What Happened to Parenting

Like so many, I watched some of the US Senate Judiciary committee hearing on the harm of big tech platforms to children. The performance politicking hit a particular low when Tom Cotton of Arkansas questioned Singaporean TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew repeatedly about his citizenship (not seeming to understand that Singapore was a country) and asked if he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party. That moment was only outdone by Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee accusing Mark Zuckerberg of wanting to turn Meta into the 'premier sex trafficking site in the country.' The irony was palpable that such 'gotcha' moments were designed to go viral on the very same social media platforms the Senators were vociferously attacking. Irony died with hypocrisy in Congress a while ago. 

The other moment that featured prominently on the nightly news was Zuckerberg turning to apologize to the assembled parents behind him, many of whom were holding pictures of their children who had been bullied or blackmailed online into committing suicide. He told them he felt bad for the pain and suffering they were enduring. Crocodile tears.

I understand the demands for social media platforms to do more to make online spaces safer for young people. They should do more to make them safer for the rest of us too, curbing hate-speech, antisemitism, racism, bigotry, misogyny, terrorism and political interference. 

Still, while watching the hearing the question I couldn't help asking myself was: Whatever happened to parenting? It's not as if I'm completely insensitive to the challenges of raising kids in the age of social media. Of our four daughters, one of them has never known a world without it, and the others have lived with it since they were adolescents. Three of my four children are subsumed in it, their lives barely exist outside of social media in any meaningful way, their online personas indistinguishable from their real-world ones. Like alcohol, social media can and should be understood as an addictive substance, and the dangers of abuse should be made clear to anyone who chooses to partake, especially adolescents who lack fully-formed brains. 

As parents there's only so much we can do, after a certain point in time. But my question about parenting relates to the years before that point is reached, before the die has been cast and your offspring is an independent agent in the world who will make their own decisions, good and bad, and any parental influence is henceforth negligible. The moment when your parental report card comes in, and all the work you've put in with your children, loving them, spending time with them, listening to them, nourishing them, teaching them, guiding them and helping them, either pays off or doesn't. As with any report card, when enough work hasn't been put in, it usually shows.

Extending the school analogy... my concern is how we've been offloading parental responsibilities on non-parents for years, especially in the schools. Schools no longer just provide educational services, they feed our children and provide them with social services and psychological services too. Teachers have been telling us for a long time that they are finding it difficult to do the job they were trained to do because they are overwhelmed with so many non-teaching aspects of the job related to the wellbeing of students. Burn out is rampant and fewer people are entering the profession because it's become unmanageable. Our eldest daughter was a post high-school CEGEP English teacher (Quebec's version of grade 12 and 13). The workload was too much for her to bear and the frustration level was off the charts. The job literally made her stressed to the point of physical illness. Her career lasted less than two years. 

Might the dearth of values and moral obtuseness we're witnessing in recent generations have something to do with the fact that so much basic child-rearing has been dumped from the home onto the system? 

Coincidentally, this week we saw the beginning of the unprecedented trial for involuntary manslaughter of Jennifer Crumbley, mother of Ethan, the teenager who murdered four high-schoolers and wounded seven others in Oxford, Michigan. Ethan's father James will be tried separately. The Crumbley parents purchased the murder weapon for their underage son as a Christmas present, apparently despite being aware of his unstable mental health. Without knowledge of the case against the elder Crumbleys, it's not a stretch to surmise that parental neglect was involved. Don’t take my word for it take Jennifer's, who wrote in text messages after the shooting, “I failed as a parent. I failed miserably.”

I’m no psychologist but might there be a connection between parental inattention, and disturbed children taking out their rage on their school? A kind of sublimation of anger actually intended at their parents? Ethan Crumbley’s journal was found at the scene of the shooting in which he wrote, “my parents won’t listen to me about help or a therapist... I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the fucking school.”

I’m not saying Ethan’s criminally reckless parents are comparable to the parents whose children committed suicide after being cyber-bullied. But there is the same main missing ingredient in both cases, although in different quantities, with tragic consequences. One thing’s for sure, you can’t blame the kids.

[Update: The jury returned an involutary manslaughter guilty verdict for Jennifer Crumbley]