Dec 11, 2018 3 min read

If you haven’t heard, an Ohio father has been praised and panned in equal parts for making his 10-year-old daughter walk to school.

The girl had been suspended from riding the school bus for the second time this year because she bullied another child, her father said in the now-viral video he posted to Facebook. He wanted to hammer home the lesson that bullying isn’t acceptable and that she isn’t entitled to a ride to school when her bad choices put her in a position to need one.

As one might imagine, the video sparked strong opinions. Some thought the dad got it just right, and taught his daughter a very valuable lesson. Others believed he missed the point, calling him a bully for forcing the girl to make the five-mile trek to school in 36-degree weather as he followed slowly behind her in the car.

No matter whether you feel that the punishment fit the crime, there’s a bigger issue at stake: its documentation for posterity.

Parents love to share pictures and videos of their children on the different social media platforms. Those things can get liked and shared a multitude of times. It’s likely that the silly video of little Johnny tripping up the steps at age 3 will remain out there, in one form or another, long after he has kids of his own.

So will the video of this girl, who’s been widely identified in television and newspaper reports. Searching the girl’s name (or her father’s) will always bring up headlines like: “Ohio dad shows us how not to raise a bully” or “Dad’s punishment for bullying goes viral.” Almost all of the online news stories have a copy of the two-minute video linked or embedded on the page.

As of last week, the video had been viewed 21,883,454 times. It continues to remain a public post on the father’s Facebook page.

Parents urge their children to be vigilant about what they post on social media.

“Don’t post anything that will embarrass you later,” they say. “It can come back to bite you when you look for a job.”

It would seem that some parents – and this father, in particular – need to practice what they preach and consider how they represent their children on social media. Parents ought to think about the potential long-term impact that their posts may have on their children, especially in a world where nothing shared online ever really goes away.

Even if the Ohio girl’s father pulls down the video, at this point, it’s been copied to other sites. This 10-year-old’s punishment will always exist online. Her father’s voice will forever narrate from his vehicle as a camera captures the girl, carrying a lunch box and wearing her yellow and purple backpack, trudging to school.

A search of her name, even years from now, will bring up her very public shaming.

At its best, it will cause her continued embarrassment for a childhood mistake. At its worst, that could cost her opportunities.

And those potential penalties – far more so than a walk in the cold – are too steep a price.