Are we witnessing the death of parenting?
This story will be pretty far off the beaten path for what I usually discuss, but I have to admit I am fascinated (in a horrible way) by it, and apparently many others are as well. I asked my wife to DVR the View today, which was possibly more embarrassing for me than someone being a Giants fan today.
To catch you up to speed on what is happening, watch this video from ABC News 10 video from ABCnews:
So Holloway started a website entitled “Help me Save 300” and printed screen grabs of pictures and Tweets from the party. It’s resulted in a few good things, and one thing that will likely anger a lot of folks.
For one thing, the Eagle statue has been returned. That’s to be expected, since they had a picture of the girl who stole it. Additionally, Mr. Holloway had a ton of people come over and help him fix up some of the damage, including some of the kids responsible. As he posted on his website:
4 Students of The 300 showed up and took a stand for their greatness; I want to thank the parents for joining them. This was significant.
Four kids out of 300 seems rather meager to me, but I guess it is a start. I wouldn’t have been able to go back if it was me only because my parents would have paddled my butt so hard I probably would have needed a chair to move around. Look, I did some dumb stuff as a kid, but I rather draw the line at causing $40,000 in a house that I broke into.
Apparently most parents are not like my own (via my former hometown newspaper the Berkshire Eagle):
Now, some of the teens’ parents have threatened to sue for damages over his website, helpmesave300.com, which they claim defames their children, according to Holloway.
The former New England Patriots player told The Eagle he thought these parents’ anger is misdirected.
“I wasn’t there. All I did was reveal it to you,” he said. “If your child pooped in their diaper, change the diaper, don’t yell at me. It’s simplistic but it’s true.
“You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve been getting,” Holloway added.
Some parents, he said, claim their teenagers are suffering from “anxiety and depression” as a result of the considerable media attention given to the case. He said they’ve told Holloway “if my child commits suicide,” the blame will fall on his shoulders.
But Holloway’s lawyers and other “top attorneys” from around the country have assessed the circumstance and told him the parents’ chances aren’t good, he said.
So some kids break into a house, do drugs and destroy the place, and the parents want to punish the guy who publicized it? Are you kidding me?
For his part, Hollway seems like a pretty good dude.
(1) Today we honored and support our real HEROES, our military and veterans that served in Vietnam War, Gulf War, Desert Storm, Desert Shied and The Afghanistan. It was an amazing day; that all enjoyed and treasured.
(2) Community Volunteers helped to restore the damage; it was a powerful time healing. You should have been here.
I wish I could have been there to help him, but I am more stunned at the litigiousness of parents. If Johnny and Jane misbehave, how is it the responsibility of the victim? Does this make any sense to anyone?
And now I’m actually excited to get home and watch my DVR of The View, which I will immediately delete after watching in case someone looks at my TV someday and catches me taping the View. As I said, I’d sooner be a Giants Offensive Lineman that get caught recording the View.
I don’t know if this is a common thing, but in the Chicago area, there are statutes on the books that hold the parents responsible for ANY damage their kids do.
It isn’t that parenting is dying off. It’s more a refusal to take responsibility for what you or your brats do, and blame the victim for what happened. Are we really going there?
Only if the parents have to pay for the damage that their children did will this stop.
We are witnessing parents who what to be there child’s
friend, and not there parents.
Every single one of them should go to jail, children and PARENTS BOTH!
Once the nation chose to be a nation of child worshippers instead of parents raising the next generation of responsible adult leaders this outcome had to be result of that action.
This is an extreme example TSO, but to be honest I see this every day. I’ve stated before that I donate time coaching, and administering in a league in Western Massachusetts that involves 6,000 plus children. Our league has been sued numerous times for a variety of stupid and frivolous reasons. We’ve been sued for refusing to allow children who are too old to play with younger children (we are obligated as a child organization of US Soccer to adhere to their age groupings), we’ve been sued for not allowing a child with GLASS beads in her hair to participate in a soccer game (another direct violation of the parent US Soccer regulations).
We have some serious rules about violence and language to help de-escalate confrontations on the youth sports fields across the Pioneer Valley….
We don’t want to be the next youth sports league with a dead referee or a dead parent on the sidelines, but so many of these parents feel we are restricting their right to free speech as though a private organization that doesn’t allow swearing at the 15-18 year old referees is somehow restricting their freedoms….
Many of the parents and coaches are great people, but a significant number are useless sh1tbags and so are their children. This problem has become worse and worse over my 23 years of donating my time to this endeavor. The death of parenting was inevitable in my opinion, the abdication of responsibility from the parents and consequently their children is just another by product of that outcome.
Parents, that “anxiety and depression” that your children are feeling is called guilt. I know that most of you have managed to live relatively guilt free protected lives and don’t realize that guilt is positive. It means that your little darlings actually have some idea of right and wrong. As parents, it is your job to nurture that guilt. Tell them that they will feel like this every time they do something that they know is wrong. Tell them that the best way to end the anxiety and depression is to confront the problem and do what they can to fix it. If you as parents decide that the best thing for your angels is to attack the person that they wronged, you are going to tell them that guilt is a negative, the best way to deal with it is to attack, and that there really is no right or wrong. I’d posit that it is just this parenting methodology that has gotten us where we are now.
I am just thankful that my parents did the right thing for my Sister and I. My cousins are narsasistic, drunks, dope douches, or serious wastes of oxygen (at least on one side), and my parents did not even tolerate the use of the words shit and up for my first decade of existence. When you are at a mall holding your GF’s (now exs) hand, her head on your shoulder, and some fucktard teen walks up and starts telling her to ‘holla at me boo’ in front of you, it takes everything to not choke his rude ass out and throw him down a level. Parenting has become too absentee!
So, the vandals are “suffering from anxiety and depression”? Too fucking bad. They should all be in cells, waiting for their turn at explaining to the judge just what the fuck they were thinking.
I would think that he has a big hammer to hit back too the parents who complain. Individually sue those parents for all the damages and ask the court to place a lien of their houses as a bond.
If I had done something like that my parents would have walked me up there by my ear to make it right right after they had tanned my hide. Heck, growing up even my friends parents had permision to whoop my ass if I messed up around them.
#9: my Dad would have either shot me for being a failure as a human being, or worked me to death with hard labor. And that is seriously no joke, he actually threatened me with a 1911 freshman year of HS, if I ever even smelled of Pot… Well, not so much threat as a promise
Well, I look at them as job security for police, prosecutors, and prison staff.
hope the parents at least identified themselves…. makes arresting their vandalous kids that much easier.
@4 After spending 20 years as a USSF referee, I’m you and I could talk for days about soccer parents. I always say that soccer-parent goggles are even more distorted than beer goggles. But none of this stuff surprises me. Hell, just last week I saw a news report about parents inisisting on sitting in on job interviews with their adult children.
All he did was cull their internet postings. They outed themselves by posting on social media. Now he knows who their are, and so does the NSA! He has a perfect right To counter sue any parents that sue him. I think the guy is being very reasonable in his actions, in fact he is a hell of a lot more reasonable than I would be in his place.
@13 I still have a current USSF ref card in my wallet….I’m a sucker for this youth sports stuff…I always tell folks I have no money to be a great philanthropist so all I’ve got is time and a love for this sport learned from a German grandfather…I have coached about 10 different teams taking them from 3rd grade to high school (and a few of those teams beyond) over the last 23 years, I mentor the new grade 8/9 referees in our area and am stupid enough to be on the board of 3 different organizations. I do a little grant writing and was able to get a field and parking constructed for a local community from grant money.
Any time you’re in the western mass area I’d spot you some beers for a little conversation about futbol!
Here you go, this is why people who are wrong sue: They win. Comes now a story regarding a NYC teacher who was on jury duty and, when he entered the courthouse, was found to be carrying 20 glassine envelopes of heroin stashed in a cigarette pack. He was fired but guess what? That’s right. He sued and a judge agreed that just because a teacher is walking around with heroin doesn’t mean he should lose his job. “A judge found that Damian Esteban’s firing was ‘unduly harsh’ and ordered the Department of Education to impose a lesser punishment.” Fox News online.
Their kids aren’t feeling guilt over what they did, Bobo–they’re feeling guilt over being caught. I know when I was in HS, I didn’t run with the partying crowd, but I also had the words of my father in the back of my head that if I considered doing stupid shit, I’d be better off STAYING in jail cause I wouldn’t see the next sunrise.
Case in point–a while back I was at a very large and crowded restaurant when the fire alarm went off. Seems a little kid had pulled the fire alarm because mommy wasn’t paying attention to her little spawn. As we were all walking out I merely shook my head and kept walking outside.
As we walked back in, mommy started screaming at me and demanding an apology for “being mean” to her daughter and using as an excuse, “She’s only FIVE!”
To which I replied, “You’re not!” I don’t think she got the point.
Not sure why the cops who broke up the party didn’t take any kids into custody. And who drove off, designated drivers? Hope Holloway decides to pursue charges since the punks aren’t showing any remorse. I checked some of the kid’s twitter feeds, and they’re complaining about being victims due to the website and news attention.
Give them all some community service! The parents too.
Had it have been me, I think the following conversation would have occurred with my dad.
“Hello, Mr. Holloway. Nice to meet you but I’m sorry that it’s under these circumstances. My son? No, I regret to say that he won’t be out of the body cast for at least another five months. Assuming I don’t break him more while he’s still in it. But I promise when he can use the walker, he’ll be apologizing to you personally.”
Pax–probably what my father would have said. And FOUR out of 300? And I’d love to know if they actually apologized or just kind of shuffled around and picked up some of the evidence they left behind.
Some people have no shame–and the nut doesn’t fall from the tree. Personally, I’d love for the parents threatening to sue do just that. The shitstorm they’d get would be, to put it mildly, interesting.
I came to parenting a little later than most. I was 43 when my first child was born and almost 46 for my second. Two beautiful girls who have me so wrapped around their fingers that I cannot think straight when it comes to their welfare. But if either one of them ever participated in something like this, I would take away their will to live. Last year, both of my girls participated in cheerleading for the local rec league. Some of the things I heard out of parents mouths was pretty darn shocking considering we were around children, but it was the two incidents of physical altercations that really shocked me the most. There is a coarsening of our society today. Parents are not as apt to shield their children from crude language and bad conduct and bad behavior. And with social media in the mix, kids today have none of the restraints that most of us had when we were younger (like a father that would flat out kill my ass). It is sad to me that 300 children thought this was acceptable conduct and even sadder that some of their parents are turning a blind eye to this criminal behavior.
No kids of my own, but I’ve wrangled the younger cousins from changing diapers up to now and all of them know I don’t play the same games their parents do. Cousin stole from me and I caught him? He got to call his dad and explain what he’d done, then he got punished by him, myself and our grandmother. I laughed in his mother’s face when she tried to get us to back down. These days? He’s extremely careful with anything he borrows and returns it promptly. A quick brain dusting, threats of duct tape and a mixed use of time out and a proper spanking have kept them all in order around myself while their parents struggle to reign them in.
Shame I’m not allowed to hit the parents. ‘Intentionally’ anyway.
Kudos to the player though, those kids are lucky it wasn’t someone with a mean streak in them.
This makes me so glad I’m far away from highschool and that social circle. I wasn’t a perfect kid–we caused our share of problems and ruined more than our shares of other people’s woods. I’m not trying to say that’s better…but isn’t it?
Not at all sure that there is a statistically significant percentage of parents with kids who have them because they really want them in the first place. No surprise that they do not want to learn actual parenting skills. Or claim any responsibility for their special little snowflakes.
Yeah, seriously destructive behavior was not something any of us in my day would even consider. We got our backsides tanned for very minor offenses. No one wanted to discover what would happen if we did something criminal.
I think we’re witnessing the consequences of incompetent parenting by s couple generations of people raised on Dr. Spock.
When I was as kid, if you did something you knew you shouldn’t do, you got spanked for it. There were rules and you knew what would happen if you broke those rules.
Now there are no rules and these subsequent children are the result. The worst part is that their own parents will NEVER let them grow up and become real adults.
As the parent of 3 young adults, I can’t list all of the mind-boggling crap I saw and heard while they were growing up. A highlight (or lowlight, depending on your perspective):
The Cool Mom – Mother of one of my son’s classmates who lured his football teammates to her home, had them do chores, gay them pot and then had sex with them. She was sentenced to 30 years. Her poor daughter was so humiliated she dropped out of school.
We live in an upper-middle class neighborhood, the safest in our city. No bus stop is farther than 2 blocks from any house. Parents DRIVE their kids to the bus stop and sit there and wait for the bus (with engines on), like there’s some child molester waiting behind a tree or something. I can already guess how their littler snowflakes will turn out.
I guess I’m not surprised. I see adults all around me without a clue as how to behave. Every time I see something, I use it to educate my kids, even though they are now grown up.
#1 pet peeve – you do NOT ask for gifts, or say anything about gifts, in an invitation of any kind. Gifts are VOLUNTARY. Guests are not obligated to pay you to attend your event. I can’t tell you the number of wedding invitations I’ve received that ask for money.
@21
Got it in one, Master Guns.
PH2 – what she said. Boomers and after must be some of the worst parents in history, obsessed with whether the child “feels good” and not caring whether the kid is incompetent and headed to be a serial killer. We totally forgot that the fastest neural connection is between the butt and the brain (to be used sparingly but always when appropriate.) Somehow, most of my generation forgot the word “no”. How any kids came up OK is beyond me…. but I’m grateful to all of you who did.
David, my mother is a baby boomer and I can say that her and my father raised me right (see my comment above). My kids still get spanked when deserved and also told no. The rule at my house is two parents say yes than it means yes, but if one parent says no it means no. Just like when I was growing up the worst phrase uttered in the house is “just wait until your dad gets home”. My kids are by no stretch of the imagination abused, but they get the firm swat on the backside when needed or other forms of punishment like being grounded when that type is needed.
When I was about 7 years old, I went through a short period where I was an outright thief. Stole from my mother’s wallet, my father’s wallet, etc, etc, etc.
My from the old country Irish father discovered that his son was turning into a criminal and he…how do I put this?…turned homicidal. He roared that he would “rather be on death row than have a son who was a thief!!!!!” My Irish mother had to hold him back from slicing me up into little pieces.
He did get his satisfaction though. He calmed down…a little bit…then proceeded to tan my butt. I really couldn’t sit down for a week.
I can’t imagine what he would have done if I had done something like what these little peckerwoods did.
Oh, and I’ve never stolen a single thing…and I thank him every day for being the father that he was.
I was teaching kids at AIT who didn’t know US history, had any and every toy they wanted from their parents, even as a high school grad, couldn’t spell, couldn’t write, could form complete sentences.
That was a decade ago and it seems to be getting worse these days.
These are the same type of parents who defend their kids screaming out “he’s a good boy, he’d never hurt nobody!” when their kid is in a gang, does drugs, commits armed robbery, etc etc.
I can’t believe that the legal system isn’t charging every single one of these brats and put them in juvie until the court date.
@31 As a cop in Hawaii, I dealt far too often with the local schools. Huge fights, theft, assaults on teachers, the list goes on. Even one murder.
I was shocked at the illiteracy in the high school students. Pidgin is big in Hawaii, particularly on the west side of Oahu. Whenever I had to take a statement from a teenager (and some adults), they wrote like they spoke. I started writing the statement for them, then having them review it (i.e., I read it to them).
Disheartening stuff.
When I went to high school, if a cop showed up there, all the students would have been talking about it for weeks! Not today!
I would have had a difficult time helping to clean up as I would have still been pulling plaster out of my ass from my Father putting me through a wall. Doing something like that would never had occurred to me. I have done my best to teach my three girls that you don’t do the right thing out of fear of being caught, but because it is the RIGHT THING. I asked my 14 year old what she thought I’d do if I ever caught her doing something like this, and she actually laughed and said “I can’t imagine how bad that would be”. They’re pretty good kids, so I think they get it.
But little Johnny won’t be able to get into college now!!!! (Boo hoo hoo)
Pathetic.
I’m still trying to figure out how so many things went awry during a single generation. A few folks above ID the baby boomers as the twist in the road. And I can’t disagree. But what is overlooked is WHO raised them. Yeah, I’m talking about America’s Greatest Generation. I’ve often wondered what the hell happened there such that those who sacrificed so much ended up raising a generation of jerks.
Bingo, AC! It is the so-called greatest generation who raised the fools who utterly destroyed this country.
Hey! Don’t blame ALL Boomers!
Blame the ones who decided to NOT do what they could for their country, and ran away from the Vietnam war, listened to idiots like Abi Hoffman and Ayers, decided it was more important to get stoned and grooving in a pile at Woodstock than it was to take some responsibility for their lives and what they do.
THAT bunch of dorks includes ‘Wayward’ Bill Chengelis and the other SV bums like him from the Boomer generation. They did nothing to earn what they want, but they want it anyway.
Blame Dr. Spock who, according to my sister who worshiped his books, said that ‘holding your kids too much is addictive, so stop holding them’ (among other silly things), but failed to recognize that physical contact is exactly what kids need. Some current parents raised on Dr. Spock won’t even touch their children. No wonder they’re doing insane things.
And blame some of this on Lyndon Johnson, too, while you’re at it. His much-touted ‘war on poverty’ has created even more poverty, violent children, and now entire generations of children who will never grow up. None of these parents I see show any signs of parental authority toward their children, except for the Hispanics, especially the Hispanic mothers. There’s a difference between authority and abuse and any good parent knows it.
Where I come from, ‘No’ means ‘No’. My brother spanked his kids. My brother-in-law spanked his kids, despite my sister’s objections. They just didn’t beat them to death.
It gets better:
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Students-tackle-cleanup-duties-4823139.php#photo-5184073
Apparently, of the kids who showed up to help clean up, NONE had attended the party.
So we’re still o-fer. And the parents of the little snowflakes are still threatening to sue.
Fuck ’em.
Death of Parenting … Yes in some precincts there is NO parenting.
Not in mine. I am good father, married to good woman, raising a good kid.
However, the fractured family coupled by the WHY ME entitlement generation has produced a generation of slackers who lack discipline, morals and character.
But what the fu*k do I know?
One of the things my commander told me when we went anywhere for training, was this:
If you film yourself doing stupid shit, you’re an ass. If you post the film, you’re liable.
I would find each and every special snowflake on the video and sue their parents. I would hold each joint-and-severally liable for the entire cost of replacement and repairs as well as mental aggravation for their not-supervised dumbasses… I mean children.
and the arrests start http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ex-nfl-player-charge-teens-144740646–nfl.html
Those little dog turds look like what you get from people who want to be their kids’ pal instead of a parent