Hypnosis has been used to treat conditions like anxiety and pain, but Los Angeles hypnotherapist and mother of three Lisa Machenberg says it can be a very effective parenting technique. She’s even given her unusual method a name – hypno-parenting.

Machenberg first started using hypnosis on her children to help them get through the night without wetting the bed, but has since then used the clinical technique to aid them deal with things like performance anxiety or focusing difficulties. The Malibu-based therapist also admits to using hypnosis on her kids and husband in order to make sure things run smoothly around the house. “I hypnotize my children and my husband to do things for my benefit all the time,” she recently told Barcroft Media. “We have a household to run. Many times, I exert influence so my children are able to get their chores done, so this house runs efficiently.”

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In a bid to spend more time with his daughter and get to know her better, a Shanghai dad sold his two million yuan ($300,000) house and his share of the company that he co-founded. He is now using the money to travel the world for five years, along with his two-year-old girl.

“If I don’t keep her company now, I will lose the chance after she grows up,” Zhu Chunxiao said. According to news reports, Zhu, who is of Korean descent, lived and worked in Shanghai for the past 10 years. As a successful entrepreneur he lived a comfortable life, but he decided to give it all up to give his daughter a taste of the real world. So after three months of careful planning, he sold all his assets and decided to take off for the next five years.

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There’s something quite special about dads doing their daughters’ hair – celebrating the fact is Denver salon owner Calli Huebl-Bodilis. She regularly hosts a hairdressing workshop called ‘Beer and Braids’ for dads and their little girls at her salon, Envogue.

The workshop – priced at $55 – provides one-on-one training to six dads on ponytail, braid, and bun basics. They get hands-on practice on their own daughters’ hair, after which the little girls put on a fashion show that is judged by stylists. The winning dad gets a six-pack of beer, while all the girls are gifted goody bags with hair products.

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Looking to teach your misbehaving children a lesson?  Well, a barbershop in Snellville, Atlanta, seems to have hit upon the perfect solution – old-man haircuts that make kids look like they are balding.

Aptly named the ‘Benjamin Button Special’, the haircut involves shaving the crown of the head and leaving the sides long to make them resemble a balding elderly person. The service is offered free of charge three times a week by Russell Fredrick and his team at their suburban salon A-1 Kutz.

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Chinese businessman He Liesheng is putting Tiger Moms to shame by taking ‘pushy parenting’ to whole new levels. ‘Eagle Dad’, as he calls himself, has only one philosophy when it comes to raising his son: “We think that not having adventures in life is the most dangerous thing.”

Well, adventures don’t sound all that bad, but wait till you hear what he’s put his son through so far. At age four, He Yide was made to jog in the snow, while wearing only underpants. It was supposed to be a character building exercise, and the video clip that Liesheng shared online showed the boy crying while running in New York’s subzero temperatures. It earned him the name ‘Running Naked Boy’ on Chinese social media.

A year later, Yide was taught to fly a plane and he made a 35-minute flight above Beijing Wildlife Park in an ultralight aircraft, breaking the Guinness Record for the world’s youngest pilot.

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While most parents punish kids by sending them to their room, Sofia Petrova’s mother went a little further than that – she exiled her misbehaving daughter to another country. The 18-year-old hasn’t been home in three years; her mother hasn’t permitted her to return in spite of repeated apologies and pleas.

So how does a parent actually convince a 15-year-old high school freshman to board a plane to Siberia? Well, it turns out that Sofia was tricked. Her mother and stepfather told her that they were sending her on a three-week vacation to visit her biological father for the first time. But when Sofia reached Novosibirsk city, she realised the chilling truth – there was no return ticket.

That’s when her mother and stepfather informed her that she was actually being ‘punished’ for her typical teenager behavior – flunking school, running away from home and stealing money. She was to remain in Siberia with her father until she learned to change her ways. Sofia was pretty much helpless; although she grew up in the US, she was born in Siberia and had a Russian passport. So she needed her mother’s consent to return.

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29-year-old Kuang Zhengxuan is currently making waves on Chinese social media websites for his atrocious behavior – he’s actually suing his parents for not taking care of his financial needs. Despite his age, Kuang apparently expects his parents to continue ‘raising’ him, an attitude that has earned him the nickname ‘man-baby’.

Kuang is said to have quit school at a young age and studied woodworking and haircutting instead. He tried working for a while, but he says he was wrongly accused of stealing and beaten. That’s when he concluded that he has no real abilities, so he simply stopped working.

According to news reports, he lived a rather lazy lifestyle in his parents’ home. He spent all his time sleeping or playing with his cellphone. Fed up with his behavior, his parents recently asked him to leave home and fend for himself.

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An elderly Chinese couple were recently forced to go to court to teach their freeloading son a lesson. Xu Qing, the 29-year-old son, never went to work because he found it too boring. He chose a life of comfort at his parents’ home instead, where all his needs were being met. But the situation got out of hand when he brought his girlfriend to live with him, and expected the same service for her as well.

It all started when Qing, an only child, left university; he simply refused to go to work like other people his age. His mother, Xu Hsing, cooked and cleaned for him out of love. Qing was the typical spoilt son – he ate, slept and surfed the internet all day long. His father Ku managed to find him a job, but he quit after only three months because it was too dull.

Soon, Qing managed to meet a jobless woman online, and the pair hit it off. She moved in with the family after dating Qing for only a month. The parents were horrified, and much to their chagrin, discovered that they were expected to cook and clean for the girlfriend as well! This was the last straw – they put down an ultimatum asking Qing to get a job or move out.

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Last winter, when Jeremiah Heaton’s daughter Emily asked him if she could be a real princess, the doting father didn’t have the heart to refuse. Even though he didn’t want to raise her hopes or make any false promises, he found himself agreeing to the outlandish request of a six-year-old.

“Over the winter, Emily and I were playing, and she has a fixation on princesses,” he said. “She asked me, in all seriousness, if she’d be a real princess someday. And I said she would.”

So Jeremiah spent hours scouring the internet for a suitable piece of unclaimed territory. He focused his search on the Latin term ‘terra nullius’, which means ‘land belonging to no one’. After several months of searching, he has now managed to locate an 800-square mile desert in Africa, thousands of miles away from his home in Abingdon, Virginia.

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Money might not grow on trees, but it sure can buy you lots of them. Proving this point is a rich businessman’s wife in China, who has rented a whole mountain just so her her daughter can learn more about nature and the great outdoors.

33-year-old Gan Lin, a former teacher, now spends most of her time dreaming up innovative ways of spending her husband’s money. The family lives in China’s Chongqing municipality, where Yin Gan, the daughter, attends fourth grade at a primary school. Gan recently discovered just how little Yin knew about nature, so she decided to solve the problem by throwing some of her excess money at it. She paid a local council to lease a mountain, including a 1.3-hectare farm located there.

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A Boston father and his 14-year-old daughter have recently made the headlines after the man posted a photo of a Facebook Deactivation Agreement that states the girl will receive 200$ if she doesn’t log into her Facebook account for the next five months.

Facebook addiction is one of the most talked-about issues of the moment, and when it comes to teens, the problem is even bigger. But one Boston parent may have found the perfect way to convince his daughter to take a nice long break from the popular social media platform – he’s paying her $200. The enterprising young girl has managed to strike a deal with her father, Paul Baier, that involves him paying her $50 in April and an extra $150 in June, if she respects her part of the agreement. “It was her idea, which I fully support,” Paul told the Daily Dot. “She wants to earn money and also finds Facebook a distraction and a waste of time sometimes.”

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Ever looked at a baby and wondered if it was a boy or a girl? I’ve been there. It’s a dicey situation because most parents take offence if you blurt out the wrong gender. Beck Laxton and Keiran Cooper are exceptions, though. They raised their kid for five years without revealing the gender to anyone, until recently. Only when things were getting difficult at school did they tell the world that their baby is actually a boy.

This might sound real crazy to a lot of people out there, and Laxton is quite aware of that too. The 46-year-old mom does admit that several people had branded the couple as “loony” and they had to suffer some amount of ostracisation due to their choices. “I discovered that I’d been described as ‘that loony woman who doesn’t know whether her baby is a boy or a girl’. And I could never persuade anyone in the group to come around for coffee. They just thought I was mental,” she says.

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This isn’t the first time the Chinese have been in the news for their strict parenting techniques. When Chinese-American Amy Chua came out with her book, “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, it was met with a lot of criticism.

Now it’s Xiao Baiyou’s turn. Also Chinese, the 47-year-old businessman recently published a book called “That’s Why They Go to Peking University”, about his fathering techniques. He believes that his practice of hitting his children with a rattan cane helped them get into top colleges. He has been nicknamed “Wolf Dad” after his brutal methods, and he is actually proud of the title. “Wolves look ferocious and brutal, yet they have great wisdom and are exceptionally tender to their cubs,” he said. His brutality, according to him, is only out of love.

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