Parents Under Siege: Why You Are the Solution, Not the Problem in Your Child's Life

Book by Bedard Claire Garbarino James

Chapter 1: When Bad Things Happen to Good Families

It all starts with compassion. You love your children. You want the best for them. You would give your life to save theirs. But sometimes love is not enough. Bad things happen to good families. Would you have compassion for a family in which a little girl died because she got into an unlocked medicine cabinet while her mom was on the phone? Would you feel compassion if a little boy were hit by a car while out riding his bike after his father had warned him many times not to ride in the street? To paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen master and peacemaker, compassion is not a principle, it is an energy in us waiting to manifest.

In the movie Seven Years in Tibet, there is an unforgettable scene in which Heinrich Harrer, played by Brad Pitt, is asked to build a movie house for the young Dalai Lama, at the Potala Palace, in Lhasa, Tibet. As the excavation begins, Heinrich arrives at the site and is greeted by a group of monks rushing toward him, looking absolutely frantic. They gesture toward the ground and implore the unsuspecting Heinrich to stop all digging; they explain that the worms hiding in the earth are being trampled and destroyed. Stunned by their concern for even these lives, Heinrich is left speechless.

He returns to see his friend, the young Dalai Lama, who explains to him that Tibetans believe that all living beings are to be protected against harm and suffering. This compassion is at the core of their spiritual practice and beliefs as Buddhists. When Heinrich protests that such compassion is impractical, the Dalai Lama reassures him, confident that he will find a creative solution to the problem.

The next scene reveals the solution. The monks kneel on the ground in two rows: one row of monks digs and places the mounds of dirt into bags, while the second row goes through the bags, gently removing each worm and placing it in a bowl for transportation to another environment where the worms can continue to live happily and fulfill their purpose. Why is this so important to us? Because it is a true story. This scene is not some movie fantasy, but rather a true portrait of Tibetan Buddhist belief and an accurate reflection of a people's nonviolence and respect for all living beings, great or small. For the Dalai Lama, it all starts with compassion.

Decades later, the adult Dalai Lama says of compassion: True compassion is not just an emotional response, but a firm commitment founded on reason. Therefore, a truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change, even if they behave negatively. Through universal altruism you develop a feeling of responsibility for others, the wish to actively help them overcome their problems.

In the summer of 2000 we spent a week listening to the 65-year-old Dalai Lama teach compassion. We were fortunate enough to have an audience with him, along with 200 other Americans, and we recommitted ourselves to living lives of compassion. The goal of this chapter -- indeed, of the whole book -- is to bring this commitment to parenting. So, following the counsel of the Dalai Lama, we begin with the process of understanding, which is the most reliable foundation for compassion. We want you to know why and how parents are under siege -- why maybe you are under siege -- and encourage you to use understanding to act with compassion, with your own children, with other parents, with yourself.

The challenges parents face exist on a spectrum. At one end are the day-to-day issues -- for example, getting infants to sleep through the night, toilet training toddlers, getting first-graders to pick up their toys, ensuring that sixth-graders do their homework, and making sure teenagers don't drink and drive. At the other end are the frightening problems that confront a minority of parents -- an infant with spina bifida, a child with cancer, a teenager who is paralyzed in a car accident. But certain difficulties require even more compassion than the child damaged physically through chance, some genetic defect or some lurking virus, or some random danger: Some children seem to volunteer for trouble, resisting everyone who tries to help and guide them toward a positive path.

Anything Can Happen

In Chicago, a mother walked her 7-year-old son, Dantrell, to school every morning. Their inner city neighborhood was a dangerous place to walk alone, and she always feared for his safety. One day in 1992, she accompanied Dantrell to school, and as the daily ritual goes, she let go of his hand to let him walk the last 75 feet to the front door, where teachers were standing on the steps to greet him. As usual, cops were sitting in a parked car at the corner. But this time, as he walked toward the school, a shot rang out and Dantrell fell dead, shot in the head by a gang member out to revenge himself against an opponent's little boy. It happened in broad daylight, in everyone's sight.

Seven years later, on April 20, 1999, a mother in the affluent Denver suburb of Littleton, Colorado, watched her beloved son get on the school bus to Columbine High School. Content in her knowledge that the day would unfold with the same predictability only such a small, affluent community enclave can provide these days, she went on with the rest of her day. Such peace of mind was, after all, why they had moved to this area. A security guard was stationed at the school, and surveillance cameras protected the building. A few hours later she learned from television reports that her son was dead, shot in the head by two of his classmates.

Anything can happen. This is the lesson American parents have taken with them into the twenty-first century, the one that resonates the loudest and ultimately leaves no parent unaffected. This is a parent's "Vietnam," the strange war that happens in faraway places and then suddenly hits home. It has profoundly affected the way parents think about other people's children and their own. Like the Vietnam lesson of the 1960s and 1970s, the anything-can-happen lesson of Littleton, Colorado, is part of our national consciousness. We want this terror to go away, yet it won't completely disappear.

For some of us it is a whispering voice inside; for others it is full-blown terror. Parents are uncomfortable with the status quo. The discomfort is hard to articulate for most, but undeniable. Not everyone's eyes are open, though when it is your child who is in trouble, you see it clearly. A mother tells us this. "My husband and I have given everything we have to being good parents, and our son is only getting into deeper trouble. We don't know where to turn anymore, and all we get is 'What are you doing wrong?' Not in so many words, but in the way some other parents look at us, or in the comments they make." Parents sleep better at night believing that if only they do things right, they are guaranteed good outcomes. Thus they resist compassion. They resist empathy. They yearn to believe they are immune. It's an understandable impulse. But the more you know, the more you know you must resist it.

In September 2000 we were participating in a program with Frank DeAngelis, the principal of Columbine High School. The moderator asked him what he had learned from all that had happened. He replied that if someone had asked him on April 19, 1999, if it was possible there were boys in his school so angry and troubled that they were planning to destroy the school, he would have said, "Impossible." But what he learned on April 20, 1999, was that it was possible, that it is possible anywhere in our country. Ask any American parent who has looked with open eyes, without the comfort of denial.

"If I work hard as a parent, my children will turn out okay." That is the unspoken guarantee of the American Dream of Parenting. We are told that you get back what you put in, a guiding principle that has sustained parents for generations because it seemed logical, and it seemed to work for most of us, most of the time. It made sense. It offered direction, order, and predictability to our ongoing efforts to make something of our children. It promised a reward at the end of a job well done. Some among us still believe it.

After one of Jim's lectures in the weeks after the Columbine High School shootings, a school board member in a small town in New York State stood up and said indignantly, "It couldn't happen in my family! Not with my kids! Not in my school!" We wish he were right. Frank DeAngelis would have agreed -- until the day it happened in his school. So would Dylan Klebold's parents -- until the day it happened to their family.

The 1990s threatened the American Dream of Parenting as never before. The problems surrounding our children and youth became increasingly more serious: rising suicide rates, drug abuse, explosive youth crime, and increasing rates of depression in young people. In 1999 USA Today asked American parents to comment on the difficulty of being a parent then compared with twenty years ago -- specifically, whether parents thought it was more difficult to raise children to be "good people." Almost 90 percent answered "Yes." Three out of four indicated that materialism and the negative influences of pop culture and the mass media were a "serious problem" in trying to raise good children.

No single event brought this home more than the school shootings committed by Dylan Klebold and his friend Eric Harris in Littleton. While we don't know Eric's parents, we know Dylan's parents, and we can assert without a doubt that they are good parents -- attentive, involved, and loving. Yet Dylan still developed a bizarre rage against humanity that he and Eric documented in a series of chilling home videotapes made in the months before their attack on their school. We know Dylan's parents are good parents, and still he reached the point where he planned and implemented the massacre of his schoolmates. The shooting left a dozen kids dead, and their parents in shock that this could happen. While their story is extreme, many good parents have discovered that their children are not who they think they were.

Listen to one mother's account.

I remember having had some concerns about Christopher when he was little, and again in Grade 5 when he was caught stealing something at the corner store, one aisle away from where I stood. Toward the end of grade school, his teachers also started complaining about how he was acting-out in class. We took him to a psychologist for testing, and he concluded that Christopher had mild Attention Deficit Disorder. We had never considered such a thing until then, and we were not particularly knowledgeable about ADD. We thought that although Christopher could be hyperactive at times, he could also be super-engrossed in activities. He could be very focused. However, as I began to read about ADD and ADHD, the description of the syndrome seemed to fit so many things in Christopher that we accepted the diagnosis. At the time, the therapist said it was not something that required therapy or medication. He did warn us that things might become worse, because as they become more academically challenged, there will be problems. He left the option of treatment open as a possibility in the future. The psychologist also relieved us of guilt and the great feeling of responsibility my husband and I felt regarding Christopher's behavior. Some of the impulsive behaviors he engaged in didn't make sense to us, and I actually thought there was something we had failed to teach him. I think when he was shoplifting in the next aisle, I took it as a moral failure on our part, and I do have to admit that one day I had him write all Ten Commandments at the kitchen table. But the psychologist said that all the Ten Commandments in the world are not going to change an impulsive type of decision making, and if you love him you hang in with him but be prepared that there will be difficult times. It isn't a moral problem, it is an issue of impulsiveness and unpredictability. The therapist was right. Things did become difficult. Christopher became a habitual truant, and we eventually found out that he was using drugs, probably more than we will ever really know. He disengaged more and more from our family and started spending the night away, then several nights at a time. We would call all his friends, at least the ones we knew of, and often could not find him until he came home on his own. Devastated as we were, we continued to hope.

The promise of getting back what you put in doesn't seem like such a sure thing. Growing numbers of American parents have come to realize that things have changed. To be sure, some of us hang on to the old comforting rationalizations. A mother in Mississippi tells us, "I still insist that if you are blameless, nothing bad can happen." But more and more parents look at what is happening to families like the Klebolds' and say to themselves, "I think I've been a good parent -- but what happened to them could happen to me." Parents are afraid and confused, bombarded with contradictory advice from the Right and the Left, blamed if their children turn out screwed up, and swinging between hysterical overreaction and numbed resignation. Parents need compassion, based on understanding.

But Do the Issues Ever Really Change?

The philosopher George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Many Americans are unwilling to look at history in more than a casual way, but when it comes to understanding parenting, we need to start with history. Ten years ago Jim was asked to deliver an address on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of a family service association in Chicago. The topic was to be the challenges parents and families would face in the coming millennium. To prepare himself for that assignment, Jim sat in a public park that had been in operation for 100 years and read over some old newspapers from the 1890s. The exercise was illuminating. The issues for parents and families as the twentieth century dawned were these, among others:

1. Substance abuse (opium) and addiction (alcohol) were recognized as insidious and powerfully destructive forces in family life.

2. There was evidence of a widening gap between rich and poor, and many voices called for action to improve the conditions of the poor -- particularly the "worthy" poor, what we today would call the "working poor."

3. Traditional American values and institutions were being challenged by the influx of immigrants who did not speak English, were perceived as making disproportionate demands on social services, and who were suppressing wages by accepting low pay, long hours, and inferior working conditions.

4. The legacy of slavery and the reality of racism lurked behind the public facade of democracy and broke out in dramatic incidents of lynching and race riots from time to time.

5. To their contemporaries, growing numbers of girls and women appeared to be in moral jeopardy due to the frequency of premarital sex and pregnancy; and the sex industry flourished.

6. Child abuse was entering the public consciousness, and there was a sense that juvenile crime was escalating.

7. Significant numbers of families were not intact, as mothers frequently died in childbirth and fathers often abandoned families.

Does this sound familiar?

The French have a saying that translates as "The more things change, the more they remain the same." There have been changes in the past hundred years, of course: divorce and unmarried-teen births have replaced maternal death and paternal separation as the main causes of "incomplete" families; openly gay and lesbian adults now publicly claim the right...