The Nitti Family

The Nitti Family is the eighth episode of Season 3 of Supernanny USA.

Episode summary
Jo visits the Nitti Family in West Melbourne, Florida. 28-year-old Lisa has 4 unruly sons: 10-year-old Darren, 8-year-old Matthew, 6-year-old Devin, and 5-year-old Jared.

Darren is the bully of the family. He will do anything he can to hurt his brothers. He stabbed his younger brother Matthew in his back with a thumbtack.

Matthew is very dramatic and hyperactive. In a submission reel, Matthew tries to hide his game controller in a hamper full of toys while Lisa confiscates his GameCube.

Jared is a mama's boy. He's the youngest member of the family and copies his family's disruptive behavior.

Devin is very explosive and would lash out when he loses his temper.

Lisa and her boyfriend John (44) have been together for almost 2 years, but they can be aggressive and angry. When the boys act up, Lisa threatens to call John, whose temper intimidates the boys.

When Jo tries to put change into the house, John is resistant and even angrily confronts her.

Can Jo help Lisa and John with the boys, and can she try to get John on the same page when it comes to changing the household?

Submission Reel
Jo is in West Melbourne, Florida to help the Nitti Family. Lisa (28) had 4 boys before meeting her boyfriend, John (44). John Describes The House as "The Crazy House".

Darren (10) is the bully of the house. He will do anything he can think of to hurt his brothers. In one scene, Darren accidentally stabs Matthew with a thumbtack.

Matthew (8) is the second-born drama queen, and will cry over anything, He is shown having a breakdown when Lisa confiscates his GameCube and the game controllers.

Jared (5) is a mommy's boy, due to the fact that he's the youngest, Lisa believes the reason for him being one is due to the fact she’ll often give into him.

Devin (6), he controls the house. For the second youngest, Devin is an extremely aggressive boy. He constantly battles his brothers.

As soon as John gets home, The first thing he does is yell at his boys. Worse, the Boys give no respect to Lisa whatsoever, which bothers John as he doesn’t know how to change that.

Observation
Jo arrives to help the Nitti's. But before her observation even began John had Devin in the corner. John admitted he felt a little embarrassed as Jo walked in on him trying to keep Devin in the Corner. Soon afterwards John left for work. Then Lisa had confrontation with Devin as he hit one of his brothers with a sword, Lisa says that when Devin throws fits he does anything he can to hurt her. Then what happened next was the unthinkable. Lisa began to put Devin in a headlock while he was clawing her, screaming and spitting everywhere. Lisa was just sitting there being hit and spat at and somehow allowing all the abuse. To Jo, Devin spits like a camel. Darren also mentions how Lisa is treated “like a punching bag” by Devin. Lisa pacifies Devin and as opposed to disciplining him, she gave him the sword that made him aggressive in the first place.

After the headlock incident, Jo got to see exactly how the boys treated each other. She doesn’t really see them be nice as the boys fight constantly, Lisa says the boys have zero respect for themselves whatsoever. Jo says it’s so much for Darren who's the oldest and is meant to be the "role model", as he’s simply there attacking his brothers. Darren says stuff happens, and in the interview he claims he's "a little bit of a bully."

At lunchtime, the smallest thing turned into a huge crisis for Lisa. She became very aggressive and in all of the kids' faces. She sends all of her kids to the corner. Darren and Jared for refusing to sit, Devin for hitting his brother but probably the strangest was Matthew all for getting mustard. So Matthew is in the corner and Darren, who just left it began to start trouble again by sneaking Matthew some chicken nuggets. Matthew was asked to go to his room because he's had his opportunity (according to Lisa) for the corner. Lisa then calls John because sometimes she'll have to call him at work if the boys are acting to crazy for her to deal with. Lisa says that if Matthew hangs up on John, he will be in trouble.

Lisa had to run some errands with the kids, but getting them in the car was a disaster. Lisa told Devin to put on his seatbelt, but Devin refuses. Lisa decides to toss the sword in the trash. She continued to fight with him, and took everyone out of the car until Devin was ready to behave. Eventually, he was ready to go, but he still fought with his mom. As Lisa drove halfway to the destination, the boys were fighting. Lisa put Devin back in his seatbelt, and she turned around, and drove all the way home.

Eventually, John comes home from work, only to hear about how disrespectful the boys have been towards Lisa and each other. Then he screams orders at the boys. John is fine with the boys doing as they're told because he scares them by raising his voice. What makes Lisa angry is the fact the boys give John a lot more respect then they do to her, since she’s the one who’s with them all the time, Lisa believes she’s the one who should get all the respect and not John.

Parents Meeting
Jo gets straight to the point and says that all the boys are punching living daylight out of themselves, Lisa says that Devin's fury started when he was a baby and she doesn't think that Darren has anger issues. Jo is shocked by this and John laughs knowing that Lisa is wrong, Jo knows that behavior needs to stop and John says it's why she's here. Jo finds it shocking that the boys' one minute are walking all over Lisa and then she's super aggressive in their face. Lisa seemingly gets where she can’t get take it anymore, hence her blood gets boiled.

Jo then says that when they do discipline its like their in war with the boys, pointing out how it was shocking to see how Lisa put Devin in a headlock and restrained him, Lisa admits that the only way she can control Devin is holding him, but due to the fact he never bit her Lisa defends herself and claims that she never hurt Devin but in actuality she did, John also defends Lisa as he suggests that instead of beating Lisa up about it Jo should tell her what she should do. Jo is quick to tell John, Lisa isn’t being beating up about anything. while Jo does praise them for using the corner but says it's used for anger. John knows he's 100% guilty of that, he's tried things in the past, but all of them have failed now he doesn’t know what to do. At the end of The meeting, John admits that whilst Jo was a bit harsh she was right about everything and he knows it’s the truth.

Teaching
Jo put up the rules and shortly after, Devin became very aggressive and started to kick Lisa. Jo and Lisa put Devin in the corner. Devin kept pushing John's buttons, but Jo refused to let him step in and made Lisa do this alone. After 2 hours, Devin finally stayed in the naughty corner. She also managed to make Devin pick up his mess and apologize. John does admit he was wrong and apologizes to Jo.

Jo also knows how angry the boys get. Therefore, she brings in the chill out zone. According to Darren, he and Devin have anger issues. Once again, Devin gets aggressive, which causes Lisa send him to the chill out zone, where he drew on the board until he had chilled out. Once he calmed down, Lisa wrapped things up with him and comforted him.

Jo knows that car rides are a disaster. So she introduces reward charts for all four of the boys. Lisa lays down the ground rules for the ride and tells the boys that they will be rewarded a sticker (5 points) for following them. Then she does a countdown of the clock for how much time is left. The boys did kick off in the car. But, when Lisa reminded them of their points and the rewards they would receive, they behaved for the entire journey. They earned their stickers.

Jo goes to Darren's football practice, finding out that Darren behaves differently at football than at home. After that, Jo leaves for 4 days.

Clip 1
While Jo was gone, Lisa did the car technique perfectly. She asked the boys if they thought they deserved a sticker.

Clip 2
Matthew kicks off and has a drama queen tantrum for an unknown reason. He throws items, attacks items and then screams at Jared and violently throws him to the floor making him cry. Jo asks why he wasn't in the chill out zone. Lisa didn't know. Jo tells her that she has the power to defuse it.

Clip 3
When Lisa sends Matthew in the corner, he tries to escape and throws papers on the floor. Lisa took a step forward in discipline while Matthew kept escaping, but Lisa kept communicating with him as he escapes from his time out. She eventually follows through by giving her second-born son a warning by saying that if he kept acting up, he was going to lose his afternoon playtime. Matthew jams the fan by using a towel which causes him to lose all of his playtime. This causes Matthew to get upset. Later, Matthew apologizes to his mom and cleans up the mess he made.

Clip 4
A rude and verbally abusive John puts Devin in the naughty corner. When Devin escaped, John did grab him, put him back in the Corner, but what happened next was shocking. He holds Devin down in the corner, gave him a scary eye contact, and yelled at him, leaving Devin scared.

When the clip ended, Jo looked furious at John until she asked him if he liked how he looked like in the video, but all he kept on replying was a very sarcastic "That's me". When an upset Jo asks John the question again, he rudely says “What do you want me to say, lady?” which heavily offends Jo.

Jo after calming down tells the both of them to show their self esteem and confidence to the boys.

Reinforcement
Jo wants to bring back brotherly love in the household. So she has Darren teach his brothers some things he does at football.

Then, the boys help John build a birdhouse. John and the boys felt good about it.

After that, Jo's work with the Nitti family is done!

Post-Episode

 * Lisa and John broke up.

Pop Culture

 * When Jo meets Matthew and Jared, they were playing on the Nintendo GameCube, however the game they were playing is unknown as it had to be censored out to avoid copyright issues with Nintendo.
 * While not that similar, When Matthew tells Jared to shut up in The DVD Meeting, he says it in a way that sort of sounds like Foghorn Leghorn from Looney Tunes.

Video

 * Older Brother Stabs Younger Brother With Thumbtack (submission reel and observation) - Supernanny US YouTube channel
 * Aggressive Child Spits At Mother (observation) - Supernanny US YouTube channel
 * Mother Struggles With Discipline (teaching) - Supernanny US YouTube channel

Trivia

 * The car the family owned was a 1997 Dodge Durango.
 * This is the first episode to have a reward chart.
 * This is the first episode involving parents as dating partners instead of spouses.
 * John could be considered the series’ first ever sexist parent due to calling Jo “lady”. This predates Phil, the most hated parent of the entire series from The Davis Family (Season 5), who was also sexist, yet much more sexist than John.
 * This episode was filmed in July 2006.
 * This is the first episode to have someone with a physical disorder, as Lisa has Hypertelorism, A disorder which separates the distance of their eye sockets way farther, which explains why she looks different to most parents who appear on the show.
 * This episode marks second time in Supernanny, in which a parent goes against Jo's tactics, in this case, John. The first parent to do so was Arthur from The Webb Family, and the third to do so was Holly from The Tafoya Family, who not only went against the techniques, but Jo herself, infamously walking out on her during the DVD meeting.
 * When Jo was going through the house rules, if you look closely, you can see one that says “Do your chores”. It’s possible the boys had chores before Jo arrived
 * Whilst it’s unknown what exactly Devin did to end up in the corner before the observation began. It could be assumed that he hit one of his brothers, or John, as he was the one keeping Devin in the corner