Children Taken From Maryland Couple After YouTube ‘Prank’ Videos – Parenthood Does Not Make People More Mature, Godly, Loving, or Responsible
Many secular conservatives and Christians go on and on about how nuclear families are necessary for society, they shame or criticize women who do not have children, and they feel that being a parent is necessary to make a person more responsible, mature, or godly. I should know, because I am a right winger. I’ve been a conservative for years, but I think other conservatives really get this stuff wrong.
Every week, I see news stories of parents who neglect or verbally or physically abuse their children – being parents did not make such parents mature, godly, loving, or responsible.
I was verbally abused by my father and sister growing up, and it’s a very painful thing to endure – my father has mellowed out a tad since growing older (he can still be a little verbally abusive, but not as often as when I was younger), but my sister has gotten worse.
When I was younger, my dad would sometimes pull “pranks” on me similar to what the dad in these You Tube videos was doing to his kids, in addition to run-of-the-mill put-downs where my father would tell me he didn’t value my thoughts, opinions, and basically convey to me he thought I was a loser and a failure.
When you have these sorts of “pranks” pulled on you when you are a kid, they HURT. They make you feel rejected and unloved by the parent doing it. There is nothing funny about it.
The kid is hurt now, but I can guarantee when he gets much older and reflects on this, the anger will come out – most of the hurt will die down, and he will instead be infuriated and resent that his dad did this to him.
What this dad did is cruel. It’s not funny. What they (the father and the stepmother in this story) did is in fact emotional abuse – I’m guessing the mouth-breathing morons behind this You Tube channel (the Martin parents) only regard physical strikes as “abuse.” WRONG. Abuse can be emotional / verbal.
So. I feel sorry for the kids in the story below – I know what it’s like to be verbally and emotionally abused, to have pranks done to me and cruel words said to me under the guise it’s just “joking around” and so on.
Christians and secular right wingers need to let go of this idea that marriage and parenting are necessary to make people productive, mature, good people – that’s clearly NOT THE CASE.
The New York Times ran (Link): this Tweet today:
“The couple verbally berated their 5 children, often to the point of tears, then racked up millions of YouTube views”
…Children Taken From Maryland Couple After YouTube ‘Prank’ Videos … The parents first defended the videos, posted on the DaddyOFive (You Tube channel) …
Here are some more links about it:
(Link): YouTube prank parents lose custody of their kids
(Link): DaddyOFive parents lose custody ‘over YouTube pranks
(Link): These YouTube parents pulled disturbing ‘pranks’ on their kids. Now, they’ve lost custody.
The videos on DaddyOFive’s YouTube channel were hard to watch. In one, parents Heather and Mike Martin scream at 9-year-old Cody, accusing him of spilling ink on the ground. (He didn’t spill anything, and the stains on the carpet were from trick ink).
Another shows Cody being shoved into a bookcase. In a third, the dad encourages one of his sons to slap 11-year-old Emma, the only girl among the five children in the family.
He does, hard enough to make Emma cry.
When the broader YouTube community found out about the channel, there was an angry uprising. And now, the once-estranged birth mother of Cody and Emma has emergency custody of her two kids.
(Link): YouTubers who made kids cry with extreme prank lose custody
- Maryland parents Mike and Heather Martin have a YouTube channel in which their two youngest children are often the victim of cruel pranks
- The parents of five had been under fire for an April video pranking their son, Cody, nine
- Stepmom Heather squirted disappearing ink all over son Cody’s bedroom carpet
- Parents bawl him out, then reveal the joke and make him plug their channel
- They released an apology video in April, but still said the kids were in on the ‘pranks’
- The parents lost custody of Mike’s two children, Cody, nine, and Emma, 12
- Cody and Emma’s biological mom, Rose Hall, says the children are being ‘deprogrammed’ from the abuse
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