These days, judgment and outrage seem to be as American as baseball and apple pie. God help you if you stumble as a parent, as all parents do, and the internet finds out about it. Just ask Tashia Ditucci of Concord.
Last week, Tashia’s 8-year-old son James suffered second-degree burns on 15 percent of his body after trying to duplicate a stunt he had seen on YouTube. The boy was having a sleepover with his 10-year-old brother and a cousin when he covered his hands in hand sanitizer and set them on fire. The trick is that the alcohol in the sanitizer is supposed to burn off before the flames can singe the skin. It went horribly wrong, but it could have been much worse. James’s mother was told by doctors that her son could have died if the fire had burned even a minute longer. The Abbot-Downing School student is now recovering in a Boston hospital.
To watch Tashia speak to WMUR is to watch a deeply shaken mother who knows she almost lost her little boy. We imagine that she can’t stop replaying that night in her head and punishing herself for not preventing the near-tragedy. Some lessons are painfully learned.
We would like to say we were surprised to learn that Facebook commenters decided to skip human empathy and assign Tashia Ditucci the tag of negligent mother, but online callousness is a new American pastime.
It’s true that there are some bad parents out there. We read about them every day. They are the ones who intentionally inflict harm on their children or fail to protect them because it’s inconvenient. That’s not what happened here. Ditucci checked on the boys several times during the night and wishes now that she had checked one more time.
But even that may not have been enough. Kids sometimes act impulsively because, well, they’re kids. They are incapable of assessing all the risks associated with their actions. The challenge for parents is to instill caution without making their child afraid of the world.
Of course, none of this will make much of an impression on those who sit at their keyboards waiting to render verdicts. In this not-so-brave new online world, judgment and outrage are the default settings.