I agree with the cat. What the bloody hell is that guy doing, hitting so close to that baby?

Reminds me of a guy who used to "tease" his baby when it was young. I was horrified at the time, and sure enough, the kid grew up to look wary and skittish all the time.

Knock it off, mister. It isn't funny.

(Older kids LOVE to be teased, if done in a loving way. This baby is waaay too young to understand.)

I think (hope) he was only doing it to demonstrate the cat's protectiveness.

Awwwwwwww.

What a sweet kitty. ♥

I think that the noise being picked up by the recorder makes it sound a lot worse than what it is. In my opinion, he's only really patting next to the baby.

Would it not be fair to say that clapping is a roughly equivalent action? And i see people doing that near babies all the time without someone worrying about affecting the kid's mental state as it grows up, or worrying if the kid perceives the clapping of hands as a threat or worry.

If babies are too young to understand, then they may misunderstand clapping? Or alternatively how are they to understand the waving of someone's hand nearby to be aggressive? Especially given that it appears to be a comfortable family unit.

Most importantly, can we please consider that the baby was slapping its own leg? Perhaps one day the baby slapped its hand about, the father did the same thing, and the baby got enjoyment out of it? It slaps its hand about again at the end too. We don't know, we can't know, and it's very unfair to make so many casual assumptions - not just about his actions, but about what is normal for different people.

I'm concerned about the amount of assumptions being made in chastising this man. Especially when drawing a parallel to an anecdote about someone "growing up skittish" because of "teasing". Correlation, not necessarily causation.. and again, what evidence is this of teasing, and how is it fair to speculatively compare it to something stated so vaguely?

I'm sorry to be combative about it, but i feel this is a huge leap of imagination based on 30 seconds of video. A great many of us (if not all) could be made to look all kinds of contrary ways based on 30 second snippets, and it's an indelible brush that he's being hurriedly tarred with. I stand to be corrected, but i don't see any signs of distress either from the baby or the person recording, and the baby looks otherwise healthy and well provisioned. It was not placed in that seating with those accoutrements without care and attention. I think more harm than good can come of judging things like this, considering the subtlety of most *actual* abusers.

He was doing exactly that.
He's said he's punishing the baby for having dirty hands.