Tough love

WHAT parent hasn’t, at one time or another, felt a boiling rage, a need to lash out at the object of so much love and effort? What parent hasn’t resorted to desperate measures to reach a sullen, ungrateful, rebellious teen?

I suspect Tommy Jordan is that kind of parent.

And before the “experts” send impassioned e-mails about teachable moments and keeping one’s cool, play Jordan’s video a few times and note the anguish, frustration and disappointment in his voice. On more than one occasion, he has to stop to regain his composure.

The fiasco, as Jordan calls it, began when he discovered his daughter’s Facebook post while he was upgrading her laptop with new software – a task that took him hours, by the way. In a snooty, profanity-laced complaint titled “To My Parents,” Hannah grumbles on Facebook about all the chores she has and how she ought to get paid for doing them. She insults the adults in her family and warns them she won’t stick around to help them when they’re old. And she whines that she can’t balance her schoolwork with her chores.

Sounds familiar? For me it sure does. My children, now grown, even used the same word Hannah did – slave – as if they understood its true meaning.

Apparently, Hannah had been grounded for a similar incident and hadn’t learned her lesson, so Jordan, an IT consultant, decided to kick up the discipline a notch. In the video, he also talks about his own hardscrabble childhood.

He uploaded the video, Facebook Parenting: For The Troubled Teen, to his profile as well as his daughter’s. It also appeared on Youtube along with a link to the Facebook thread and a final written message: “Maybe a few kids can take something away from this. … If you’re so disrespectful to your parents and yourself as to post this kind of thing on Facebook, you’re deserving of some tough love.”

Not surprisingly, hundreds of thousands have commented. Others have posted their