Pokemon Card-Burning Mom Sets Off Twitter Inferno

Move over, Bean Dad, it seems yet another parent has singlehandedly become the parenting supervillain of Twitter – Pokemon Card Mom. 

On Friday,  political communications consultant Liz Mair took to social media to share her erm, fiery approach to reprimanding her child – incineration his Pokemon cards. “I have resorted to burning Pokémon cards as a punishment when my kid doesn’t do basic stuff he has to do," she wrote, in a tweet that has garnered the ultra-cursed ratio of 107 retweets and 5,661 quote tweets, later nothing that “the basic stuff" in question "is eating."

“He comes home without having eaten any of his lunch? Card burnt,” she elaborated in a subsequent post. “He doesn’t eat enough dinner? Card burnt. Bear in mind my kid is about 4’6” tall at age 7 and yet weighs less than 55 pounds. He needs to put some weight on, specifically muscle.”

While some commended Mair's approach …

it seems others were less than convinced, claiming this is supervillain origin story material … 

… bestowing upon her the highly un-coveted title of Twitter's main character …

… and discussing the financial implications of this decision …

… with everyone's favorite pottery-making 2000's RomCom staple, Seth Rogen, even sounding off on the matter. 

But don't take it from the judgemental chorus of strangers and, well, Seth Rogen – back in 2018, Richard David Curtis, an expert in child behavior, told Metro UK that smashing your kids' stuff can garner less-than-desired outcomes, namely that “repetitively associating violent acts with not getting your own way can teach children a link between the two.”

‘Even as a one-off it is quite extreme," he explained, speaking in the context of British TV presenter, Kirstie Allsopp, who at the time, said she broke her childrens' iPads to stop them from playing Fortnite. “How would Kirstie have acted if one of her children did that to her phone because she was too busy to do something with them?’”

A better alternative, he says? Confiscating your children's items instead of, you know, going pyro on their Pokemon cards or smashing their electronics. 

“It is far more appropriate to restrict access or take it away for a finite period of time,” he continued adding that this way, “children learn to respect the boundary."

“The risk is with using a large sanction like destroying it or giving it away to someone else, is that rather than teach children about respect, it teaches them to be devious and hide their use of the game.”

So folks, take it from, well, pretty much the entire internet – why punish your children by burning their Pokemon cards when you could punish them the way my parents punished me – forcing your kids to become Seinfeld super-fans by blocking every channel on the TV, leaving them with a boxed set of seasons 1-6, and calling it a day.

For more internet nonsense, follow Carly on Instagram @HuntressThompson_ on TikTok as @HuntressThompson_, and on Twitter @TennesAnyone.