THE press has been full of horror stories for the past year about how teenagers engage in sexual behavior usually reserved for the sets of porn movies.
Everybody wonders where they get these ideas. “It’s Hollywood’s fault!” yell some. “Blame the public schools!” scream others.
And then you hear about dirtbag parents like Robert and Rochelle Wien, and you think: With adults like that setting the standards, kids don’t have a chance.
The Wiens aren’t a pair of “Jerry Springer Show” lowlifes. They are wealthy Westchesterites who ought to have known better than to allegedly allow a stripper to perform lewd acts for their underage son and his pals. According to reports, there was beer and pot at the high-school bash, and Robert Wien even drank vodka with the naked dancer.
Not long ago, parents behaving this way would have been unthinkable. When I was growing up, there was a generally accepted understanding about what was and wasn’t appropriate for children, even teenagers.
Other adults didn’t hesitate to discipline children not their own, because these grownups could safely assume that a misbehaving child’s parents would want them to keep their kid on the straight and narrow.
Similarly, teachers had more authority because parents assumed school officials were right until proven otherwise.
That’s gone. Today, my teacher friends say the only contact they have with parents is when mom and dad want to know why teacher is picking on their kid.
When Mom and Dad are like the Wiens – the poster couple for permissive parenting – what hope is there that kids will grow up safe, sane and with good moral character?
A couple of years ago, PBS’s “Frontline” did a documentary on a syphilis outbreak among high-schoolers in a prosperous Atlanta suburb. An investigation found out that these middle-class and upper-middle-class teens had the kinds of sexual histories that would make a prostitute blush.
Frontline interviewed their parents, who all reacted as if they had no idea why their kids had turned out this way.
Yet any viewer could see that these kids had been raised in material wealth but spiritual poverty, by disengaged parents who didn’t love their kids enough to say, “No.”
People once aspired to move to suburbs like Chappaqua to raise their kids in the safety that privilege was supposed to afford. With well-heeled wastrels like the Wiens minding the kids, you’d be better off living in a “Springer”-approved trailer park. Same moral atmosphere – without the pretense and mortgage.
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