In a letter to the editor in the May 10 issue of the Herald, a reader pointed to family dysfunction as contributing to the youth mental health crisis. No doubt many of his points were valid. A strong family life experience can no doubt be a solid foundation as children grow and confront the many travails of life.
Over the years, we have heard about the importance of the nuclear family in child rearing. In 2020, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a widely read and controversial article in the Atlantic in which he called it a “mistake.” Brooks argued that the best environment for raising children was a much older model, the extended family. Lest we forget, we were also advised in Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book that “It Takes a Village” to raise a child.
All of this misses the point of the ultimate responsibility that falls on parents. Many parents reading this would undoubtedly agree that once that first child is born, life changes in ways that do not even end when the child reaches legal maturity.
Psychologists tell us that positive parents are loving, supportive, firm, consistent, and involved. The challenges to pulling that off in today’s society are many and varied. Even where poverty, crime, drug use, and other potential causes of child trauma are not present, society still presents us with a high rate of divorce, marital discord even to the level of domestic violence, work demands unable to be balanced with available child care, and an uneven ability of schools to play the expanded role that has devolved onto them.
The many problems that are part of the context of parenthood are beyond our individual ability to easily deal with them. Perhaps the best we can do is recognize and act on the fact that having a child means assuming a new level of responsibility and commitment.
We see plenty of evidence that the responsibilities of parenthood are easier to talk about than to accept. Let’s just consider the past two years of disruption caused by juveniles on vacation at shore resorts in the county. Many of these individuals have not yet reached the legal age of adulthood. Many are on vacation with parents and family members. Most are not coming from home environments plagued by poverty and violence.
Yet, in the late hours, a parent has no need to know where the juvenile is or what he/she is up to. When parents read news reports of rowdy gangs of young people engaged in illegal activity, including underaged drinking and pot use, there is no need to ensure that one’s child is not participating in the dangerous behavior.
We cannot fix all the problems associated with raising children in our relativistic, permissive, egocentric, modern society. We cannot snap our fingers and do away with many of the factors that cause childhood trauma for so many unfortunate youngsters. But we can renew our responsibility as parents. This is especially true for those of us with the resources to provide a comfortable life for our children.
Those children need more than comfort. They need a set of values and parental role models to underscore those values. A parent who is on vacation at the shore and feels they do not need to track what their juvenile son or daughter is doing is breaking with the responsibility they accepted with having children.
We have somehow been expected to believe that parents are totally unaware of backpacking young people toting illegal liquor and cannabis to massive party locations on beaches and boardwalks. If they are so unaware, it is because they chose to be.
The problems of parenting in our troubled time are serious enough without adding parental inattention and self-focus.
If you are a parent, accept the fact that it is a full-time, all–the–time job. The minute that child is born, he/she deserves our best effort, even when that comes at the cost of our own indulgence.
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From the Bible:
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. Proverbs 22:6
