As parents trying to navigate the modern world of screens and kids, we have all felt the sudden urge to fling a device out the nearest window.
For Joel Barbour, a father of five, that urge became a reality—instantly turning him into an internet sensation after he threw his son’s Nintendo Switch out of a moving vehicle. It’s a move that local highway patrol would almost certainly frown upon, but the internet is letting him have his moment.
He started his now-viral Instagram video with an honest admission: “So I did something a little bit regrettable this morning as a parent, kind of not, kind of felt absolutely great.”
Barbour explained that his 13-year-old son, Davis, was being “a little f-cker” who thought he knew better than his parents.
Deciding to take matters into his own hands, he took the simple route: bye-bye Switch.
“I threw my son’s Nintendo Switch out the car, going 60 miles [96km/h] an hour down a highway,” Barbour proudly recalled.
“He wasn’t even playing the Switch. I was like, ‘Keep going, I’m gonna throw your Switch out the window.’ He was like, ‘No, you’re not.’ I frisbeed this thing. I mean, it felt pretty great.”
While the act was satisfying, the father admitted to a brief moment of guilt. “I felt horrible doing it because he loves this thing—and, uh, man, it felt good too. The look on his face, he couldn’t even believe it. You know he’s crying, trying to tell me how expensive it is, like he knows, like he pays for a damn thing anyway.”
Empathizing with other parents currently navigating school holidays and screen addiction, Barbour ended his video with a rallying cry: “So, you know, if your kids are testing you, just throw it. Throw the electrics, throw the phones, throw them out the window. Feels great.”
It didn’t take long for fellow parents to flock to the comments section to show their appreciation.
“You’re doing great, dad,” one person praised.
A mother quickly agreed, sharing her own extreme measures: “I threw my 16-year-old daughter’s phone out of the car and then drove over it. Still one of my favorite parenting moves.”
“So we’re not ‘gentle parenting’ anymore? Got it!” another joked.
To which a user replied: “If you understand gentle parenting, you understand that this is gentle parenting. Not yelling, shaming, or losing control… following through on something you said in a calm manner is the gentle part. When you understand what it is, it actually makes 100 per cent sense.”
Another mother cheered: “Following through on rogue threats is key to successful parenting.”
Others looked back fondly on the strict parenting styles of previous decades. “I’ll never forget when my mom took a hammer to my sister’s Barbie house because of her attitude. Destroyed it in front of us all. Powerful lesson,” one user commented.
“I have been known to throw several treasures out the car window back in the ’90s, usually items my children were fighting over,” another ’90s mom weighed in. “The stories they now tell, laughing until they cry. Lessons learned, and mom is a legend.”
A few days after the initial video took the internet by storm, Barbour shared an update video alongside his son.
“All right, so everybody was so concerned… about Davis’s Switch and if he learned anything,” Barbour said, turning the camera to his teenager. “What did you learn?”
According to Davis, the tough-love approach worked.
“It’s been a couple of days, you saw the video. Yeah, well, the video is kind of funny,” Davis said. “But I learned that you definitely don’t disrespect your parents or else things get frisbeed in places that you don’t want them.”
But what about the expensive console itself?
“We did go back, we got the Switch. We pieced it back together, and it still works,” Barbour revealed, adding with a laugh that Davis’s sister went right back to playing it immediately after.
When asked if he had any regrets, the father doubled down on his method.
“I still stand behind it. Throw the electronics out the window.”
