Safe Haven

This disturbing story has received alot of play lately:

Between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Wednesday, three fathers walked into two
hospitals in Omaha and abandoned their children. One left nine siblings, ages 1
to 17.

The men, unless proven to have abused the kids, won't face prosecution
under a new Nebraska law that is unique in the nation. The law allows parents to
leave a child at a licensed hospital without explaining why.

Other parents have also used the law to leave their children. Last
week, a 13-year-old girl was left. The week before that, two boys ages 11 and
15. In all, fathers, mothers and caregivers in six families — some single
parents — have bailed on 14 kids, including seven teens, since the law took
effect in July.

"They were tired of their parenting role," says Todd Landry of
Nebraska's Department of Health and Human Services.

The mistake, said a Nebraska official this morning, is that they failed to define "child" precisely enough. The legislature had intended to limit dropoffs to newborns to prevent young mothers from abandoning their kids. Apparently pre-teens and teenagers don't qualify as "children" under the intended Nebraska definition.

What should we make of this strange and disturbing episode?

If parents truly are abandoning their kids (some even flying them in from out of state!) in Nebraska not out of financial need but for their own convenience, it seems like one of the more damaging indictments of our current culture. Here are a couple of gut-level observations:

1. Parenthood. We encourage parenthood without any sense of long-term commitment. Parenting is to a great extent sacrifice, from infancy on up. Too many people are in love with the idea of being a parent but have no use for the daily grind that kids present. It is easy to vent our collective outrage at the appalling choices of individual parents, as we're seeing in the Nebraska case, but we have to examine a society that offers too few supports for parents, that mindlessly celebrates parenthood for even the most obviously unfit parents, and that sets up teenagers in particular for failure.

2. Teenagers. We offer them the worst possible role models in our dumbass money culture, which actually celebrates ignorance, laziness, and hostility to any and all adult authority (regardless of how its constituted, so legitimate and illegitimate authority figures blur together). Moreover, when parents act in petty and selfish ways, as they often do when their kids inconvenience them, kids pick up on that and it becomes legitimate to them. "Fuck you, it's all about me" is too often a default response for parents and their teenage kids alike. "I should get my way even if I haven't earned it" likewise.

3. Childhood Protection. In many areas of our public life, we have defined downward the age line between childhood vulnerability and adult responsibility. Child offenders are tried as adults more often than at any time in the past 100 years (see the recent story about the 8-year-old who shot his dad who is about to be tried in adult court). In our culture, to paraphrase one scholar, kids "know what we know about sex and violence" at a much earlier age than they really should. Then we turn around and penalize them for acting on that knowledge in immature and dangerous ways.

I dearly wish this Nebraska story would prompt more critical analysis in the media of the underlying reasons why so many parents are so eager to dump their kids so callously. There are so many questions simply not even on the table in the public discourse that need to be.