Socially Comfortable Terrible Parents

An excerpt from my new book, ”The Children We Left Behind.”

I didn’t find out my father passed away until a few months afterward when my mother coincidentally Googled his name, finding it listed at a funeral home.

While writing this book, I did the same for the first time and found a page littered with pictures of him as a frail old man alongside younger and older people. Since we were essentially strangers, I didn’t know who any of these people were, but it sparked a question in my mind: “Do these people know he hasn’t talked to his children in years?”

It’s a question I’ll never get an answer to, but it makes me wonder how many of these people knew how he stepped away from his kids in his final years of living and still treated him with reverence. How many of those smiling faces disregarded his failure as a father to laugh and giggle with the man who ultimately discarded us? It’s bad enough knowing that the man who helped to create you wants nothing to do with you, but it’s even worse knowing that he’s surrounded by enablers who make him feel comfortable with his poor decision.

They claimed him as a friend, but he barely acknowledged our presence. Maybe they called him a wonderful man, even though they knew he was a horrible father. It’s possible someone swelled his head up with compliments and framed him as an honorable man, even with the knowledge of him shamefully leaving his children behind.

We are currently allergic to not only feeling shameful but also hesitant to engage in shaming tactics against anyone, even if it’s justified. Usually, it’s the people who live shameful lives who advocate for its eradication, claiming that its existence is oppressive to our society rather than what helps to keep it in order. The worst among us hide their immorality while demanding that if someone like themselves is exposed, we should avoid treating them with disdain.

Public ridicule or avoidance of terrible people is a simple shaming model because we understand that social isolation is a punishment; hence, association is a reward for the horrid. We engage in social ostracization because it’s an effective way to maintain the direction of our society’s moral compass and to penalize anyone who dares to deviate from our virtuous course. Shaming disciplines the person who violated our social contract but warns anyone who dares to follow in their footsteps that they’ll suffer the same consequences for their reckless actions.

Can shaming go too far? Possibly, but then we would need to recalibrate and ensure that we are appropriately steadfast in punishing the right people for the right reasons. However, what has happened has been that we’ve turned the term “shame” into a net negative, placing fear in the hearts of anyone who even considers participating in it. The rule is that social shaming tactics are to be avoided, and we should expand our understanding of everything that we used to put under question decades ago.

If we shame nothing, we accept everything. Possessing a moral compass is pointless if everything is plausibly positive, depending on many factors or circumstances. What I’ve been witnessing is our society becoming lost in its own filth of open-mindedness as it considers the alternative first and challenges what we naturally know to be true second. There is a demand for us to make everything subjective, imploring that some things are wrong depending on who commits the offense and finding excuses for their deplorable actions to avoid accountability. What we know to be objectively immoral is constantly challenged as being outdated truths and we’re told that modernity can only happen if we throw away the old customs.

However, there is no expiration date on truths or objective wrongs. While it is true that culture is constantly changing, this does not mean that everything in our culture must change. Sometimes, culture changes because what we did before didn’t work or because there is now a more effective way to handle something.

This endeavor to reject shaming anyone’s behavior has created an environment where parents are allowed to live comfortably in their shameful state, and no one has the fortitude to make them experience being as uncomfortable as they made their children. It’s to say that terrible parents roam this planet, not in secret but with openness to the monsters they’ve become.

Sure, you harbor great anger toward a dead-beat parent, believing they deserve public shame, and you’d never advocate for any parent to step away from their child. But when it involves your friend or family member, you stay silent and accept their excuses for their voluntary withdrawal from their child’s life to maintain your relationship. You erase from your mind the image of a child who desperately wants and needs their mother or father in their lives so you can avoid the truth about the person you care about. You’re complicit in that parent’s comfort amidst their poor parental decisions, and the longer you let time pass, the more your gumption to enforce a standard amongst people you associate with dissolves.

We have far too many adults who’ve created children only to treat them as distant memories, and their associates engage in amnesia alongside them. You surround yourself with deadbeats, invite them into your life, and pretend that the parent you enjoy spending time with is different from the one who doesn’t want to be around their children.

You’re friends with parents who speak to their children with hatred in their hearts and resent having to use their resources to sustain their children’s lives. You’ve witnessed them yell at their children with great vengeance over typical child problems and berate them with adult behavior expectations.

For some of you, you’ve watched your friend or family member get possessed with hatred and choose to inflict pain against their child’s body in the supposed name of discipline. You’ve been a bystander to some of the worst treatment a child could endure, and you said nothing about it. There was a grey area between what is or isn’t legally abusive, but you only leaned on the legality of the situation because it was perpetrated by someone you know.

You believe you’re a good person who would virtuously respond to socially or legally unacceptable behavior until the person committing the atrocity against a child is a familiar face.

To purchase “The Children We Left Behind” from Amazon, go to www.thechildrenweleftbehind.com, and to purchase directly from Wrong Speak Publishing, go to www.wrongspeak.net/shop.