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Notes -
It comes off as somewhat delusional. This comment sums it up:
If you have 2 parents with jobs, who care about your academic and musical accomplishments, you're probably doing pretty well, even if they hit you once in a while.
You're gonna get them investigated by CPS, make them lose their job, make them more stressed out or the family poorer by breaking things, for what? So you can be in the care of people who care less and are even more abusive, with fewer resources?
Ideally you'd be able to find a somewhat trustworthy adult like a relative that could take you in, but that's not something a child can easily assess.
Additionally, parents have many non-violent ways of hurting their children if they escalate. Domestic violence charges that will stick to their background checks for years while they're looking for their first job, identity theft to ruin their credit, psych ward commitment...
Even the author concedes that their strategy is only viable if the parents are paper tigers, and TBH I feel like their conception of parents who aren't paper tigers is abstract at best.
What do you do with a parent who is no stranger to breaking their own windows? Or, to get personal, what do you do with a parent who would burn their own house down (It was a shoddily executed attempt at insurance fraud in which we lost far more than the insurance paid us.) and then have the kid drugged for being sad about it (Mom doctor shopped until she found someone willing to diagnose me with OCD.)?
Somehow this escaped me but still, why would a 'paper tiger' hit a kid? Probably because the kid did something wrong. Is it worth jeopardizing the only relationship you have with adults who have your best interests in mind over some moderate violence? Even if there is no significant escalation, parents can always simply give up on the child.
'Oh yes I never dissuaded you from getting into 100k in debt for an art degree because you'd break a window over it, remember?'
'Why did I not discourage you from dating this clearly abusive person? What was I supposed to do, hit you?'
'You got yourself disfigured and sterilized and we did nothing to stop you? Well we thought you were all grown-up all along'
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One of the silly and dangerous things about the exchange in Aella's post is that it doesn't distinguish between parental motivations. I suspect, though I can't know, that the parents of authors one and two are disciplining, whether wisely or unwisely, out of love, so those kids really don't have to worry about their parents trying to hurt them this way out of revenge. But kids from worse families who tried their advice could be burned pretty badly.
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