Not Sorry Parents – Just Sorry People
So, the other day, I was driving my kids to school and listening to a morning radio talk show (which is probably bad for my blood pressure but I can’t seem to break the habit). The topic was playground bullies. The illustrious Roula and Ryan had invited calls from parents of the bullies as well as the bullied.
So some woman calls in to whine about how hard her life is as a result of her five-year old being a bully. It seems that his classmates’ parents are constantly demanding that this woman control her son. She says she’s “put in 100%” and talked to her son about his bullying a whole, whole lot, but nothing works. And it’s so hard for this woman. People think she must be a bad parent, but she’s not! They bother her all the time. When is it going to stop? The latest guy was all pissed off because this woman’s son threatened to break the guy’s daughter’s arms. “Why do these people have to overreact to everything?” the caller whined. “Don’t they realize how hard it is for me?”
This reminded me of Neal Pollack’s Salon column, in which he whined about how sucky it was that his son had been kicked out of preschool for biting other kids. Because, you know, good preschools are hard to get into, and it’s hard to be a successful writer and parent with some biting toddler underfoot.
I almost called in to the radio show to point out to the woman that, although she may be talking to her son about his bullying being wrong, he could probably also hear her constant bitching to everyone else about how wrong the victims’ parents were for bothering her about it. He was probably learning, basically, that mommy was okay with the bullying as long as no one blamed her for it.
But then I didn’t. You know why? Because I realized that if the woman didn’t already care about other children getting hurt or feeling afraid, she would never be able to teach her son to care about it. It’s too late for this woman, and it’s too late for Neal Pollack, who, on his blog, has been making petulant references to all the hatemail he got over ever since his Salon article was posted. I could call them personally and teach them to feign shock, disgust, disappointment and compassion when they hear about their children bullying others because, ostensibly, their children would realize, “You know what? My behavior, in this case, was unacceptable to the people I love and admire.” But it wouldn’t work, because these parents’ real attitudes – the completely self-centered, discompassionate ones – would show through in everything else they’d do.
There are a lot of people like this in the world, and they’re not all parents, either. Some of them will never be parents, in fact, because they hate all children for stealing their Harry-Potter-related opportunities.
For the most part, I’m not interested in telling other people how to raise their kids. I barely have the time to concentrate on raising my own kids, so I let others fend for themselves.
However, I have to ask the radio show woman two rhetorical questions:
1. If you don’t have the barest shred of empathy when it comes to other people’s children, how can you expect your son to?
2. If you don’t care about other people’s suffering, why should I care about yours?
