Everybody is always so quick to blame the parents. Every time a news story comes out about some teenager or group of teenagers in Anytown, USA committing some horrendous or abhorrently stupid act of vandalism, random violence, treason or plain old illegal idiocy, the overwhelming response from the self-righteous majority is always, “Where were the parents in all of this?”
Where indeed? Presumably they’re sitting at home sucking on a crack pipe and watching talk shows with the glazed over look of a George A. Romero zombie. Or they’re spending 90+ hours a week at the office putting their own selfish ambitions above the development of the moral fabric and sense of social responsibility of their otherwise perfectly angelic children. Why else would an American teenager do something stupid or violent?
One article I read online a couple of months ago described how a teenager in Florida tried to poison her mother while cooking dinner by deliberately adding a spice she knew the mother was violently allergic to. The overwhelming consensus among the myriad of comments to the article was, in the abstract, that parents are to blame for all of the ills of society’s children, and in the specific context, “Where was the father in all of this?”
That’s a good question, so let’s take a look. Sure, maybe dad is a deadbeat asshole who abandoned his family years ago and is off drinking and whoring himself to death in some wayward Midwest town that caters to the drinking and whoring type. Or, just as likely given the evidence (none whatsoever), he was a goddamn hero fireman who died saving newborns from a burning maternity ward. This is all speculation anyway, so why not go all out?
And that’s the point, it’s all speculation. In the vast majority of these instances where the newscasters and the general population alike cry out in enraged unison “Where were the parents in all of this?” in that accusatory tone we all like to don so much, we actually have no idea what the parents are like because it’s not an important enough story to delve that deep into the home life. There are a few exceptions, such as the Columbine tragedy. Because it was massively investigated and reported on multiple times daily for months, we eventually learned that one of the teenagers involved was able to horde an entire arsenal in his bedroom without detection from mom and pops. Ok, so certainly in that instance some of the blame should be shifted to the parents. But in most of these stories, very little insight into the domestic situation is given, yet we somehow always arrive at the conclusion that the parents are to blame and then we sit back and rest easy knowing there’s really no such thing as bad kids, only bad parents. And we know we’re not bad parents so by God our kids are going to be just fine.
Today I read another one of these teen-gone-wrong stories online and watched as the comments section immediately turned to parent bashing. Apparently a massive brawl broke out at a gas station in (here we go again) Florida, over a pack of cigarettes of all things. The exact details are uncertain, but police know that a stolen pack of cigarettes was involved. Of the six instigators, two of them were teenagers, 15 and 16.
Immediately the questions and accusations began. “The parents SUCK and should be held accountable…” wrote ‘JumpShot.’ “WHAT were these teens doing out at 1 AM?!?! Where are their parents?” mused ‘jeezluise.’
It hardly seems worth reiterating that four of the six instigators were legal adults, no longer under the shackles of parental supervision and free to be out as late as they please. So let’s just concentrate on the two teenagers. Without venturing once again into absurd narratives about the parents’ whereabouts, let’s instead look at some of the very realistic possibilities here. It’s definitely a possibility, so let’s get it out of the way first; maybe the parents simply don’t give a flying fuck what their kids do and let them run around as late as they damn well want. But then again, maybe the parents are relatively decent upstanding citizens who actually don’t want to see their children end up as the filthy suckfish on the belly of society.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume this is the case. Ok, so they give a hoot about their kids. What now? If you’re a single mother and you firmly tell your sixteen year old son that he’s not allowed to go out after 10 PM, but he’s determined he’s going to anyway, what are you really going to do about it? Hit him? Oh no, not today. That would be child abuse. And even if you could, you’re a tired mom and he’s practically a fully grown man full of vivacious, violent, hormonal energy. So it wouldn’t do much good anyway. Face it, if he decides he’s leaving that house, he’s leaving that house. You can threaten him with consequences (take away his car, ground him, shut off the cable, etc), but assuming he’s not the rational, level-headed human being one would clearly expect a sixteen year old to be, he may decide that the immediate benefits of going out and having mischievous fun late at night outweigh the repercussions of that vague, fuzzy specter that most teenagers have a hard time grasping called the future.
Even if you are capable of overpowering your teenage child and even if you had carte blanche to beat them like Super Mario Bros., what exactly are you going to do when they go out after school and simply don’t come home when they’re supposed to? Nothing. Sure you’ll blow up their phone, leave a hundred angry messages, threaten with all the above consequences, but if they decide they’re staying out, there’s literally nothing you can really do about it.
But we’re not talking about good old-fashioned teenagers who just stay out all night quietly binge drinking and fucking like rabbits. We’re talking about the bad ones. We’re talking about the ones who poison their mothers, the ones who start riots over cigarettes, the ones who randomly kick the shit out of the homeless, the ones who shoot their classmates and start structure fires and blow people for crack. Surely someone somewhere must have fucked up royally to create these monsters. Maybe it was the schools, maybe it was the media, but I think we’re safe to assume that it was undoubtedly the parents. Right?
Maybe. Maybe it was the parents. Maybe there was sexual abuse. Maybe there are abandonment issues. Maybe there was a complete lack of moral structure. Then again, maybe not. But either way, at some point in life people have to become accountable for their own actions. The law seems to believe that, except in very major circumstances, that point is 18. Legally speaking, I say fair enough. You have to have some legal age when children become adults and 18 seems to work pretty well. But what about morally, mentally and emotionally? Are people under 18 simply free of the social duty to know the difference between right and wrong and act accordingly? Are their parents necessarily the designated bearers of that burden?
Even in the Columbine case where the parents did undoubtedly deserve their fair share of the blame, a massive witch hunt ensued to attempt to blame video games and Marilyn Manson as well. They blamed the parents, they blamed the media, they blamed the gun laws, and maybe all of those things deserved blame. But where the hell was the blame for the kids? We’re not talking about a five year old who pulls his dad’s gun out of a drawer and accidentally shoots his friend here. We’re talking about people with the knowledge of how to obtain firearms, the advanced motor skills necessary to properly operate them and the presence of mind to actually plan out a strategy. If a couple of twenty year olds had similarly orchestrated such an atrocious act, nobody but those two twenty year olds, and maybe their lack of mental stability, would have been blamed. But when it’s a couple of seventeen year olds then clearly it’s our duty as a society to spread the blame around as much as possible. Because unless there’s someone else to blame, there’s just no way a kid could do a thing like that.
Well I don’t buy it. The sad truth is that there are some kids out there, just like there are some adults out there, who are just rotten, evil bastards. All those rotten, evil bastard adults out there were kids once. You think that rotten, evil bastard mentality just popped up on their eighteenth birthday? Some people just have a screw loose and there’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it except sit around and wait for them to crack and then lock them up.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the parents are never to blame. In many circumstances I’m sure that to a certain extent they are. In some instances they probably are in a very big way. People much smarter than me have studied and debated Nature vs. Nurture in every aspect of the human personality (including the rotten, evil bastard one) ad nauseum and there are still countless theories and opinions on the subject. It’s a worthwhile thing to study and all, how childhood experiences and early family life work to shape a person’s personality and the way they behave in society, but if we’re talking about people who are less than a few years from legal adulthood, people who are old enough to drive, people who are old enough to work and pay taxes, than we’re talking about people who are old enough to ultimately be held accountable for their own actions.
I don’t yet have children, but I probably will some day. When I do, I fully plan on doing my absolute best to instill them with the values of civility, rationality and social decency that I’ve grown accustomed to. However if, despite my best efforts, my kid ends up being a sadistic sociopath who does something heinous enough to make the national news anyway, do me a solid and don’t come beating down my door to drown me in an ocean of blame and just let me mourn in peace.
