Children are, in my book, off limits when writing about personal experiences. As an author and psychotherapist with an expertise in family estrangement, I have not hesitated to share my personal experiences with readers. Other writers and clinicians have also contributed their stories because like me, we feel our experiences can help others. In my writing, however, my children are off limits when it comes to public exposure. I feel strongly that they’re entitled to this respect and privacy; after all, thought they’re all grown up now, they’re still my children.
This week I was shocked and appalled by a story in a British newspaper, The Independent, about an acclaimed writer named Julie Myerson who decided to write the story of her decision to cut off all ties with her 17 year old son. Myerson, by the way, is no hack; she’s a well-known and critically acclaimed writer in the UK.
Myerson’s son Jake had developed a habituation to a form of marijuana called “skunk.” For some reason, skunk smoking has become epidemic among British adolescents. I don’t know why this trend hasn’t migrated to the US, but fortunately it hasn’t, at least to my knowledge. Skunk is extremely powerful cannabis that is grown hydroponically and is up to 25 times more powerful than the pot smoked in the U.S. It’s created a serious public health problem in Britain and has caused a dramatic rise in psychosis and hospital admissions due to skunk abuse are at their highest level.
In Myerson’s soon to be released semi-autobiographical book, “The Lost Child”, she writes that her son Jake’s drug abuse was so out of control that he became violent and posed a threat to his two younger siblings and to her and his father. Because he refused treatment and became unmanageable to live with, she took the advice offered by drug abuse experts to throw him out of their home and in effect, to disown him. To put it another way, she resigned from her job as Jake’s mother.
Ironically Myerson had been disowned by her own father and had promised Jake when he was 12 years old that she would never cut him out of her life because “we think a parent's relationship with their child is the parent's responsibility – however old or bad the child is." Good for you Julie, I agree with you there. A parent is a parent and is always a parent of their children. Having been cut off by my parents, I couldn’t agree with you more. I also don’t disagree with the professionals who advised her that she needed to throw Jake out of the house. That’s the only way to stop enabling the addiction with the hope the addict will hit bottom and get treatment. Apparently Jake did become abstinent from drugs after a period of time and this drama could have been used as a stepping-stone to repairing the rift between Jake and his family.
Instead Julie chose to publicly expose her child’s drug problems and the related behavioral problems caused by the drug abuse. Now that, in my opinion, is off limits, indecent and obscene. No one with a heart would publicly expose their child’s personal struggles. Any parent with respect for their child and human decency, love and kindness would not be critical of their child in their writing and publicly humiliate them for their own glorification as a writer. She made a choice to do this, though and never even gave her son the choice to have his and the family’s dirty laundry aired out in public.
Every adolescent challenges their parent’s self-control and engages in unpleasant defiance and sometimes abusiveness. I was no picnic as a teenager and certainly adolescence was not the easiest of times for me as a parent. Julie Myerson, however, made two indefensible moves: she not only publicly defamed her son but she never, at least in public, reflected on her role in her son’s problem. I’m not saying her son became a drug abuser because of bad parenting, not at all, but I am saying that as parents we always have to look honestly at our part in perpetuating our children’s very normal human challenges. Julie, its time as they say in AA, to make a searching and fearless moral inventory. Addiction is a family disease after all.
