The sign, clutched by 12-year-old Dylan at a busy intersection in Spring, Texas, says it all: "I was suspended from school for cussing out my teacher."
The unusual punishment, meted out for Dylan's foul language, was the brainchild of Rachel Macha, a friend of Dylan's mom.
“He cursed at a couple of his teachers on two separate occasions and was suspended from school today,” Macha, who apparently had permission from the mother to administer this punishment, told KHOU last Thursday. “He wasn't raised to speak that way.”
She added that more conventional methods, like grounding and taking things away, had failed to have much of an impact. "This was something different," said Macha to WPTV.
Judging by the look on Dylan's unsmiling face, the experience won't be forgotten anytime soon.
Despite the apparent sudden uptick in public shaming as a parenting tool, however, many experts caution humiliation can actually be counterproductive.
"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 The Huffington Post in an earlier interview. "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."
What do you think? Does the punishment fit the crime?
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