the guy on here who wouldn't help his kid get lunch for six hours because he was working on a puzzle is a good example of how parents have tyrannical power which they can abuse in large ways or small.1

the guy is saying his daughter is fine, and that he was just trying to teach her a lesson about self reliance or some such. she's 9. 2

I'm sure she is fine. but he has the ability to just not feed her for as long as he wants. he decided to exercise that ability for hours, basically just for the hell of it. there are no consequences for that. his daughter has no ability to object.

people are upset at this one guy, but they were also upset at me for saying that parents have tyrannical power. why? well, people are willing to label certain folks as bad parents, but are *much* less comfortable acknowledging this is a systemic issue.

but parents can just be assholes to their kids in lots of ways, and again the kids have basically no recourse. any parent could do what this guy did.

or parents can strike their kids to teach them a lesson. or throw them out of the house.

it's not immediately obvious how you deal with that or mitigate it. but you certainly aren't going to mitigate it if you don't admit it's a problem.

people are calling this child abuse, which seems excessive probably—but the thing is there's a huge range of things you can do to torment children that don't rise to what we generally consider child abuse.

and those things and the justification for them are also how child abuse is justified.

like, this guy is saying, "i'm just doing normal stuff to teach my kid a lesson!" and yeah, normal stuff that parents do to teach their kids lessons is often really unreasonable and cruel if you think about it for a minute.