Articles labeled: discipline

It seems like the administrators of “tough love” may have gone a little too far in the marketing. Federal investigators are looking into a number of youth “boot camps” — essentially boarding schools for troubled kids — for engaging in deceptive practices in encouraging parents to send their kids there. We weren’t aware this was such a big business! Now us parents are outsourcing discipline?

As part of the federal review, investigators at the Government Accountability Office made undercover calls to boot camps and referral services that work with them.

In one case, an investigator posing as a father was advised to hide information from his wife about a program, according to GAO investigator Greg Kutz, who was scheduled to testify about the investigation Thursday before a House committee.

“The referral agency warned our fictitious parents that his wife might ‘freak out’ about sending her daughter to a boarding school, and stated: ‘I want you to tell her that it’s a college prep boarding school … If she thinks that you want to send her daughter to a place where there are drug addicts and people that are all screwed up, she will look at you and say ‘no way,”‘ Kutz said in prepared testimony obtained by The Associated Press.

Kutz also stated that when investigators called a Texas wilderness therapy program, they were misled by a program representative into thinking health insurance would reimburse the family’s expenses upon completion of the program.

Now, our kids can get just as unruly as the next, and we’ll admit we’ve daydreamed about some creative punishments for the little buggers — locking them in the garage, throwing them in an alligator pit, running them through the car wash… the difference is that these are fantasy stress relievers, we don’t actually do it.

A Florida mother caught on tape using a pressurized hose at a car wash to discipline her toddler daughter could end up in hot water after police meet Friday to consider filing child endangerment charges.

“She appeared [to be] a parent who thought she was disciplining her child for acting up. It’s a unique form of punishment that I don’t think anyone has ever seen,” Commander Matt Irwin of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said Friday on TODAY. “It’s not acceptable in my mind.”

The incident began on Feb. 24 when a white Hyundai Elantra pulled into a self-service bay at the Magical Car Wash in Orlando…

Police later determined that the toddler’s mother, who is 22 and five months pregnant, pulled into the car wash for the sole purpose of hosing down her daughter — possibly for wetting herself in the backseat of the car.

At the end of the surveillance tape of the incident, which police seized as potential evidence, the woman is seen stripping her daughter’s soaked clothes off and wrapping her up in a towel.

The woman has since turned herself into police. She has not been publicly identified.