A dad is going viral for a controversial parenting choice he made as he was driving along the highway with his 13-year-old son
“So I did something a little bit regrettable this morning as a parent,” Joel Barbour, of Spokane, Wash., said in an Instagram reel. “But I threw my son’s Nintendo Switch out the car going 60 miles an hour down highway 211.”
“I’m not kidding you,” Barbour continued. “My son, he’s 13, he’s being a little f—er. He thinks he knows better. He wasn’t even playing the Switch. He just had it. I was like, keep going and I’m gonna throw your Switch out the window. He was like, no you’re not.”
Every parent has been there: Your tween or teen is talking back and you’re at a loss for how to make them realize the error of their ways. Barbour says his son’s cocky insistence that there was no way his dad would really toss his Switch made him lose his patience and “Frisbee the thing” out of the window of his moving vehicle
“It felt pretty great,” he admitted. “I felt horrible doing it because he loves this thing, but man, it felt good. And really, just the look on his face. He couldn’t even believe it. You know, he’s crying and trying to tell me how expensive it is, like he knows, like he pays a damn thing.”
“So you know, if your kids are testing you, just throw it,” Barbour says at the close of the reel. “Throw the electric, throw the phone, throw ’em out the window. It feels great.”
Parents were quick to jump in on the post to share similar stories of being driven to lose it by their kids. One dad shared that his son complained so much about how poorly his phone worked that, while doing some handyman jobs around the house, he “spun around and hit the phone with the hammer and said, ‘Sucky phone problem solved, now you have no phone!’”
“I threw my 16-year-old daughter’s phone out of the car and then drove over it,” said another parent. “Still one of my favorite parenting moves.”
And, as it turns out, Barbour’s son, whose name is Davis, may have learned a thing or two from the experience. In a follow-up reel, shared to Instagram, he talks to his son about the incident, saying, “Everybody was so concerned about Davis’ Switch and if he learned anything … What did you learn?”
“The video is kind of funny,” Davis says. “But I learned that you definitely don’t disrespect your parents or else things get Frisbeed in places you don’t want em.”
“And we did go back,” Barbour says. “We got the Switch. We pieced it together, and it still works.”
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