I got stopped dead, made temporarily speechless, on my radio program the other day. The caller who was able to bring me to my vocal-cord knees was an 11-year-old boy. How?
The boy said he had just come home from school and was listening to my program, as he did every day. (I think the radio was keeping him company, because no one else was home.)
He told me he had a problem at school: He liked this one little girl, but there was another one who was “making eyes at him” and letting him know she liked him. He wondered whether he should drop this perfectly good “girlfriend” for the “new adventure.”
Here’s where I fell into the sinkhole: “Well,” I began naively, “how would you feel if your dad went off with some new lady every time one showed interest?”
“He did,” was the boy’s matter-of-fact reply. Oops.
Well, if you can’t use the good behavior as an example, you go to the pain caused by the bad behavior as a motivator.
I pointed out to the boy the pain this type of behavior causes (which he already knew). I also tried to explain how easy it is to skim along the surface of a pond, jumping from lily pad to lily pad, instead of plumbing the depths.
“If you went from girl to available girl,” I asked, “who would really get to know and love you? How would you ever feel really safe and secure with anyone?”
He got that.
I get tons of mail from adults who admire their fathers or mothers for hanging in there through their spouses’ mental or physical illnesses or through financial disasters, incredible stresses, traumas or tragedies.
These writers proclaim their personal gain of an intact family, of course. But what strikes me is how much more emphasis they put on honoring the character of their parent. They seem to use that parent’s behavior as a compass and a Jiminy Cricket-type reminder of what they could and should be.
A parent’s frivolous lifestyle of searching for gratification and self-fulfillment in spite of obligations to their spouse and children is incredibly damaging.
It’s pathetic how many of these types think their newfound greater happiness with some new partner is going to light up the lives of their children as well. It’s a whole lot easier for adults to find a new love than it is for children to love that new find.
A recent female caller to my show is a good example of this type of thinker. The woman has two minor children and is shacking up with some new lover. Her complaint was that her mother was giving her grief about this.
She wanted to know what to do to get her mother off her back. “This really isn’t her business,” she told me.
“Yes, it most certainly is!” I said. “The welfare of your children is her business as their grandmother.”
The woman totally rejected any notion that her behavior was a problem. When I challenged her to consider her daughter as a teenager wanting to sleep over with her boyfriend, she said she felt that was different.
How? Frivolous, casual, non-committed sexual behavior by a parent is a clear message to a child that sex is not sacred or special, that its use is determined by your own rationalizations (sexual need, loneliness, excitement).
The mother insisted that her shack-up situation was a commitment. I argued that it was only a tentative attachment with a let’s-see attitude, offering no example to her children of the courage and ability necessary to promote family unity.
Frankly, she didn’t care. And that’s what I’m finding more and more often: Adults have been lulled by so many media and pop-psychology influences to the mind-set that their emotional and physical needs must be satisfied and their children will simply cope.
Yes, they will cope, but at what price? The drug-use, suicide, runaway, sex and violence levels have never been higher.
Without the nest of a family and religious life, where do you expect our kids to turn?
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Questions may be sent to Dr. Laura Schlessinger in care of the Chicago Tribune WOMANEWS section, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611. Questions of general interest will be answered in this weekly column once a month; unpublished letters cannot be answered individually.
