Girl Takes Life
Bad Parenting Becomes Lethal
By Daniel Muniz

Do more parents need to grow up? Has the line between adulthood and adolescent behavior been blurred?

Millions of teachers who are with our children on a day-to-day basis certainly agree that so many parents are now out of control. Educators and school administrators constantly have to deal with the outrageous behavior of immature adults who are not all that different than that of their offspring.

And outside of school, bad parental behavior is slowly creeping into everywhere else.

The bizarre but highly publicized incident of Megan Meier is one such example.

13-year-old Megan Meier from Dardenne Prairie Missouri committed suicide because her online personal relationship went awry. Her cyber boyfriend was a handsome 16-year-old teenage boy named Josh. And since Megan’s life was beset with weight problems and depression, she quickly became enamored with someone higher up in the social food chain taking an active interest in her. But at the peak of her infatuation, Josh abruptly and cruelly ended their online relationship. In the final emails that were exchanged, Josh said:

For a young girl who was barely in her teenage years and who was also fraught with low self-esteem and confidence problems, that crushing blow was more than enough to push her over the edge to take her own life.

Granted, there should have been more parental involvement and supervision, especially when kids go online and use social networking sites such as MySpace.

But what makes this story so bizarre is that Josh was a fictitious person created by the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Lori Drew was 47 years old at the time and a neighbor. Megan had stopped associating with Drew’s daughter but the girl took it as an unforgivable slight. She then enlisted her mother to help retaliate against Megan. And in our modern electronic age, cyberspace has become the new playground so Lori Drew made up a bogus MySpace account in an attempt to deceive Megan and then bully her online.

Unfortunately, the harassment worked too well.

Although this story got national press attention because the media loves extremes, outrageous behavior by parents is becoming more commonplace. The difference here is that the outcome ended tragically.

But whether it is at a Little League field or in a gym during a volleyball game or at a play in an elementary school, our newspapers and evening news are becoming filled with stories of out-of-control parents throwing chairs, engaging in fist-fights, or even pulling guns. There are still plenty of invective laced temper tantrums but the real danger is when the anger goes beyond shouting matches and resorts to physical violence.

Kids are always going to be mean to other kids and there probably is nothing that can ever be done to effectively stop it. After all, children lack wisdom, maturity, and the critical thinking skills needed to make good decisions.

However, the real problem is when parents aren’t any different in their social development than that of their own kids. And what is worse is when parents no longer establish gradient differences between their lives and that of the children’s; they ultimately become one in the same. In fact, plenty of adults now think of kids as being people who wear smaller clothes so they then treat them as their friends instead of engaging in parenthood.

As a result, parents are no longer living vicariously through their children but are becoming an integral part of their social experiences. It is as if they too are going through whatever grade their child is in. Consequently, these parents are actively helping their children become socially popular in school whether it is throwing keg parties or helping them buy their friends.

On one side of the pendulum, these parents are also trying to help enhance the image and the social experience as well as the popularity of their children in what they think is a “positive” way to help them out. But what about the other side of the pendulum in which a parent is just as eager to find a “negative” way to help their children such as resorting to malice and exacting revenge?

And that is when things get scary. In this situation, Lori Drew saw absolutely nothing wrong in helping her daughter get back at Megan. Parents these days have already gone out of their way to become their child’s best friend, so retaliating against their “perceived” enemies is not that far of a leap.

Does that mean that incidents like that of Megan Meier are going to become commonplace in our society?

Well, we haven’t reached that point yet but from what educators and school administrators from all over the country are already seeing; such outrageous behavior could indeed be around the corner if more parents don’t start acting like parents.

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