I had heard about this, but I expected MUCH worse. I figured her post would have been along the lines of, "I f***ing hate my dad/stepmom, they can go die, f**k off you dirt bastards, etc etc etc!!!" So what she actually wrote was pretty underwhelming.

Instead she just feels like she has to do too much, and expresses it poorly. But hey, she's a fifteen year old girl, probably in high school, and has a stepmom (assuming that sometimes children have issues coping with divorce and step parents, which may make her act out). Divorce, hormones, and high school are enough to make some teenagers do A LOT worse, so I'd have to say that using a weapon to destroy the laptop was missing the point, if any, he was trying to make.

Personally, I'd have went around a large store/mall asking people if they had a computer until someone said no, then give the laptop away and record it all, to show her (assuming she's lying and her life is pretty squishy) that not everyone is lucky enough to have such things.

Instead, it seems he decided to make the point that a grown man is a bigger badass than his 15 year old daughter.

More or less, I'm surprised that there hasn't been a CPS investigation into the father, this behavior on his part is way beyond what a parent has any right to do. Sure the parent can take away the laptop if they bought it, but the humiliation and attempt to control is way beyond what any parent has the right to do.

It's Texas... why are you surprised?

At the end of the day this is how I see it.

He is the Father (as far as I know he doesn't beat her) there for he can do whatever he thinks is an appropriate punishment to teach His Daughter how to not be an idiot.

Granted I agree with most he probably overreacted with shooting the laptop but she'll never forget this lesson. So yes I agree with the parent in this case.

And to answer the title of the thread Would I Do The Same?

Hell no I'm an intelligent person when I comes to electronics and understand there value I'd just repurpose the Laptop for myself and or give it to someone else in need of it.

We don't get youtube here in China. Which is why I've been commenting on the merits of the comments and keeping away from the specifics of the video.

Suffice it to say you'd have a hard time getting CPS (or whatever they call themselves now in Oregon, they were so hated they actually changed their name) on the liberal west coast to go after this guy. There's no way in hell anyone in Texas is going to touch that one.

And people wonder why domestic violence remains a problem. It's precisely because incidents like this pop up and aren't investigated. It might very well be just a single incident, but I'm guessing that it probably isn't if he's overreacting to this degree this time, I'd be very surprised if it was the first time his temper got out of control.

Ultimately, without being in that home, I really don't know, but in practice this is a pretty significant break down in judgment to be a completely isolated incident.

From watching the video if I were to surmise any kind of abuse I'd guess verbal abuse. I doubt that guy beats the shit out of his kid, but hell, I found up once a guy I really looked up to was raping both his stepdaughters every day and molesting his two young sons. So yeah, people can really surprise you, but even as a pessimist I'm going to assume shit like that is the exception rather than the rule.

And that makes it OK? Without further information it's really hard to know whether this is stage 1 domestic violence or just an incredibly poor decision on the part of the father. An isolated incident isn't generally going to be as serious as a more generalized trend, but you're naive if you think that emotional abuse is any less harmful in the long term than physical violence is. Physical violence at least tends to end at some point, I know of cases where emotional violence would stretch on for decades because nobody recognized it as domestic violence.

Having seen the video, I think that it's not likely that there's really a case of abuse here - but I absolutely agree that a CPS should contact the family. Because the dad's behavior is clearly out of the ordinary, and he _does_ have problems managing his anger in the video. He doesn't yell or hit anything, but you can see how his anger impedes his speech, you can see the force with which he makes a fist when crumpling the piece of paper, and - most importantly - you can see how calm he suddenly gets after shooting the laptop. Nothing of this _proves_ that there is anything more going on in this family. He could just as well be a totally nice guy who couldn't hurt a fly, never even raised his voice against his daughter, and is actually incapable of showing authority towards her.

But the point is - even in the cases where there _is_ abuse, you often don't get better pointers than the ones you can see in the video, i.e. something that's out of the ordinary and seems somehow overblown, and indications that a person allowed feelings to control him more than he controlled the situation. In such a situation, an investigation by the CPS will not do any harm, but _can_ prevent the situation from becoming much worse. At the very least, it will tell the dad that there are limits to what he's allowed to do, and will tell the kid that there are places she can go to if things really go south. They could also tell the dad how to get advice about parenting teenagers (which _is_ a very difficult task), but given his insistence of demonstrating that he was "right", I doubt he would listen to them.

As i said, my impression is that there _probably_ isn't anything wrong in the family that would warrant further action by the CPS. But if you don't go after situations like this, you'll also miss the situations where there _is_ something very wrong. And then, when people learn that a kid had been abused/mistreated by a seemingly sympathetic and well-mannered parent for years, everyone's astonished again how this could not have been spotted.

That's more or less my intuition on this. There are some incredibly brazen abusers out there that would do so in public, but I doubt very much that this is the case. That usually tends to stop as children grow up and learn to more effectively manage their emotions, but it does definitely happen in public from time to time.

A CPS check is undoubtedly in order, but I doubt any action beyond possible parenting classes or anger management would be required. And I obviously don't know if this is a long enough standing problem to justify more than a warning about this being inappropriate behavior.

I didn't say it was okay but CPS generally won't involve themselves in anything but the most severe cases of emotional abuse. I'm not defending it, just stating the way I understand it to work. CPS in some states won't even involve themselves in anything but the most severe cases of child neglect or physical abuse. Well, unless you have a record and then they'll fuck with you over trivial shit just because they know you can't really fight back.
I took that as nervousness. I stammer just like that on camera, or at least used to when I was younger. I know a lot of people who sound just like that the minute they have to do any public speaking, etc.

Fair enough, I'll grant you that one, I probably did misread it. In general though, CPS tends not to even bother investigating most abuse cases primarily because they aren't willing to look into what looks minor on the surface.

It's similar to suicide and drug overdoses, there are cases where nobody knows about it until it's too late, but those are very much in the minority, it's fairly rare for somebody to wake up one day and decide to down a bottle of pills or see how much coke they can snort. Usually there are signs that end up being ignored.

CPS ignoring things completely because they don't consider it serious is a really dangerous state of affairs.
Nervous? Yes, you could be right about that, but if he's nervous about doing that sort of thing on camera it could also be an indication that he's so mad that he's not acting with any sort of judgment.

Of course, this is all speculation, going with information on one video without really anything else to go on is really not going to lead to any sort of meaningful insight into the incident.

That's possible. It's clearly visible that he is in a state of emotional arousal, but it's not possible to pinpoint the reasons with certainty. Personally, I think that the other observations point towards anger rather than anxiousness. Look at the force with which he crumples the piece of paper, twice if I remember correctly - that's not nervousness, that's his anger finally finding a way to express itself after he's kept fighting it back during his whole speech. I also think that his speech became better after he shot the laptop (and that he generally seemed more relaxed afterwards), but I don't have time to check that right now. A state of emotional arousal would also explain why he thought that shooting a laptop might be a good solution to the problem.

To me, it seemed that he made his decision (and still was) in a mood where a parent should probably punch a sandbag or play Alien Shooter for half an hour before making a decision. Though I'm not condemning him for that. Raising teenagers is far from being an emotional cakewalk. But I think it would have been better if he slept over the decision, he might have found a better solution afterwards.

I was hoping for more of an Office Space-esque beatdown.