Tough problem: What does a free society do about unfit parents?

By David McElroy · December 1, 2011

When it comes to my ideas about how to structure society, I have confident answers for most things, because they’re based on solid principles that I’m very comfortable with. But there are a few tough questions that I don’t have answers for. The toughest one — and the one that haunts me the most — is how to protect children with parents who are abusive or otherwise unfit. I honestly have no good ideas. Do you?

I started thinking about this Wednesday because of a video clip that a lot of people were linking to. Some were laughing. Some were shaking their heads. Others were angry. I’m just left frustrated at how no solution to this problem fits neatly into any of the things I believe in.

The video is a collection of several stories about a woman in Florida who has 15 children with three different men. She is angry because she thinks no one is doing enough to give things to her and her children. She’s not a sympathetic character, to put it mildly. At one point, she tells a TV reporter:

“Somebody needs to pay for all my children and all our suffering. Somebody needs to be held accountable and they need to pay.”

The state’s child service agencies had been trying to help her. They had been paying her rent, giving her furniture, and providing other services. But that wasn’t enough for this dysfunctional woman. When we meet the woman and her kids, they’re all living in a two-bedroom motel unit — after they had been evicted from a house that the state had been paying for. (The details of the eviction are unclear.)

It’s easy to turn this into just another opportunity to bash whiny people who believe society owes them something. That’s certainly the case with this woman. Ultimately, though, the question is what a truly free society can do about situations such as this one.

The absolutist answer is to simply say that people are completely on their own. If they have kids, they’re responsible for them and it’s not anybody’s else’s problem (or business). That’s not a satisfactory answer to me.

The other extreme is some variation of what we have today — a coercive system that says someone has the power to take children, but also has the responsibility to give things to dysfunctional idiots such as the mother in the video. (That’s some of her kids in a motel room with a reporter.) To me, that’s just a different kind of disgusting. That has devolved into a bizarre kind of system by which we enable dysfunctional people to be bad parents and expect the rest of us to pay for their irresponsibility. It’s not a solution, either.

So what do we do? Does a free society simply leave it up to individuals to take matters into their own hands when they see kids being mistreated — and handle it as well as they can if they have the physical force to enforce a solution? That’s a messy and unclear answer, so I can’t claim to like that one, either.

In every case, the kids are the ones who are hurt — and I don’t have any idea what to do about it.

So what do you think? Do you have a solution that I don’t have? This is one of those questions that any free society is going to have to deal with. Are you going to throw the kids overboard in the name of our principles of freedom? Are you going to allow an exception to be made to rules against coercion? Or is it going to be some kind of vigilante justice where people with the desire to protect children simply force their way in a free-lance sort of way?

I don’t have a good solution. Actually, I don’t have any solution, good or bad. How about you?

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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