NEWS

Is public shaming of your child effective? Right?

Robert King
robert.king@indystar.com

Like so many kids in these kinds of productions, the girl on the sidewalk with the downcast face, shifting on her feet, looks like she’d rather be anywhere but where she now stands — starring in a home movie, a morality play shot on a cellphone.

Literally in the middle of the public square, under a blue sky day in Indiana, she stands as a humiliation sandwich between two pieces of cardboard signage that tells the story of her shame in Sharpie pen, misspelling and all.

“My name is Abby Mills & I AM a Liar & a Theif,” the sandwich board reads.

In smaller letters are the words: “I’ve stolen from my parents, brothers and sister, aunt & uncle. I even stole my 9 yo cousin’s Christmas Presents.”

The narrator of the video — speaking from behind the phone in a gravelly, homespun voice — explains that he is the girl’s father. This is his vision of tough love, a cinematic plea to “do whatever it takes” to keep her out of jail and on the good path, even if it means shaming her in both the public square and the virtual one.

“She’s gonna understand that I mean business, and this is my last straw before she gets put into the system,” says Gary Mills of Richmond, Ind., who is the father of 14-year-old Abby Mills. They are the two main players in a video that, in the month since he posted it to Facebook, has been viewed more than 500,000 times.

The Mills family video is part of a new and growing parenting and punishment trend — the child shaming video — that now pops up routinely on Facebook, YouTube and other sites. A Google search on the subject turns up thousands of such videos.

Parents such as Mills see them as a useful tool for discipline — a way to hit kids where their friends are, where it hurts. Others, including some child behavior experts, see child shaming videos as ineffective at best and potentially harmful at worst.

The online catalog of shaming videos includes one of a father ripping into his 15-year-old son for wearing jeans that sag down below his buttocks. The father makes the boy model and turn around for the camera, as his dad chastises him. “Girls don’t even wear their pants that tight,” the dad shouts. “I know your nuts hurt. Get your behind up there and change your pants. You can’t even walk fast.”

There are videos featuring dads giving wayward sons bad haircuts or mothers following their children to school with a camera phone rolling. One such mother follows her daughter across the schoolyard, into her classroom and into a seat next to her hapless subject. She says her daughter has been misbehaving in class. “Hopefully,” the mother says, “she can get her act together and I don’t have to come back.”

Among the most popular shaming videos is one of an indignant mother berating a 13-year-old girl who posted a picture of herself wearing a sports bra on Facebook. The girl apparently listed her age as 19 on her Facebook profile information. For nearly six minutes, the woman tells the world — and with particular aim at the men who have befriended her daughter on Facebook — that her daughter is different from her sexy persona. “She watches Disney Channel. She has a bedtime. She doesn’t sit around in a bra. She doesn’t sit around in lace panties and she doesn’t know how to wipe her butt good.” Under such castigation, the girl is reduced to tears.

In many of the cases, such videos garner hundreds of “Likes” on Facebook and plenty of praise in the feedback comments, much of it from parents, who often acknowledge their struggles to corral the behavior of their own children.

Despite the populist nature of the videos and reports of a short-term turnaround in the behavior of the child subjects, not everyone sees them as a good tool for correcting a child’s behavior.

Some parents who are critical of the videos are concerned about the dignity of the kids or the everlasting effects of videos that never disappear from the Internet, even long after a child has tried to move on from the incident that sparked them.

Dr. Leslie Hulvershorn, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health, said when parents purposefully and publicly shame their child, they can damage their relationship with that child, creating barriers to good communication and interaction. In a worst case, a vulnerable child could be led to suicide.

“It is a horrible situation to be humiliated in front of your friends,” Hulvershorn said. “So it is risky for parents to do that, and it’s probably not going to do much in the long run for curtailing the problem behavior.”

Even if parents see an initial improvement in behavior, she worries that the long-term effects could be troublesome. A better approach, she said, is a tactic backed by several decades of research as a more effective means to change a child’s behavior — positive reinforcement, or rewarding the child for doing something good.

One thing that get-tough tactics, such as the video shaming, can achieve, Hulvershorn said, is to bring parents validation from other parents who might applaud their no-nonsense approach to parenting.

“You see parents do this a lot in public places, and yelling at their kids,” Hulvershorn said. “It’s partly to get other parents to recognize them as being good parents. I think this is an amplification of that.”

Mills, a 49-year-old disabled father of five, said he had warned his daughter months before, after some previous incidents, that she would face public embarrassment if she continued to steal. After another lapse last month, he made good on the threat, forcing Abby to stand in front of the courthouse and the police department in Richmond wearing the sandwich board. Sheriff’s deputies passed by and spoke to her. A prisoner heading from court in shackles urged her not to follow his path. A woman hugged the girl. Mills watched all this from just a few feet away. Later, he posted his cellphone video to his Facebook page.

Since then, he’s received notes from parents across the country praising him for his efforts with his daughter. He was invited to New York to appear on a talk show hosted by Bishop T.D. Jakes, where he was featured with other parents behind some of the more popular shaming videos.

On the show, Mills explained that he had spent 10 years in prison for theft, that he saw his oldest son go to prison for theft and that he was trying to open his daughter’s eyes to reality. His reasoning drew the support of the studio audience.

Abby, who her father said declined to speak to The Indianapolis Star for this story, spoke to Jakes via video, saying: “I was really embarrassed, but I knew that I needed it.”

Jakes, a pastor and author, took no clear stance on the video shaming phenomenon, saying its usefulness depends on the family. But at a time when too many parents are absent from the lives of their children, he praised Mills and the other parents for their involvement.

In the weeks since his own video went viral, Mills says, his daughter has been behaving. She’s been doing so well, in fact, he “ungrounded her” this week after a month of restricted movement outside the home. He says nothing bad has come from the experience. And to his critics, Mills makes no apologies for the video.

“You raise yours, I’ll raise mine,” Mills said. “For every child, there’s always a different punishment. Every child ain’t the same. I proved the point to my daughter, and she now knows that ol’ dad means business.”

Call Star reporter Robert King at (317) 444-6089. Follow him on Twitter: @RbtKing.