of the hand-wringing about ‘child abuse.’ Remember that up here in Canada, Mohammed Shafia beat, threatened, and ultimately murdered his daughters, for dating and dressing in Western attire…and the police and child services took a completely hands-off approach. Obviously, there are different, politically-correct standards for what constitutes ‘child abuse.’ As for school shootings, these were unheard of before the 1970s, when gun control was more lax, and liberal-permissive parenting was unknown.
Imagine what’s gonna happen when she brings home a boyfriend who daddy disapproves of.