Parenting

How do you know you are a good father?  I am not sure as to the answer to that question.  Perhaps we are to always wonder and worry, so that we are always going that one step farther to get better.  There is no pinnacle, or plateau, that once you reach it, it is all good, and no more effort is required.

I wonder what mistakes I made with my kids, and how it will impact them in their lives.  Understand that it is not IF I DID, it is WHAT did I do wrong.  We all do, regardless of intentions, capabilities and effort.  That is part of being human, and while it sucks, it is usually fairly insignificant.

I have sat here praying and pondering the events of the last week.  A white woman outed by her "parents" for playing black and serving as NAACP president, that was pretty freaky.  Here in Raleigh, there were the usual shootings and murders in the poor minority neighborhoods.  There were two criminals that cooked meth in the house with their toddlers, to the point where the toddlers had detectable levels in their system.  Then, this psycho in Charleston shoots a bunch of people after they studied the Word with him.

How does all this tie together?  See, I am an engineer at heart, and the thought of coincidence offends my soul.  There are only statistical probabilities that govern repetition.  So, everything is connected in its way.  The Christian faith tells us that this is all the result of man's sinful fall.  At a very high level, that ties all the misfortune and tragedy in the world together.  And, I am in no position to argue with the Word of God.

But, I think that this particular string of events comes down to a much lower level connection.  One that is prevalent and pervasive and ever-present.  We have a parenting problem that is driving these kinds of events.  I understand that there have always been crappy parents and broken people.  But, you are not living Little House on the Prairie just raising your kids not to be criminals and psychotic.  You are doing the bare minimum required.

Hillary Clinton got a lot of heat about it taking a village to raise a child.  I don't agree with that, but I think that a village is extremely useful when raising your child.  Both from the aspect of reinforcing good parenting practices, and from exposing how you definitely do not wish to parent when it is your turn.  That last piece is maybe most important.  Your particular family may not deal with teenage drug abuse, but if you are connected within the community, you have exposure to how it is handled and how it works.

The question is how well you paid attention as a child, and, which lessons made the most impact to you.  Unfortunately, this is where it gets controversial and uncomfortable.  But, I am going to call out what I see.  If your environment only compounds and reinforces the most atrocious practices, you cannot be expected to do more than that level of parenting.  Regardless of the love in your heart, the desire in your soul, if you have never been shown how to do something, you will not be very good at it.

If I was given 40 hours and unlimited supplies, I could scribble non stop and actually replicate the entire Hebrew alphabet in those scribblings.  I would not be able to pick them out, order them, use them, or understand them.  I wrote them, but I can't write with them.  It is the same with multiple generations of parents we have raised.

If you are surrounded by dope dealers, criminals, felons and institutionalized individuals, you are limited in what you can do as a parent.  You have choices however.  You can choose to stay there and watch your children become that which surrounds them.  Or, you can take them away from it, whatever it means or takes, and provide them with the external relationships and examples that are required to fully form them as adults.

Does that mean that every single parent family in the "hood" ends up raising gang bangers or skin heads?  No, but it is the feel-good lie we all focus on, that because there are outliers that escape and break their cycle, it is all going to be okay.  What we do not discuss is that for every Jay Z, there are thousands of Dylann Roof's, just with lower body counts.  It is so much easier to sleep and feel less troubled if we do not think about the number of youth that are lost, that we never see, never hear about.

I am guilty of it as well.  I have said it over and over again, when discussing this with others from our beautiful home and life.  "They had the same opportunity that my child had.  If they chose to not learn, to not develop and to be criminals, then lock them up."  You should see me at the end, symbolically wiping my hands of the whole affair.

They did not have the same opportunity as my children.  I moved my children to a place that had decent schools and quality of life, when it became clear that there was nothing for them where we were living.  They did not like it, and they did not find it pleasant.  But, they got the education they deserved, and the start they needed.  And, all those children I knew well, that were part of our lives up to the point we left, they mostly moved as well.

What got left behind, got left behind.  Most of them were/are functionally illiterate.  They have little marketable skills for the work place.  What they have is an ingrained knowledge of how the judicial and entitlement systems work.  They have the learned practices of broken homes, because there is much more money available if there are not two parents.  They have learned to survive within the system of poverty we have created in this country.

They parent the way they were taught.  If you want to know what the cycle of poverty is, it is the cycle of piss poor parenting.  No one rises above their raising.  One either lives up to your raising, or rejects it and goes the other way.  It is always the raising that we come back to and rest upon.

Kids become adults.  There is no guarantee that kids with good parents will be good adults.  Free will and choice are ultimately what they are and always have been.  However, just as there are few outliers from bad parenting that overcome and achieve, there are only few outliers that fail after good parenting.

There is nothing I would like more, than to see the cycle of poverty become the focus of our efforts.  There would be no way to break it without fixing the mess that is the family constant of our impoverished peoples.  We would defeat the growth of the urban gangs, because we would build family units that prevent that growth.  We would break the cycle of incarceration, because we would build families and ethics that prevent that cycle.  We would break the grip of drugs, because we would have generations no longer surrendered to drugs without a fight.

What would happen if we created a culture in our impoverished families that celebrated education and learning?  What would happen if we created a culture in our impoverished families that celebrated parental responsibilities and empowered parenting?  What would happen if we stopped leaving our children to be taught in school, and instead, let them be educated in school and taught them at home?

What would happen if we held parents accountable for the actions of their children?  What would happen if we expected parents to be responsible for their children again?  My mother and father were very clear that I was a reflection of them and their raising of me.  If I made the decision to do something that reflected poorly on them, I understood what was coming.

It was the parenting expectation that my parents grew up under, which they then used as they were raising me.  I then applied that to my children as they were raised.  I expect that they will apply those processes to their children.  As that proceeds, so does the opposite logic.  If you have never learned accountability, responsibility or skills, how do you suddenly develop them?

You don't, nor will those children, nor the children that come to those children, nor the children that come to those children.  It has been ongoing and worsening since the 60's.  It has coincided or driven the decline of the schools, the growth of incarcerations and the marginalization of families as a unit.  That is where the connection lies for what we are seeing.

Until we are willing to do the uncomfortable, and address this, and teach something different, and build other expectations, this will continue.  It is sad, and sadder still that this crystallized for me on Father's Day.

I called my Dad and wished him a Happy Father's Day.  I am so grateful for what he taught me explicitly and by example.  I wish that example had been available to all.  Love is not an antidote to bad skills.  And just trying is not okay when parenting.  Commitment, accountability and responsibility are the bare minimums, and you have to be fully onboard.

I love you all.  Happy Father's Day.