As my family heads back to "school" today, (when you homeschool, every day is "school"--or no day is "school," depending on how you look at it--so the days that you leave home and attend enrichment classes elsewhere become "school days" for you), I can't help but be particularly prayerful for the families of the students at Sandy Hook Elementary. I don't know when they actually went back to school...or will go back to school...or even where "school" will be for them now...but I'm sure picking up the pieces and trying to move back into "normal" has been all but impossible for them over the holidays, and is all but impossible now, moving into the "back to school after the holidays" scene.
In the midst of all my praying and thinking and praying and talking and praying and crying over the past several weeks, I've read many interesting articles about the situation. This one, published yesterday on
Public Discourse, finds author Russ Nieli arguing that "we ignore at our own peril the problems caused by family breakdown." It isn't really "politically correct" to discuss these things, but any honest assessment of the situation requires that we do so.
Absentee Fathers and the Newtown School Shooting
by Russell Nieli within Marriage
January 2nd, 2013 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/01/7488/
Any
honest analysis of the Newtown tragedy must address the social problems
caused by divorce, absent fathers, and the burdens of single
motherhood.
Last
month's massacre of twenty young children and six adults at Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, prompted much public debate
and soul-searching. The results were predictable. The left-liberal
position went something like this:
There
are too many guns in America, too many crazy people who should not have
guns, and too few restrictions on the kinds of firearms that civilians
may own. It's ridiculous to allow civilians to possess military-style
assault rifles with large capacity magazines that can kill dozens of
innocent human beings in minutes. We need to end our national love
affair with firearms and firearm violence and should learn from the
Europeans and Japanese, who severely restrict gun ownership for anyone
not in the military or government police forces. We also need laws
mandating that privately-owned firearms be stored securely so that
criminals or unlicensed users can't get them.
Our
mental health system also needs a thorough overhaul. Troubled, at-risk
youth are too often left to fend for themselves because their families
cannot pay for or access the professional care they need. We need to
provide them this care through more outreach programs in schools and
community centers that identify children and teens at high risk for
self-destructive or socially destructive behavior.
While
many found this view compelling, the conservative take on the Newtown
horror couldn't have differed more. It went like this:
Guns
will always fall into hands that they shouldn't, no matter how
extensive our gun control laws are. These laws don't prevent criminals
from getting guns, but they disarm law-abiding citizens and render them
helpless against deadly criminal attacks. Look at what happened in
Norway. A country with very strict gun laws still saw one of the worst
gun massacres of all time when the deranged Nordic supremacist Anders
Breivik systematically shot and killed over five dozen helpless
adolescents on an offshore island where only he possessed a firearm.
Only a heavily armed Norwegian SWAT team stopped his attack. The bad
guys prey on helpless victims who they know will never shoot back. Only
good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns. To protect our school
children we need more armed guards--policemen and suitably trained
civilians--who know how to use firearms responsibly and how to defend
the helpless and defenseless against homicidal crazies.
We
also need to stop the poisonous influence of violent video games and
Hollywood movies on developing young minds. Teenage youth can become
desensitized to violence through an addiction to games like Grand Theft
Auto, Thrill Kill, Postal, and Mortal Kombat. These games reduce
people's sense of empathy and increase their appetite for sadism and
aggression. If we really want to tackle the problem of youth violence in
America, we should critically examine the perverse messages that our
media-saturated culture often sends to young people.
Other
claims and arguments were made to bolster both positions. The Supreme
Court, for instance, came under attack from both sides--from the right
for prohibiting prayer in public schools, from the left for interpreting
the Second Amendment to include a right of private gun ownership. The
two contrasting views were fleshed out in countless op-ed pieces and
news broadcasts with the usual low quality we expect of such media
treatment.
The Elephant in the Living Room
Though
both sides in this dispute have something sensible to say, they've
missed an elephant in the room either because of willful blindness to
anything politically incorrect or because of a lack of real-world
experience. I speak of the problems associated with divorce, family
breakup, father absence, and the enormous burdens placed on a single mom
who must rear a troubled male child alone.
Adam
Lanza was not normal. He suffered from morbid shyness and an inability
to connect with his student peers and anyone else--a cold, withdrawn,
hollow shell of a person to his classmates, an Asperger's patient to
professional psychologists. Even under the best of circumstances--with a
loving, caring, two-parent family consisting of a husband and wife who
complemented each other's strengths and worked together as a
team--raising someone like Adam Lanza would be a real challenge.
One
can't say how he might have turned out under different circumstances,
but statistics show that having divorced parents, as Lanza did, plus a
father who moves out of the household, remarries, and has little contact
with his son for long stretches of time, is not the ideal formula for
successful childrearing. Yet what sociologists call "family structure
issues" were rarely discussed in the media, not even on conservative
talk radio where one might have expected them to have a preeminent
place. Most Americans, it seems, have so many divorced or single-parent
neighbors, friends, and relatives (if they are not themselves divorced
or living as single parents) that discussing family structure is simply
too painful and too sensitive to be taken up in any honest or candid
manner.
While
we may never be able to explain fully what caused Lanza's murderous
rampage, the best speculation to date involves, besides mental health
problems and gun availability, the challenges faced by a single mom
trying to raise a deeply troubled youth. A Fox News reporter gathered from
the Lanzas' neighbors and others who knew the family situation that
Lanza likely killed his mother because he thought that she loved the
students and teachers of Sandy Hook School more than she loved him.
Lanza knew that his mother planned to have him committed to
conservatorship, and perceived her court petition as an effort to send
him away. This enraged him to the extent that he killed first-graders
who may have worked with his mother in the past year, and the school's
principal and psychologist, who were his mother's good friends.
It's
hard to read such an account without feeling great sadness for someone
like Nancy Lanza--a single mother with a deeply disturbed male
adolescent on her hands and no man in the house to turn to for help or
advice. Those who knew her said that she was at her wit's end and
thought she could no longer care for her son by herself. In a saner age,
when people understood the palpable harms of "broken homes" and
"fatherless boys" (the terms themselves have become quaint if not
archaic), the "family structure issue" would have guided reflection on
the Lanza killings. But now, since any such discussion of divorce's
harms, especially the harm of not having a father present in the home,
would step on too many toes, we focus instead on the safer territory of
gun control and our mental health system.
A preview of the current non-discussion was provided almost fifty years ago when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.
As Moynihan learned, however important the "family structure issue" may
be to an understanding of an acute social problem, for many it strikes a
raw nerve, the pain of which shuts down all serious discussion. A
preoccupation with "racism" and "de-industrialization" were the
equivalents in Moynihan's day of guns and the mental health system
today, as topics to raise to avoid the salient but hypersensitive issue
of family breakdown.
In his book Fatherless America,
David Blankenhorn writes that "across societies, married fatherhood is
the single most reliable, and relied upon, prescription for socializing
males. As marriage weakens, more and more men become isolated and
estranged from their children and from the mother of their children. One
result, in turn, is the spread of male violence." Though we can't
ignore the other contributing factors to the Lanza massacre, this simple
truth must be acknowledged in any honest assessment of the Newtown
tragedy.
-- Russell Nieli is a lecturer in politics at Princeton University.
And so we pray every day for our marriage, for our children, for our home, and for our family.
Lord, protect us. Keep us faithful to one another. And
keep us compassionate and concerned for those who are wrestling amid the pain of struggling marriages and wayward children and a world nearly breaking under the crushing weight of sin.
May we ever remember that, "He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found"!
