Homeschool
Moms Hiring Bullies to Teach Kids Valuable Lessons Wearing a heavy pair of earmuffs while tending to some vacuuming, Tammy Price of Waterbury, Connecticut is less concerned with the cold of late winter than the flurries of obscenities and spine chilling shrieks of agony emanating from the second floor of her home.
After the commotion
finally subsides, she gives an overweight, moustached twelve year-old boy $20 and a bag of ice for his knuckles, then heads upstairs to find her 10 year-old son Brandon hanging from a coat rack by his underwear. Concerned that depriving their homeschooled children the
sometimes brutal inculcation that public schoolyards provide will leave them too
delicate to cope with the harsh realities of life, the Prices are one of
many homeschool families around the country who are contracting local bullies
to come to their homes to physically and emotionally abuse their kids. There are a lot of real assholes walking this cruel planet, and you need to learn how to deal
with it, observed Brandons father Gary, Which is why I think its
good conditioning to have some creep come over to the house from time to time to give my boy
the business and kick the crap out of him a bit." Though his wife recognizes
the real world value bullies have to offer, she laments the necessity of having
to dole out tough love through a hulking, adolescent pituitary-case intermediary.
"Watching my son vomit from fear before one of his play-dates just about breaks my heart," she says, "I know it's for the best, but to
see him walking around for days afterward completely stooped over and bow-legged
from being slugged repeatedly in the stomach and having his pants pulled forcibly upwards between his tender tooshie cheeks, it makes me really sad that this is necessary." Nonetheless, the Price's, like so many
other homeschool parents, say they greatly prefer having their child beaten up
and humiliated in the controlled environment of their own home. "We
always search the bullies we hire for weapons before letting them in the house,
so at least Brandon won't get shot or stabbed like he'd be liable to at public
school, and although the twenty dollars an hour we pay is just the tip of the
iceburg after the bullies get through either stealing or destroying many of his most
expensive toys, we know it'll all be worth it in the long run," Mr. Price
remarked. |