American parenting is on the decline

Opinion: August 2, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Paul Akers

Free Lance-Star

Fredericksburg, Va.

In a YMCA locker room some years ago I was toweling off as an attorney, loosening his tie, described to a friend his victory in a child-custody case earlier in the day, but not in a triumphal tone.

“What I really wanted to tell the judge,” the lawyer said, “was to put the kid in foster care and not let either of these parents within 100 miles of him.”

I recalled that comment while reading Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in Brown v. EMA, involving hyper-violent video games. In ruling that California could not forbid the sale of these games to minors, Scalia noted that “parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home.”

I don’t know precisely how the family of Antonin Scalia functioned, but my assumption is that it was intellectually and morally refined, with the financial and human resources to fortify its elevated values. I know one of Justice Scalia’s sons: Paul Scalia, a priest, is a man whom I like and, without reservation, respect. I would not be shocked if one day he made cardinal.

Most of the parents with whom I’ve come into contact during the last 30 years, through two sets of bambinas, were not raising cardinals. A few raised jailbirds. Many others inspired conversations between Mrs. Akers and me that began, “Can you believe ...”

Fewer parents

American parenting, like almost everything else in our unraveling land, is in decline. It’s easy to see why, for reasons unrelated to a columnist’s easy moralizing. One large factor is that there are fewer parents around. As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in dissent, “Today, 5.3 million grade-school-age children of working parents are routinely home alone. Thus, it has, if anything, become more important to supplement parents’ authority to guide their children’s development.”

Breyer might also have mentioned that one in four U.S. children is being raised by a single parent; that four in 10 American kids are born to a single mother; that the 40-year pounding of blue-collar wages has forced most married parents to work more jobs and more hours, leaving less time and energy for child supervision; and that the proliferation of image-receiving technology puts gizmos into little hands that many parents don’t know how to turn on, much less monitor.

But the main reason I have some sympathy for California’s stricken law is that many parents have standards for what their kids consume that are so low you need a bathysphere to find them. The parents themselves are perfect Culture People, unmoored from age-old understandings of what is good and bad, edifying and debasing.

How else do you explain parents who let their 8-year-old sons wear ear studs like precocious pimps? Or who allow their 12-year-old daughters to leave the house in skirts that show more of their tail ends than a shrimp platter? Or who “ooh” and “ahh” with their preschooler in the checkout line over a tabloid cover featuring Lady Gaga? And these parents are supposed to protect their progeny from “games” in which players, assuming the role of sadistic killers, urinate on and set fire to bystanders?

‘Toddlers & Tiaras’

There is now a show on one of the cable networks called “Toddlers & Tiaras,” in which parents tart up their very small daughters, a la poor JonBenet Ramsey, and parade them competitively in “beauty” contests. As a Wikipedia article on these events notes, 5-year-olds “engage in behaviors and practices that are socially associated with sexiness: wearing heavy makeup to emphasize full lips, long eyelashes, and flushed cheeks, high heels to emulate adult women, and revealing ’evening gowns.”’

As our president says, let me be clear: In my America, parents who participated in such activities would be soundly caned and their filial victims delivered to the custody of Methodist parsons.

Paul Akers is editor of the opinion pages of The Free LanceStar (Fredericksburg, Va.). Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.