Are you KIDDING me? I never cease to be amazed at what some parents will do to get their kids to be ‘better’:

A soccer mom, upset at her teenage daughter’s performance at a game Saturday, stopped along Interstate 80 and left her there.

Officer Katherine Finnell said the 42-year-old Lincoln woman was ticketed on suspicion of child neglect after the 2:30 p.m. incident.

She said the woman yelled at her 15-year-old in her car and asked her to repeat lines about improving her performance. When the girl messed up the lines, she slapped her.

Finnell said the teen told her mom to pull over along I-80 near the downtown exit, so she did. That’s when the girl says her mom yelled at her to get out. She did and her mom drove away.

The poor girl is not a robot. Do I encourage my kids to excel? Yes. Are there repercussions if they fail, say, at school? Yes, though that usually involves the loss of privileges, not abandonment on an interstate! Have I been brutally honest with my son after a match where he just didn’t play well? Rarely, though I don’t berate him, but life is not all ponies and roses. If he has a bad game I tell him so and encourage him to get past it and learn from it as well as highlighting the good points. But who in their right mind is going to discipline their child over their performance on the soccer field?

Even if one of my kids started a fight on the pitch and got red-carded, it would never cross my mind to leave him on the highway. They’d be in HUGE trouble – to me no different than fighting in school, but still. There’s discipline and there’s abuse.

Any parent being honest will admit they’ve lost their cool, gone a little farther than they normally would when upset with a child. This includes on the soccer field. But there are big big lines 99.9% of parents don’t cross, for any reason. I’m thinking highway abandonment is one of them. Screaming at the top of your lungs? Not so much. But I digress 🙂

What drives me crazy is that these are the things that always get publicized – crazy soccer moms. Like soccer is somehow unique in having parents who are overzealous freaks. Yet you know there are parents who will hit or berate their kids when they fold the laundry wrong or bring home a bad grade (I’m not talking F’s – I mean not an ‘A’) or don’t live up to their parents hyper-inflated expectations for their kids. But catch a soccer mom in the act of bad parenting and it’s national news.

H/T White Trash Mom