Honey, I discarded the kids

A troubled teenager, in a novel I read recently, worried wryly that his parents probably lay awake all night debating whether a "fifty-fourth trimester abortion" might not be a viable option.

Post-natal abortions aren't yet an option for frustrated parents, but Nebraska has come up with the next best thing: legal abandonment. Like all or most other states, Nebraska has adopted a "safe haven" law, permitting a mother to leave a child with a state facility without facing criminal penalties. These laws were passed to prevent "dumpster babies," unwanted newborn babies abandoned by their terrified mothers.

But Nebraska's new law is unique, in that it applies to all children up until the age of 19.

By Sept. 23, two more boys and one girl, ages 11 to 14, had been abandoned in hospitals in Omaha and Lincoln. Then a 15-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl were left.

The biggest shock to public officials came last week, when a single father walked into an Omaha hospital and surrendered nine of his 10 children, ages 1 to 17, saying that his wife had died and he could no longer cope with the burden of raising them.

--Erik Eckholm, New York Times (10-2-08).

Officials blame these abandonments on family financial crises, lack of available psychiatric services and the insurance to pay for them, and parents who are confronting behavioral problems they simply don't know how to handle.

All of these concerns are real. And yet something is wrong. Americans for generations reared large unruly families on virtually no money at all. Farm families relied on subsistence farming. Urban families squeaked by on tiny, pre-minimum-wage incomes. Pre-Dr. Spock parents did not have the advantage of child care manuals or state agencies that promoted enlightened child care policies. Children and teens were no less rebellious and unruly then than now.

But parents did the best they could, and usually got the job done. A few kids turned out great and far exceeded their parents' expectations. Most became reasonably decent citizens, much like their parents. Some were disappointments, ran away from home, became criminals or deadbeats. But all were loved, or -- even if not loved -- raised to the best of their parents' abilities.

I feel uneasy judging others for their response to problems I haven't faced myself. And yet, we seem to be confronting a growing social tendency to give up in the face of adversity, a tendency that carries over to child-rearing itself. Like those who abandon their beloved, healthy pets -- or have a vet put them to sleep -- whenever the animal becomes a bother, or who declare bankruptcy at the earliest opportunity rather than struggle to meet their obligations, many people today seem willing to just walk away from inconvenient responsibilities.

Not most people, of course. Although the abandonments described in the NYT article are dramatic, they obviously represent a small minority of all the Nebraska families that are facing the very real pain of raising "problem" kids, many of whom will turn out just fine in a few more years.

But the story from Nebraska still illustrates a gradual, but discouraging, decline in our ability as a society to face adversity, or even simply annoyance, without flinching.