Parenting is hard. In the house next to my mother's live a now-retired couple, who have - or had - three children. Twenty years ago on December 23, me and my parents were invited over to this family for a neighbourly get-together right before Christmas. But it was the worst "party" I have ever been to. The neighbours' middle child, their youngest son, a 23-year-old young man, was missing. My family knew that he had been suffering from bouts of depression that fall, and he had spent time in hospital being treated for it. Just ten days before or so he had been released from hospital, and he had gotten a temporary job delivering things for Christmas. Well, he and his delivery van had not returned home the previous evening (he still lived with his parents).
You can imagine the awful mood as we were all trying to be nice and neighbourly. We were all thinking that the young man had killed himself, but no one dared mention the word "suicide". The woman in the family served us chicken stew, where big pieces of slimy chicken skin were drenched in a thick sauce, and trying to swallow that thick slime and thinking about the young man's probable fate made me almost throw up several times.
The next day they found his van. Then they found him. Yes, he had killed himself. It was Christmas Eve.
The thing is, those neighbours have two other children, a son and a daughter. They are both doing very well and have jobs and families.
My point is - if the parents of those three children raised their kids more or less the same way, then it worked for their oldest and their youngest ones, but not for their middle child. And the only explanation I can think of is that children are different. What works for one child doesn't necessarily work for another one.
I was born in 1955, a very different time from today. I know that as a small child I was very obedient, no doubt partly because of who I was and partly because of how I was raised. For example, when I was six years old and my brother was four our parents left us every night for weeks in a row to go and work on the house they were building. They put us to bed at seven, told us not to get up, explained that they were leaving, turned out the lights, and left. We had no baby-sitter. That was okay. I wasn't scared. My parents had told us that nothing bad would happen to us, so of course nothing would. Admittedly my brother was a bit scared, so he would come over to my bed and sleep next to me. That was okay, too. Our parents would come home at around ten or eleven and find us asleep in my bed.
Later, from the time when I was ten, my parents left me unsupervised in another way. In the summer, when I didn't have school and didn't have any particular chores to do, I was allowed to leave home and not come back until dinner. This was long, long before there were any cellphones. There were a few pay phones around, and I would always have a few coins on me for emergencies. But the only time I can ever remember that I used a pay phone to call home for an "emergency" was when a friend of mine and I had taken our bicycles and cycled away too far, and we were just too tired to cycle all that way back home again. My father came and picked us up. Apart from that, however, we never asked for help, and our parents had absolutely no idea where we were, and they had no way of tracing us. They had told us when we had to be home for dinner, that was all, and I was never late.
If something had happened to me or my brother when we spent all that time unsupervised, would our parents have blamed themselves? I don't think so. Make no mistake, they would have been absolutely devastated, but I don't think they would have blamed themselves. I'm sure it never occurred to them to forbid us to spend our summer days outside and on our own and go wherever we wanted. All the other parents allowed their kids to do that, so why shouldn't my parents do it? None of the kids I knew of ever came to any grief, not during our lazy summer days anyway. And I was always home for dinner.
But in some ways I think my parents raised me wrong, nevertheless. In some ways, they made me too obedient. A towering figure of my childhood was my maternal grandfather, and my mother never understood the role he played in my life. Any chance he got, he talked religion with me. My grandfather was a Pentecostalist, but my mother had left that church in her youth and joined a liberal church instead. My grandfather probably wanted to bring me into the Pentecostalist church instead, as a sort of compensation for losing my mother. He told me about fervently religious children, about children who lay dying and thanked God for taking them up to heaven, about children who happily cut their own birch-rods so that their parents could beat them up with them, so that the children would be even better and more God-fearing children than they were already. I had used to feel like a relatively good child who almost always obeyed her parents, but my grandfather's tales made me feel how utterly sinful and inadequate I was. And when my grandfather told me that the world was coming to an end any day now, or any night, and Jesus was going to come and get all his true followers and leave the rest behind, then I lay awake many nights and listened for Jesus. I knew that there was no chance at all that I would be allowed into heaven, not in view of how bad I was compared with the children that my grandfather had told me about, but at least I was going to scream when I heard Jesus and wake my mother, so I could plead with her to stay with me.
I still have an anger inside me, when I think of how terrified I was a child because of what my grandfather told me. And if I hadn't been raised to be such a good child, I might have refused to listen to my grandfather when he told me all his religous horror tales. And if I hadn't been raised to be unquestioningly religious I might have dared to tell my mother that my grandfather scared me. As it was, the fact that I was scared only made me feel even more sinful and doomed, and I was deathly scared of telling anyone.
Raising children is hard. How do you do it? How do you know what is right for every child? And should you blame the parents when things go wrong for their kids?
Not in the case of Megan Meier, in my opinion. I doubt that her parents were perfect for her, but then again, being perfect is almost impossible. I really do think that Megan's parents did their best for her. The other set of parents, however, did their best to bully Megan. Let's put the blame on them.
Ann
