Breaking little hearts
MTV videos are about as close as one can get to the cultural nadir, with the possible exception of Internet pornography. But even as wisdom may come out of the mouths of children from time to time, a meaningful and poignant message can occasionally find its way up from the gutter.
While I don't follow music much anymore, my exercise club always features MTV in the weight room and, last summer, I happened to notice a recurring theme I hadn't previously noticed. In Puddle of Mudd's "Blurry" and Nickelback's "Too Bad" singles from two very successful rock bands, the thematic focus is on how the separation of father and son wreaks emotional devastation on both.
The "Blurry" video is almost hard to watch, as the images of a lower-class father having fun and playing video games with his son contrast starkly with the pain of again being forced to return the boy at the end of the weekend to his mother, from whom the father is clearly estranged. While one should never mistake MTV reality for the real thing, the song's rage and heartache are palpable, the more so as the child in the video is lead singer Wes Scantlin's 5-year-old son, Jordan.
As Scantlin says of "Blurry," it is "a really personal and emotional song for me that I wrote about my son and how much I miss him É the whole concept was about kind of being kept from my kid."
"Too Bad," on the other hand, traces the bitter results of a man abandoning his family, and particularly his young son. The video climaxes with an attempted suicide-by-car, although there is an uplifting note of hope for reconciliation at the end, as the act of desperation forces the father to return and face his injured, now-adult son.
One finds it hard to imagine similar songs being written 20 or 30 years ago, before divorce became so easy and so socially acceptable, much less finding such resonance in the culture as to propel them to the top of the charts. But the terrible costs of divorce linger on, not only in the lives of the divorcing parties but also the lives of the children and the lives of those with whom the children become emotionally involved. For the child of divorce, every fight is potentially the fatal one, every conflict is potentially calamitous and there is no confidence that, at the end of the day, all will be well.
Although the Baby Boomer generation has much for which to answer, their self-centered embrace of casual divorce may well have the most lingering impact. It is not only a few angry pop-rock songs which indicate the problem, as a closer look at the 1993 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology - which is sometimes cited to show divorce isn't so bad for kids - actually demonstrates that boys and girls from divorced families are 260 and 340 percent more likely to be in the "problematic range" (in other words, requiring psychological help) than children from stable marriages.
Proponents of divorce like to argue that sometimes the children are better off following a parental split, and this is certainly true in extreme circumstances. But most of the time, divorce is nothing more than a selfish decision on the part of one parent, as 80 percent are classified as unilateral. No-fault is a poisonous notion - even worse is the awarding of sole custody, which, in combination with child support, is proven to dramatically increase the rate at which women seek divorces, primarily due to "personal unhappiness."
Since no one ever seems to trouble to listen to the children, who in the overwhelming majority of cases are bitterly opposed to the separation of their parents, allow me to do so on their behalf. If you believe that divorce - even in the case of verbal abuse, marital infidelity or great personal unhappiness - is better for your children than staying together and suffering through the misery, you are either ignorant or deluded.
The man who is determined to sacrifice his children on the altar of his happiness is totally unfit to be a father, and the woman who will not put her children's lives ahead of her own emotions does not deserve to be a mother. Life is not only about happiness, it is about many things, sacrifice being one of them. And being a parent requires the greatest sacrifice of all, to live one's life for the love of another.