Tuesday, May 04, 1999
Can parents utter hardest word of all?
Some hard things must be said if we are to be honest about this thing that happened in Littleton. If we are to learn anything, if we are to let it be important.
The first thing is that the young men who killed the children at the high school do not belong among the victims' names — even if the in-crowd made their lives a living hell. At the memorial site near Columbine High School, an Illinois carpenter erected a set of 8-foot-high wooden crosses, 15 of them, including two memorializing the killers.
Feeling guilty?
An angry father of one of the victims took down the crosses for Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, saying it wasn't appropriate to honor the shooters in the same spot. Well, of course not. What the killers did at this high school is monstrous. We might forgive them, but we will not award them martyrdom.
And however nervous — however guilty — we suburban people of means are prepared to be about our skills as parents, about our two-paycheck homes, we can say so aloud. Monstrous. The murderers took guns of incredible destruction — weapons built to perform exactly as they did — and moved from classmate to classmate, blowing them away, surely with bits of bone and brain and blood clinging to their celebrated black trench coats.
This is something evil. And we need to say so. This is not the time to be our famously flexible selves with our flexible time, flexible mortgages, flexible morals.
Right and wrong.
Good and bad.
Yes and no.
We can say these words, especially to our children. In fact, it is our duty. There is a reason human offspring are sent home from the hospital with a couple of parents instead of a Visa card and the keys to an apartment. They are unformed. And uninformed. We're supposed to fill them in.
Keeping tabs
They don't need us to be their buddies. They have younger, cooler people willing to do that. They need snoopy, pushy, loving, know-it-all parents.
A study presented Monday to the Pediatric Academic Societies convention reports that children of parents who keep close tabs on them are less likely to get in trouble. Do you suspect our parents already knew this? You know, the generation who set curfews, made us work for our spending money, made us answer a lot of annoying questions before they would allow us out of the house, nagged us about our hair and clothes.
Dr. Susan Feigelman, a University of Maryland researcher who led the study, advised parents to check up on their children's friends. This is a shocking notion for many enlightened former flower children.
Researchers surveyed children ages 9-15 over a four-year period. The group was asked whether their parents knew where they were after school, whether they were expected to call and say where they were going and with whom, whether their parents knew where they were at night.
Children monitored by their parents were less likely to sell drugs or use them. They were less likely to drink alcohol or have unprotected sex. Dr. Feigelman said the study showed that peer groups became more influential as children get older.
Probably peer groups and everything else. So it only makes sense for parents to monitor that, too. That's not repressive. That's not illegal. That is our job.
If a Marilyn Manson concert is unsuitable for viewing now, why not next month? If a gun show is inappropriate in the wake of the terrible crime committed with them in Littleton, why not forever? If a violent television show is too graphic today, how about tomorrow?
And when it becomes apparent that children are tormenting each other, adults need to intervene. Stop it. Even if the tormentors are popular athletes.
We have to start saying some hard things. To each other. But especially to our children.
Beginning with “no.”
E-mail Laura Pulfer at lpulfer@en
quirer.com. Author of I Beg to Differ, she can be heard on WVXU radio, on NPR's Morning Edition and InterMedia's Northern Kentucky Magazine.
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