I skimmed social media looking for news as I usually do in the morning when a video popped up and started playing all on its own.  It was one of those grainy doorbell videos like the ones people in my neighborhood post of coyotes, which I usually scroll, but the image stopped my hand, and I, hooked, watched.  A large man somehow managed to hold up a small child by the shoulder, and strike him several times on the body with his fist.  My stomach clenched, because it looked like injury, possibly serious, to the child.  My first thought was this might be a murder.  In the space that shock makes in my head came the thought, “Is this true?”

After a breath, I zoomed out and read the headline — some pointless political drivel — and settled.  I’ve been getting a lot of altered videos in my stream, lately.  This could be completely faked.  I have a tool for that.

“Grok,” I typed, “Is this real?”  I’ve found that Grok can do lots of fun and flashy work.  It is useless for anything involving a conclusion, but altered documents and videos leave a trail as wide as a five-lane highway.  There are a number of websites and apps that can do pieces of this work, but Grok is more question-oriented than my prior favorite, Tin Eye.  Grok responded with about three sentences of mush that translated into “looks like an unaltered doorbell clip.”  So far, so good.  I was back to breathing normally by this time.  The task of digging for truth settles me.  “How old is this clip?”  “Has this clip been altered?”  For me, the classic reporter’s questions (Who, What, When Where, How and Why) are a good guide for clarifying Grok answers, except that How and Why tend to dredge up irrelevant, agenda-driven commentary, much of which I discard.

The clip was real, US-origin, relatively recent, associated with a viral story that eventually made it to the local, not national, news.  The man was identified by name, as was the child, a three-year-old boy.   The man, said to be the father, had turned himself in after the clip had gone viral on local media.  

So I looked at the video again, with the sound turned on.  The man was angry, his words unclear.  I could make out “playing with me” several times.  He put down the child, and they walked out of view.  I could find nothing to indicate what the child might have said or done to prompt this reaction.

The phrase “playing with me” from a parent is commonly used to mean disrespect or defiance by a child.  Disrespect for a parent is widely considered to be a problem, that must be dealt with in some manner.  https://www.parents.com/disrespectful-children-8609412   and when it shows up in adults, it can be a sign of chronic dysfunction, be it in parent or adult child.  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/liking-the-child-you-love/202501/why-your-grown-child-disrespects-you-and-how-to-fix-it  . 

However, when I think about it afterward, I never saw behavior traceable to disrespect from my own children.  I saw them pop off and melt down.  Through multiple experiments, I found out that a child who has melted down can be most rapidly fixed by meeting its needs.

With practice, I could see it coming.  Getting “bad” behavior out of my children was dead, solid simple, and inevitable if I did not plan ahead.  All I had to do was push them beyond their limits.  Once they were past the diaper stage and not sick, the go-to solutions turned out to be food and a nap.

Another thing about children who are just learning to talk is that they don’t know what they’re saying.  I observed that both my brother and my children used words that they did not understand. They learn what words mean by using them.  After three boys, I concluded that it is a mistake to take seriously anything that comes out of the mouth of a young child.

So, what happened here?  Chances are the kid yelled or said something awful to his father, and the father heard disrespect.  He may have made the very common mistake of thinking the little one was in control of himself and using adult language in an adult fashion, with adult understanding.

In a flash of temper, he punished the kid right then and there, then quickly broke off.  They walked out of the camera range.  On about the fourth viewing I realized that the child walked, too, and may not have been seriously injured after all.  When the father subsequently saw himself on video, he turned himself in.  Perhaps he was also shocked at how bad his actions looked.

As a scientist I always wonder what conditions to change in an experiment.  The man in the video looked terrible after something happened with the boy.  Now I wonder how this man would have reacted if he’d known the child was helplessly responding to hunger or tiredness or both?  What if he had stopped and asked the boy “What do you think that word means?”  What if he understood that signaling parental disapproval doesn’t require any great amount of force, and that overdoing the drama can backfire?  What if this video is about ignorance, not bad faith?  In my own experience, the learning curve for me at times was almost as steep as the one for my children.  

I am grateful to my family because they taught me the significance of very early learning in babies.  The things I learned from observing my children when they were babies made handling them as they learned to talk much easier.