Kicking a kid out of a car and making them walk home ?

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I would be interested to know how people feel about a scenario which was similar to the one demonstrated in this video -

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb5bs9Lv4NA[/youtube]

The differences are :

(1) It happened at night, when it was dark outside.

(2) It happened in a very rural area, with no witnesses.

(3) The kids weren't being anything like as annoying as the ones in the video before it happened.

(4) Only one child was kicked out. That child was about 9 or 10 years old.

(5) The parent never returned for the child, and instead went home to read and watch TV unconcernedly.
The child did not know the way home, and anyway it was pitch black due to being night-time. They were about 5 miles from home, or something like that... which the parent considers to "not be far" for the child to walk home.

(7) After a few hours the child turned up, having walked to a farm in the middle of nowhere and got a lift home from the people who lived there.
The parent felt that this was perfectly acceptable, and no problem at all ; she felt the child was at no risk, and feels that her behaviour was just fine.

(8 ) The community they all lived in has a low crime rate.
This means that there are very few murders, but there are however plenty of paedophiles who go for girls (I don't know about how many go for boys)

(9) The parent behaved as though the kid was over-reacting because he was very upset upon returning home, because her attitude was "oh shut up. You got home OK didn't you ? So what's the problem ?

(10) The parent was not a single parent, and her husband worked full-time.
They only had two children.


Considering those criteria, what do you think about that kind of thing happening ?

Do you think that is all so totally OK because the kid made it home alright ?
Do you think it's any less ridiculous because of happening in a rural area (albeit at night) rather than an urban setting ?

That was common with my maternal grandfather. He would kick mom out of the car, about 200 miles from home, and forced her to walk, when she was a child. When she finally made it home, she'd get a beating for not making it home before curfew. Of course, he was drunk when he beat her.

To be fair, I've done the same thing, but with adults, who are supposed to know how to behave. I've kicked a few people out of my car on the Northwest tollway when I lived in Chicago for fscking off while I'm trying to concentrate on getting through afternoon rush hour.

That man sounds clinically insane !
(O.o)

Grandpa saw more than his share of action in WWII. But that does not excuse the fact that he was stupid and vicious when drunk. I let him know, in no uncertain terms, what I thought about him after I graduated from college. Is it any wonder I can't stand drunks?

People really do judge based on appearance. The luxury woman got treated better than the lower class woman which was the same actress. My mom used to threaten to dump us off on the side of the road when we were kids and she would also pull over and tell us to get out and then give us another chance and it always worked like a charm for us until I found out it would be illegal if she abandoned us like that and she would go to jail. I also remember another time we were at the furniture store and Mom closed the car door and told me I was staying and I was walking home because I was teasing my brothers in the store.

Re the video- the first mum was smoking. In my country, it's actually an offence to smoke in a car with young kids.She was also yelling more than the second mum.

Re the question: That's psychotic.

True, the second mom was not acting as roughly with the kids, and the kids weren't sobbing as pitifully with her as they were with the other version of the mom.

The scenario sounds like something specific that maybe happened to you or someone close to you.

I have had one of my kids get out of the car and walk the rest of the way home before--from the end of my quiet street 3-4 blocks from our house, and he was older, and I didn't get out of the car screaming and yelling and throwing his things at him. I just stopped and told him to get out now--use some of that energy. He was like, are you serious?! It was actually surprising to me that it affected him as much as it did, being that we were inside his zone that he's allowed to roam freely. He calmed down in the car for a while after that.

I'm surprised the people who brought the child home (in the described scenario) didn't call the police instead.
Not against the kid, of course, but against the parent who abandoned and endangered him.

Unacceptable. Children should be under the care and supervision of adults at all times until they are 11 or 12. This is very harsh punishment and the mother is clearly incompetent.
J.

200 miles? Did he leave her a map? I'm rather surprised, considering she must have had some adult intervention, that Grandpa wasn't arrested, even if she was an older teen.

To the OP, there is something very wrong with this parent to leave a child 5 miles away in the dark with no concerns. Very simply the child could have sprained an ankle with no one to help. This practice of dropping kids off is only okay in very limited circumstances - DAYTIME, short walk, at least teen age, not alone, relatively safe town, etc.

Now related to ASD, I have had to pull over and ask my ASD child to sit on the side of the road for a few minutes while I waited in the car right next to him. Alternatively, I could have parked the car on the road side and went out to sit rather than him. He was screaming so terribly I couldn't drive safely, poor guy.

An aside: My father used to let us out at the entry to our neighborhood when we had ice-cream. My mother didn't allow us to buy ice-cream but my dad loved it. He would treat us but we couldn't eat it fast enough to finish before we got home, so we'd finish as we walked.

I can be pretty darn harsh in terms of discipline. Never. Ever.

Saint Alan was patient, but just because he was patient doesn't mean he pulled punches (metaphorically-- I can count the number of times he resorted to corporal punishment on my fingers, and only once used anything other than an open hand on my bottom). Never. Ever.

My aunt could be a flaming b***h in terms of discipline-- she was the type who would make her kids take all their stuff out in the yard and burn it for failing to clean a bedroom, the type who dishes out spankings with a belt, the instigator in the one time Saint Alan used a switch on me. Never. Ever.

In fact, she got FLAMING pissed when a friend left me to walk about 5 miles home in the dark...

...under a full moon...

...along roads that I could have followed blindfolded, I knew them that well...

...after I'd said, several times, that I didn't mind doing it...

...WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD.

I can see threatening it. I can see a mile, down a dead-end private road where you know everybody. I let my oldest daughter walk home alone from the bus stop a few times at that age, and it was a mile (down a dead-end private road, where I knew everyone by name, after I'd talked to the neighbors and they'd agreed to watch her, and I was just about standing on the porch with a stopwatch, and only after she begged and begged and begged, and it was probably still horribly irresponsible).

I don't care how well-off you are, what you smoke (or don't), or how polite you are about doing it. BAD IDEA.

I can't see the videos, but I there's now way I'd be doing it to a child of any age. You never know who's around to pick them up (not to mention the damage done by being abandoned)
I've threatened it, not that it's really stopped any fighting/shouting from the backseat. My mother put my brother out once, but only drove about 20m up the road

My parents once tried that on me too. I was 9 at the time. It was in an older suburb, the kind where streets are laid out in a grid, rather than winding cul-de-sacs, but it's still clearly a suburb. My reaction to being told to get out of the car was sneakier and more clever than the OP's kid's. I knew the streets were too narrow and the blocks were too long to make a U-turn quickly; they were rectangles with a ratio of 3:1, and we were driving on the long side. So I crossed the street, and started running against the direction of traffic, which made it hard for for my parents to catch me and tell me to get back in the car. I got to the next major street, and walked along it for about a mile. Then I cut across the city park, and walked 4 blocks through a residential area, until I reached home. When I got there, my parents were already inside. They told me to go to my room, but didn't give me any further punishment, not even a talking-to. I was even allowed to watch a cartoon on VHS (video tape). But to be safe, I ate dinner alone in my room that night.

What helped me is the great sense of direction I had since early childhood. Even in preschool, which was within walking distance from my home, I already had the entire local neighborhood memorized. Not just the home-to-preschool route, but also nearby stores, city parks, landmarks, etc. And by age 4, when I learned to read, also street names. (I didn't make sense of the address numbering system until I was much older; before then, I just memorized streets mechanically.) In the hypothetical case where my parents actually forgot to pick me up from preschool, I would have been able to walk home by myself. Not that I'd be ever allowed to, but still. So it's no wonder that years later, at age 9, I found my way home so easily and efficiently.

They never tried the "get out of the car and walk home" punishment ever again. Interestingly, as my 8th grade graduation present, my parents gave me permission to travel around the city by myself, on foot and public transportation. By then, I could navigate the city blindfolded. I was very thankful for it. Car rides with my parents were an uncomfortable experience in 99% of all cases, not to mention the begging and pleading it took to get my parents to take me to a zoo, a museum, or other places I liked.