Your Parents Don't Deserve This

Script:

There is a pandemic in the Western world—especially, but not only, in America—that few are talking about, let alone addressing.

This pandemic doesn't actually kill people. But it does ruin lives, crush families, and cause debilitating pain—far more than most cases of COVID-19.

What pandemic am I talking about? The pandemic of people who do not speak to one or both of their parents.

Why have these people decided to hurt their parents in one of the worst ways possible—to the extent of not even allowing their parents contact with their grandchildren?

There are three primary reasons.

The first is the rise of the therapeutic mentality. Prior to the explosion of psychotherapy, people were governed by “shoulds.” But beginning in the 1960s, the therapeutic model replaced the moral model as the guide to one's behavior. A popular phrase at the time was, “there are no shoulds.”

I will use a family story to illustrate this point. Despite the fact that his mother was a very difficult woman, my father called her every night, and every night she would yell at him. As a child, I heard this, because instead of holding the phone to his ear, my father would periodically place the phone on the kitchen table.

Had my father been born a generation later and told a therapist how much he dreaded calling his mother, the therapist would likely have led my father to believe there was no reason he should talk to her. The therapist would have declared my grandmother “toxic” and given my father “permission” to avoid calling her. A culture that declared, “there are no shoulds,” would have concurred.

But my father lived in the age of shoulds. Moreover, he was a religious Jew who had been taught the Ten Commandments since childhood—the Fifth of which is,