see my post 7
I think that strikes to the heart of the matter.
Parents can’t take 100% of the blame; peer groups and the ingenuity of kids enables plenty that parents are completely at a loss to control without doing something drastic like relocating the entire family to someplace like Tarawa.
But near-total parental disengagement... one must wonder how long that was going on before things really went south.
My own kids have pushed me to limits where I faced the impulse to just pitch in the towel, but I hung in there, and things are turning out fairly alright; nobody’s on drugs, nobody’s in jail, nobody’s an alcoholic, they’re all pointing their noses toward carving out lives of meaning and personal success. We just kept doing things together through thick and thin. It was lots harder than I thought it would be, and it’s not the vision I had at the beginning, but we haven’t gone to Davey Jones locker.