A Fargo, N.D., mom punished her “spoiled brat” 18-year-old daughter by selling one of the most precious things a teenage girl could possess: tickets to a Katy Perry concert.
“Daughter is a spoiled brat and doesn’t deserve these tickets,” Cindy Bjerke wrote in a post on the Fargo/Moorhead Online Garage Sale Facebook page offering the tickets to the August 23 show at the Fargodome, according to WDAZ.
Bjerke was so angry that she was willing to take $90 for the pair, which cost her $110.
“I was not going to give her the tickets,” Bjerke told WDAZ, without identifying her daughter or what she was being punished for. “I was not going to let her go to this concert with this behavior that she’s been doing.”
Some parents were critical of the very public punishment.
“I think that’s a personal issue where it should have been handled privately because on Facebook, everyone’s going to see that,” Elgie Eagleman, a Fargo parent, told the TV station.
The controversy over public shaming as punishment has intensified in recent years as these cases have gone viral online, as happened last year when a mother sold tickets to a One Direction concert because of her daughter’s “self righteous and lippy attitude.”
But parenting experts aren’t sold on shame as an effective or appropriate discipline tactic.
“It’s not just that humiliating people, of any age, is a nasty and disrespectful way of treating them,” Alfie Kohn, author of “Unconditional Parenting: Moving From Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason,” told Huffington Post senior columnist Lisa Belkin. “It’s that humiliation, like other forms of punishment, is counterproductive. ‘Doing to’ strategies — as opposed to those that might be described as ‘working with’ — can never achieve any result beyond temporary compliance, and it does so at a disturbing cost.”