Classic, but terrible way to teach children a lesson

It’s a classic parenting tactic: teach kids not to adopt vices by forcing the activity upon them, in turn making them sick and wary of the dangerous behavior.

KIRO Radio’s John Curley’s family was raised that way, at least his mother was.

“My mom, God bless her, she smoked and smoked for the longest time,” Curley said. “She started smoking when she was 13 years old, her sister Jan started when she was 14, and Uncle Billy started at 16 &#8212 all started on the exact same day.”

Three siblings and all started their addictions on the same day. How is that possible?

“When her father noticed that one of them, Uncle Bill, had some cigarettes hidden behind the barn, he got the cigarettes,” Curley recalled. “He then went down to the store, got a carton of cigarettes and came back. He laid them all out and sat all three of them down.”

“He said, ‘You trying cigarettes? Tell ya what, smoke all of these.’ And he put the matches down, the cigarettes down, an ashtray down, and he made the three of them smoke. And they smoked and smoked and smoked,” Curley said.

His father’s idea was to show the kids that smoking was bad by forcing them to smoke heavily. Most anyone would get sick from the sudden exposure. Which is what dad had in mind.

“My mom told me, ‘We smoked so much that we eventually became addicted to it.’ And all three of them smoked for almost 30 years of their life,” Curley said.

So it backfired.

It’s not an uncommon method of trying to teach kids the pitfalls of certain vices, and while Curley can joke about his family story, not everyone is so fortunate.

In Uinta County, Wyoming a family attempted to teach their 16-year-old son about the dangers of drinking alcohol.

According to the Uinta County Herald, Joseph and Paulette Richardson tried to teach their son what could happen if he drank alcohol. The boy had been asking to drink like adults for years. The idea was to teach a lesson about the ills of drinking, especially since his biological father was an alcoholic.

On July 6, from 8:30-10:30 p.m. their son, Kendal Ball, was allowed to drink. He had shots of Jack Daniels whiskey and Fireball, according to the Herald. The young man was in bed by 11 p.m. The parents told officials Ball gave them the thumbs up as he went to bed. When they checked on him at 3:45 a.m., he was unresponsive.

“There was vomit,” Tom said. “There was brown liquid coming out of his mouth. He was rushed to the hospital and he was pronounced dead from acute alcohol poisoning.”

“His blood alcohol level &#8212 remember it’s .08 to be considered legally drunk &#8212 it was .587. If you were a 140 pound man, you would have to drink 12 drinks in an hour to get to .3,” Tom noted.

The parents are being charged with involuntary manslaughter, the Herald reports. The story is heartbreaking, Tom said.