Seeking fame and fortune

A couple of interesting things came across my computer in the past week – funny how things "cluster" sometimes – that I wouldn't mind reader opinions on. The subject is those seeking fame and fortune. One case involves "influencers," the other involves a singing career.

I don't follow any influencers, but as a category they're received a bad rap (or maybe "annoying rap" is more accurate) over the last few years. Influencers are known to disrupt restaurants, gyms, grocery stores, and other public places for their antics. They often reek of entitlement, such as offering to "collaborate" with restaurants or businesses for freebies in exchange for "exposure."

People will often do the strangest things to get attention. Consider this article documenting how people (usually women) in Palm Beach, Florida will dress up in designer clothes and hang around street corners for hours in a desperate bid to get noticed by some local who started a "best dressed" social media account.

The article says: "Palm Beachers are desperate to make it on the glitzy beach city's unofficial best-dressed list to show off their glamorous clothes and designer accessories. The South Florida beach town is known for its posh residents, but now there is a new social status symbol residents can aspire to - being feature on 'Class of Palm Beach.' Class of Palm Beach, which has amassed millions of views on TikTok, parades the town's best dressed and asks them where they bought their chic outfits from.

"The wildly popular social media page is the brainchild of one Millennial resident, who often found herself stopping wealthy people on the street and asking which designer shops they had bought their clothes and accessories from. Some Palm Beachers have become so determined to make an appearance on the account – which has 672,000 followers – that they wait on the busiest avenue for hours in the hopes of being noticed by the page's in-demand admin."

(Honestly, folks, don't you have anything better to do with your time?)

That said, presumably there's something to "influencing" if people can earn a living from it. Shrug. Not my cup of tea, but whatever.

This leads to a random article I came across in which a mother was seeking advice concerning her teenage daughter who wanted to become an influencer.  She wrote:

"How do you talk to your kids about how social media isn’t a measure of their worth? I am a single mother to two daughters, “Carina” (19), and “Kylie” (23). When the girls were younger, I limited their access to social media. However, Kylie has always had a passion for social media, and the summer after she graduated from high school, she began a lifestyle/vlogging YouTube channel that quickly amassed hundreds of followers. Now, she is a fairly popular influencer making good money across several platforms. This inspired Carina, who believed that anyone could make a livable wage off social media if they put in enough work. She too began a YouTube channel after she turned 18, and I’m now worried that she may have become too obsessed with gaining followers and likes.

"Every day, Carina laments that her channels aren’t gaining traction like her sister’s. Whenever she comes out of her room in the morning, she’s always on her phone or comparing her account to other vloggers in a similar age bracket. She posts content almost every day, then gets upset when it gets hardly any views or likes. I’m genuinely alarmed at the downturn that her mental well-being has taken, and I’ve tried to talk to her about how her worth isn’t tied to what people 1,000 miles away think of her internet persona. It falls on deaf ears. Kylie has had the same conversation with Carina, which just made Carina angry because she thought that Kylie was just trying to “eliminate the competition.”

"Because Carina is an adult, I can’t just take away her social media. I understand that I could stop her from having access to it (my friend has suggested that I change the WiFi password, threaten to evict her, etc.) but I’m worried that forcing her hand might push her away and limit my ability to help her. On the other hand, I know I’m not being very useful right now! I’m scared for my daughter and I could really use some advice."

The answer the advice columnist gave this mother was to gently steer her daughter into other interests, including a job, in an effort to break the daughter's obsession.

And that's the first thing I wouldn't mind reader input on. What advice would you give a mom whose adult teen daughter is obsessed with this career choice?

Not quite in the "influencer" category but still in the "seeking fame and fortune" mindset, consider this wail of worry from another mother of a teen daughter:

"My daughter Lailah is going to be a junior next year, and ever since she was little she LOVED watching shows like American Idol, The Voice, etc., and dreams of being a famous singer. While I think it's all well and good to sing as a hobby, she is simply not good at music.

"Lailah has a rather high-pitched voice, kind of like a cartoon or young toddler, and when she sings it sounds like nails on a chalkboard. I'm certain she's tone deaf, because she insists her voice is not high at all. I know that's awful as a mom to say, but it's true. We even hired a vocal coach before COVID and the lady outright told me she felt guilty about taking my money because [Lailah] "simply has no musical talent," in her words.

"She loves to sing at family events and it always results in chuckles at best or insults at worst from younger kids. She's always kept her head up and never let these comments get to her, which I admire a lot, but I wish she had more realistic adult plans by now.

"Lailah's grades have been struggling for years (mostly Ds) and we argue about it all the time. Her excuse is always "I don't need to learn this because I will be a famous singer!" This obsession has become a legitimate problem because she shoots down anything unrelated to singing when it comes to thinking about college or a job, which she also insists she will never need because one day she will become a world-famous singer.

"Today I told her she should be looking for a summer job and she again refused, and said now that she's old enough she wants to audition for a singing competition (undecided on which). I know these shows; most of them will have a poor-singer audition, only to mock them on TV.

"I'm not letting that happen to Lailah and told her I am no longer tolerating this obsession, and that she needs to apply herself in other areas soon if she hopes to get any sort of career, because she simply is not a good singer. She started bawling and called me an abusive mother. I feel like an a** now and am not sure if I should have handled this differently. Am I the [jerk]?"

The mother went on to answer questions from others, who made suggestions like having vocal coaches give the daughter their honest opinion to her face. The mother replied, "They have said it to her face, but she does not accept their input" and "I've done that. She still thought she sounded like Carrie Underwood" and "She took lessons a lot as a kid and has taken choir almost every year at school, and has been told honestly about her skills. She insists everyone is wrong."

Upon the suggestion the daughter should be recorded and let her listen to her own skills, the mother replied, "I've done that. She still does not get it, and even argues with music coaches."

One person responded, "I used to be a vocational employment specialist. ... You don't need to be the one to crush her dreams. You don't want to be. The best way to get through this, and to avoid backlash or appearing unsupportive, is to treat her aspirations as completely serious. Let her audition. Encourage her to put up videos on social media. Let her ram her head repeatedly into the wall until she gets tired of knocking herself out. And when she is good and ready, she'll quit, and you can be there, just as unwaveringly supportive as ever, when she moves onto the next, more realistic phase of life."

Others pointed out, "I used to wonder how all those horrible singers on American Idol got that far, thinking they were the next Whitney Houston. Someone should have told them before they embarrassed themselves in front of millions of people. You're protecting your child and that's exactly what you're supposed to do."

Both these mothers are facing the situation in which their daughters are infatuated with fame and fortune and are pursuing it obsessively. What advice would you give to either encourage or discourage these teenage girls' ambition?

The-opposite-of-affluenza parents

Doubtless most of you have heard of Ethan Couch, the rich teenage "affluenza boy" who killed four innocent people while driving in a drunken stupor. Nine more were injured, one of whom suffered a horrific (and presumably permanent) brain injury.

The brat's scuzzy defense is best summed up on the Wikipedia page: "G. Dick Miller, a psychologist hired as an expert by the defense, testified in court that the teen was a product of 'affluenza' and was unable to link his bad behavior with consequences because of his parents teaching him that wealth buys privilege."

This was the defense, you understand, after murdering four people and injuring nine more. Affluenza. Puh-lease. I don't know how that psychologist sleeps at night.

To make things worse, a few weeks ago Ethan was seen on video violating his probation by drinking, so his mother let him miss a court-mandated meeting with his probation officer. Then mother and son skipped the country and went to Mexico. They were apprehended and returned to the U.S. Both are now in custody, and both are now in deep, deep doo-doo.

It's a sordid tale. Touching on the issue of young people in general and Couch in particular, the New York Post had a superb and blistering commentary regarding how kids are being raised these days, particularly the hothouse flowers who get attacks of the vapors whenever they witness something that offends their delicate sensibilities. Parts of the article are worth highlighting:

We can lament the poor decision of the judge who let Ethan off scot-free, but this is less a story about our judicial system than it is about modern parenting. Ethan is a symbol of an era when parents lost their backbone.

If it were ever going to be clear what spineless helicopter parenting has wrought, this year should do it. The college-campus protests have comprised people who are supposed to be young adults — people old enough to serve in the military — withering over Halloween costumes, running to safe rooms when a dissident speaker appears on campus, demanding the purging of professors, books and even dining-hall food that irritates their sensibilities.

What’s particularly galling, though, is that their parents, those wild-and crazy Gen-Xers, are so intent on protecting their children’s delicate sensibilities that they are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars while their children protest the free exchange of ideas. That these kids are ill-prepared for the real world is obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

I started interviewing homeschooled kids about 15 years ago. Back then the assumption was that these boys and girls would be socially stunted because of their lack of exposure to their peers. It turned out to be the opposite. They were better able to interact with adults and quickly found themselves leaders among their peers.

What these kids have in common, along with others I have met in religious communities, are parents who don’t care what the rest of the world thinks. They are completely unconcerned with the broader messages of the culture. They aren’t interested in whether other kids have iPhones or boyfriends or watch some television show.

Parents who don't care what the rest of the world thinks...

To an extent, this statement is both right and wrong when it comes to how we (and I hope, you) have raised kids. I never cared what the rest of the world thought about the clothes we wore, the vehicles we drove, or the (lack of) personal electronics we (didn't) possess.

But we DO care about how our children, now young adults, handle themselves in the world. We care that they present themselves as clean-living and wholesome. We care that they look others directly in the eye and speak clearly and intelligently. We care that they're honest and hard-working. We care that they have the self-control to make smart decisions as they enter adulthood.

I'm guessing these qualities are harder to acquire with (cough) "parents" like Mr. and Mrs. Couch.

Stop reading to your children! It's unfair!

Holy cow. Just when you think things can't get any whackier, things get whackier.

We all understand, academically as well as emotionally, that children raised in a loving family do better in life. That love often translates into doing such wonderful things as reading to your children.

But what happens if you have the audacity (gasp) to raise your children in a loving family, and the temerity to (gasp) read to them? You're being unfair to children who don't have those advantages!

So what's a good loving family to do? Rather than encourage more parents to be loving, instead parents should stop being loving because they're giving their children an "unfair advantage" over other children who may not be lucky enough to have loving parents who read to them.

Or so concludes a whack-doodle progressive "professor" (I use the term lightly) in England. Only in academia could the obvious conclusion be twisted so badly.

"I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally," British academic Adam Swift told ABC’s Joe Gelonesi.

In his article, Gelonesi added: “This devilish twist of evidence surely leads to a further conclusion that perhaps – in the interests of leveling the playing field – bedtime stories should also be restricted.”

Don came in from the shop laughing his head off after listening to Rush Limbaugh blast this fellow to pieces. From Limbaugh's transcript:

"One wacko, one lunatic, one extreme leftist who is obsessed with this perverted definition of fairness and equality and who is determining that parents who can read to their kids at night are giving them an unfair advantage. ... All of this is rooted in the idea that nobody should be any different – we should all be the same, we should all turn out the same.

"But, of course, we’re not all the same. Every damn one of us is unique. We are not like anybody else, by design and by definition. We all have different talents, characteristics, abilities, albatrosses, liabilities, differing levels of ambition. We have differing degrees of health, genetic codes. ... Nobody’s the same. And these people always insist, nevertheless, with enforcing uniformity on everyone.

"As liberals, the answer is not to help the kids who are not in good families. They become the lowest-common denominator. They become the baseline. Everybody must be made to be like them in order for everything to be fair and equal. The natural tendency of the left is to punish success, to punish achievement, to punish anything that they believe gives an unfair advantage."

It's comforting to know that while I may have major philosophical differences with liberals, even they admit this kind of logic is, well, dumb.

Now get out there and read to your kids.

Why do teenagers rebel? Thoughts from a 19-year-old who didn’t

If you recall, Older Daughter just turned 19. She's been a model kid -- respectful, helpful, not given to angst and drama.

It's the same thing with Younger Daughter (age 16) -- no angst or drama, lots of respect. We definitely lucked out in the kid department.

Adolescence is always a dicey prospect for any parent. I've known kids with lousy parents who turned out great, and I've known kids of terrific parents who were anything from a handful (at one end of the spectrum) to horrible (at the other hand). Teenage rebellion is always tough, but eventually it's up to the teens themselves to decide whether to straighten out by the time they're adults (as most do) or whether to embark on a lifetime of bad choices and rotten behavior that will affect them (and their own children) for decades.

There is no cut-and-dried formula to get kids through their teenage years without rebellion. Variables include the personality of the child, religious influences, schooling methods, and of course parenting strategies. There is absolutely no one-size-fits-all approach that works for everyone.

But recently I found a fascinating column in which a mother asked her 19 year old daughter to articulate just why she didn't rebel. In response, the daughter wrote an astoundingly insightful essay (they're Canadian, hence the slight variation in spelling).

Here are the five primary points this teen raised:

• My parents instilled in me a sense of family honour

• My parents were extremely encouraging, but also demanding

• My family talks about everything

• We were never expected to rebel as teenagers

• God was centre in our home

While this young lady's explanation won't guarantee a home free from rebellion and strife, I found her insight fascinating. Well worth reading.

Trashy parents

Recently I drove into town to go to the library. As I turned into the parking lot, I nearly ran over a two-year-old girl, alone. I parked, walked over to her, and asked “Where’s your mommy, sweetheart?” The child pointed to a house half a block away.

I took her by the hand, then lifted her onto my hip as we walked toward the house. Seven or eight children were playing on the lawn, ranging in age from three to ten years.

“Does this little girl live here?” I asked the group, and received affirmation. “I nearly ran over her in the library parking lot.”

One of the boys ran indoors and retrieved an adult woman. The woman took one look at the toddler and yelled, “What did I tell you about staying in the yard?” She spanked the child. "Now get into your bed and stay there!"

I walked away muttering to myself.

A few years ago a similar incident happened. Don and I were driving through the same town when we spotted a three-year-old boy on the shoulder of the highway, dangerously close to stepping into traffic. We jerked to a stop and Don ran to take the child off the road. Turns out he had wandered away from the Grange building in town, where an event was taking place. When he walked into the building holding the boy by the hand, the mother ran up, relieved. She had been frantically looking for him and had no idea he had wandered so far away. She snatched him up and hugged him.

Please note the differences in outcome with both these incidences. Which mother do you like better?

There isn’t a parent alive who hasn’t temporarily misplaced a child. It's terrifying, it's soul-searching, it's frantic. But let's make one thing clear: It isn't a toddler's fault if she wanders away from an unfenced yard.

A two-year-old isn’t capable of understanding the boundaries of a yard if there’s something interesting to investigate beyond those boundaries.

Twenty years ago one of Don's friends went fishing with his four-year-old son. In a moment of inattention, the boy wandered too close to the river and drowned. The father has (literally) been an emotional wreck ever since. He has never forgiven himself for that momentary lapse.

This kind of lapse can happen to anyone. I would never blame someone when a child wanders off… until I see their reaction when the child is (God willing) found.

That's what made me so mad about the mother of the toddler I found. Her reaction wasn’t, “Oh my God, what happened to my child?” It was, “Oh my God, how could you inconvenience me so much?”

I know there is a bell curve to humanity. There are outstanding mothers and there are abusive mothers. The vast majority of us fall in the middle because most of us are decent mothers. This woman clearly falls on the lower end. She has apparently lost the instinct to nurture and protect her child. She didn’t have the imagination to think what could potentially happen if the toddler wandered off.

There really isn’t a point to this blog post except to rant, I guess. Women like this child’s mother might lead me to despair about our culture…until I stop and look around at others who mother beautifully.

Vaguely nauseating

Reader Steve from Alaska sent me a link to an article I found disturbing. It concerns some parents with three children -- two boys, and a baby named Storm of unknown gender.

No, there's nothing medically ambiguous about the child's genitalia. But the parents don't want their tyke burdened with gender stereotypes, so they are raising little Storm to be gender-neutral. They only people who know if Storm is a boy or a girl are his/her immediate family, and the midwife who delivered him/her. The parents "believe they are giving their children the freedom to choose who they want to be, unconstrained by social norms about males and females."

Which raises the first question: What pronoun should we use when referring to little Storm? The parents admit to facing "the tyranny of pronouns," as they call it. They considered referring to Storm as “Z”.

The couple's two older boys (Jazz and Kio) are five and two. "They are encouraged to challenge how they’re expected to look and act based on their sex," notes the article. Oh are they? So they're encouraged or at least allowed to wear pink dresses. Okay fine. But what if they want to turn every stick or Barbie doll into a gun? What if they choose a GI Joe action figure and want to play at combat? What if they want to take up hunting, hmmmm? Do you think these gender distinctions are going to be encouraged by the parents? Maybe I'm just casting a stereotype on the parents, but somehow I don't think they'd like that.

Whether the parents want to accept it or not, Storm HAS a gender. He or she will someday either father a child or give birth to a child. Why deny the beauty inherent in gender? Why deny the wonders of masculinity or the glories of femininity? Why does everyone have to be so durned hostile to gender differences?

In reading the comments following the article, someone wrote, "It is perfectly possible to raise children without hiding their gender and still give them a sense of self. It is not a child's job to figure something so huge out for themselves as such a young age. It is the parents' job to guide them. Problem is, the parents are pushing their own views on their children, the same way that they don't want society to do. They are only hurting the children's sense of identity, not helping. I believe all this does is teach children to be ashamed of having gender. Boys and girls are built differently, their brains work differently, their bodies work differently, and trying to have a child choose their identity without a healthy model is foolish."

Another comment says, "While I totally agree with the idea of not forcing stereotypical gender roles on children, I think that these parents may have instead created a situation where gender is suddenly huge (even if only in its "absence"). Go ahead and treat gender as just a characteristic - no different than hair color or handedness or height. None of these things need to define you as a person and are just one of the many things that make up who you are. But by refusing to even acknowledge gender, it suddenly becomes almost the whole focus."

Please don't misunderstand -- if a boy wants to play with dolls or a girl wants to play with trucks, it would never cross my mind to discourage him or her. Unless parents are anal in the other direction -- in other words, like über-macho dads who try to bully their sons into being über-macho as well -- then most kids will naturally gravitate toward toys of their gender. But some won't. Girls are usually the ones drawn to ballet, for example, but that doesn't mean there are not superb male danseurs. Boys are usually drawn to football, but that doesn't mean girls don't enjoy playing the sport as well.

There is unquestionably a continuum of gender influence among people. Some men are tough bad boys. Some men are gentle nurturers. Some women are tough bad girls. Some women are gentle nurturers. But most of us are blends of toughness and gentleness. It takes all kinds in this world, and we're all different.

Some of the more extreme comments on this article suggested removing Storm from his/her parents because of "psychological abuse." I disagree. I think the parents are whack-jobs and I think Storm is going to be messed up as a teen, but in all other respects they seem to be loving parents... and people are FAR to quick to suggest removing children from the care of their parents just because the parents are different.

I don't especially care if the parents let their boys wear pink dresses and put their hair in pigtails. Whoop-de-doo. But to deliberately rob a baby of "zis" identity strikes me as vaguely nauseating.

That's all I'm saying.

No, it IS abandonment - either way you look at it

Sigh. It's happened again. A woman has just confessed she doesn't like being a mother, and spends the rest of the article justifying why she gave up full-time custody of her kids.

"Four months in [to a book research project in Japan] when her children came to visit, she had an epiphany: She didn't want to be a full-time mother anymore. When she returned to New York, she ended her 20-year marriage and chose not to be her kids' custodial parent," notes this article.

This author is also a faculty member at a college in Vermont. Do I hear just a hint of the feminist mentality that has poisoned our nation's women against their very own children? Career is supreme; to hell with the kids.

This woman says society has a "glaring double standard: When a man chooses not to be a full-time parent, it's acceptable -- or, at least, accepted. But when a woman decides to do so, it's abandonment."

No, it's abandonment either way you look at it, when either parent willfully refuses to parent his or her children.

The article goes on to describe some of the angst a couple of other women felt throughout their decision-making process to abandon their kids. One of these women is - I'm not kidding - a "spiritual advisor." Right. Has her "spiritual visions" ever considered the anguish of the kids? Of course not. The kids, we are assured, always turn out "fine." They always do, don't they? No kid could EVER be messed up by something like this.

This reminded me of another article I copied over several years ago which was so shocking I saved it: A woman so bored (bored "rigid," in fact) with her own children that she spent "much of the early years of [her] children's lives in a workaholic frenzy because the thought of spending time with them was more stressful than any journalistic assignment [she] could imagine." She considers full-time motherhood "menial" and feels that "making a child your career is a dangerous move because your marriage and sense of self can be sacrificed in the process."

The worst part is this (cough) "mother" tells her own kids how much they bore her. Great for their little budding self-esteems, isn't it? "They [her children] also accept my limitations. They stopped asking me to take them to the park (how tedious) years ago. But now when I try to entertain them and say: 'Why don't we get out the Monopoly board?' they simply look at me woefully and sigh: 'Don't bother, Mum, you'll just get bored.'"

Are people like this so selfish that they can't tolerate boredom for any length of time? Is their fear of boredom more important than playing a game with their kids?

Okay ladies, here's a thought: SUCK IT UP. Right now there's something bigger than your boredom or your precious career or any other aspect of parenting that you may dislike. You're the one that created these human beings, and you're the one who'd better damned well rise to the occasion and do your duty no matter how many career opportunities pass or how bored you are. Duty and obligation are apparently concepts the feminist mentality would like to pretend are passé because it interferes with the selfish ME mentality.

Your precious careers will be cold comfort in your old age when your kids happily abandon YOU because they don't give a rip about you. Why should they? Old folks are BORING. They're not as exciting as a CAREER. You reap what you sow, folks.

Credit card parenting

Here's an intelligent and thoughtful post by my friend Enola Gay on a subject she calls credit card parenting. Enjoy her wisdom!

UPDATE: Several readers mentioned the link didn't work. It's been fixed.

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Lambs to the Slaughter

Come see my latest article at RegularGuy.com entitled "Lambs to the Slaughter."

Raising thugs

Something’s been bugging me lately, and I figure it’s cathartic to write it down. This is a long post, so grab a cup of tea or a glass of wine and make yourself comfortable.

When we lived in Oregon, we spent years attending a homeschool playgroup run by a woman (I’ll call her Janet) with two young sons. All the families involved with this group had young children ranging from six years old downward. We got together once a week.

Janet, who ran the playgroup, had studied child psychology in college, had once run a daycare, and wrote a weekly newspaper column on parenting. By all accounts she was an expert on raising kids. Right?

During the times we associated with this family, I had my private concerns about the way Janet’s boys were being raised. The mother was dominant, the father completely emasculated and relegated to the background. (In fact for the first several months of our acquaintance I thought Janet was divorced because no mention of the father was ever made. I found out later this was a common misconception because no one had ever heard about her husband, much less seen him.) Janet would literally forbid the father from disciplining “her” boys. He provided money, she provided the raising and education for the children.

But my concern stemmed from the utter and complete lack of discipline in these boys’ lives. An early example of this occurred one day at our playgroup when the youngest boy (who was four at the time) wanted to nurse (Janet believed in unlimited breastfeeding until the children chose to wean themselves). A bunch of us mothers were sitting around chatting while our children played when the four-year-old came up to Janet and plunged a hand down her shirt, squeezing her breast. “Nurse,” he demanded.

“Not now, dear,” Janet replied, trying to extract his hand. “I’m talking.”

“NURSE!” the boy shouted, and he wrenched her breast so hard she screamed.

“Okay, okay!” Janet settled her son on her lap and let him breastfeed.

We mothers sat around in horrified silence. Not horrified that she was breastfeeding – we had all breastfed our kids – but because Janet had actually given in to her son’s blatant and abusive demands. She let him have his way despite the violence of his approach.

It was a portent of things to come.

After a few years, people started drifting away from the group. Their children had been subject to just a little too much bullying by Janet’s boys. None of us wanted to offend her or criticize her parenting skills (though we privately loathed them) so, rather than confront her, one by one we stopped coming. My “excuse” to stop attending the playgroup was to move to Idaho.

Janet believed in involving her boys in as many extracurricular activities as possible including acting lessons, art lessons, sports, and other functions. In nearly every case, the boys were eventually asked to leave because of misbehavior.

Let’s take the art lessons for example. I know about these incidents because my friend Linda’s daughter (who used to attend the playgroup until she got fed up with the boys’ bullying) was in the same art classes as Janet’s boys.

The boys were disruptive and destructive in class. They would actually tease and taunt a handicapped student. The mother of the handicapped boy, unable to stop the harassment, finally threatened to withdraw her four children from art class unless the teacher expelled Janet’s sons, which is what happened. Janet was annoyed because – I’m not kidding – she felt her boys were just naturally exuberant.

Since Linda lived in the same town as Janet, she would sometimes bump into this family on the street. Janet’s boys would scream – yes, scream – foul language at her daughter, right there in broad daylight on the sidewalk. This would happen, I hasten to add, in the company of Janet, who never restrained their language or behavior.

The bad behavior of Janet’s sons escalated when they got older, after we had already left for Idaho. As the years passed I sometimes wondered how they were doing. The once-a-year Christmas newsletter from Janet gave no indication of problems, of course. But then I already knew she was capable of the most amazing mental gymnastics to keep seeing her boys in a pure light.

Fast forward to last week when my friend Linda was in a store and saw two teenagers in long Columbine-style trench coats with greased-back hair and slouching posture. Linda rounded a corner just in time to hear the oldest boy tell his mother to “SHUT THE F*** UP.” Linda stopped dead in her tracks, recognizing Janet’s two kids who were now 15 and 13 and looked, in her words, skanky beyond belief.

So here is the perfect example of how to raise a couple of thugs. Linda reported that Janet looked “less arrogant” than before (she was always vocal in her opinions on how to properly raise children – after all, unlike the rest of us, she was the expert). But here my friend had caught the boys in the act of verbally abusing their mother in public. The jig was up.

I hardly know what to say. The original members of the playgroup had seen this coming for years. Most of us have stayed in touch and I’ve heard similar incidences from others. It makes me feel sad to think of the despair Janet must be feeling as she starts to reap what she sowed. I liked Janet well enough during our acquaintance, even while I didn’t approve of her parenting methods, and it saddens me to see the two proto-thugs she is launching upon society.

While brings me to the concept of modern parenting ideas. Parental techniques have changed over the years, of course, but have you ever noticed that those who live by the traditional methods – firm and loving discipline, a strong father, parental authority, etc. – produce the most stable, happy, productive children who grow into adults who parent their own children in the same way? Why are people constantly trying to reinvent the wheel when the wheel works so damn well already?

I have great faith and belief that many of the old ways of raising kids worked just fine, and we shouldn’t mess with success…especially in matters of human nature. Under ideal circumstances, I believe children do best in an intact two-parent home with firm “alpha” parents who are unified in their love and parenting style, and apply consistent and strong discipline to their kids. Children, as the saying goes, are born liberal, and it’s up to the parents to raise them “right."

Janet is raising her boys “left.” The results are two proto-thugs on the threshold of being launched into society.

Oh joy.