It’s the thing that keeps parents up at night: What if their kid turns out bad? Not like, doesn’t succeed, but hurts people, is not a good person. This is the nightmare captured in The Bad Seed. Or in Gladiator…Commodus came from Marcus Aurelius? How?
It’s also a subplot in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, published just two years after The Bad Seed. Stan and Amy Parker’s son Ray has a dark side. He harms some of their pets. He steals. He ends up a gambler and a criminal. “Do you think it was in him, anyway, all this badness?” his mother asks. “Or was it his upbringing? Or is it something he has got from us?…It is like the cattle. Two goods can make a bad.”
Of course, we know now that there is such a thing as psychopathy and various personality disorders that can make someone do bad things, no matter how good their parents were. But one of the under-explored themes in The Tree of Man is how what was so admirable about Parker Family—their stoicism, their reserve, their old-fashioned values—was so ill-suited to help their son. Their son had emotional problems. He had frustrations and he had needs. His parents were good people but their own stuntedness compounded his problems. They never talked to him about any of this. They swept his troubling behavior under the rug. They pretended everything was perfect, not just with their son but also with problems in their own marriage. (Do you think Marcus Aurelius might have done the same?)
“I’ve never known what to do,” his father said in response to his wife’s concern. “I do not understand myself or other people.” Do you think that might have made things harder on his troubled son?
Look, our kids are not blank slates. They come with tendencies and proclivities, divergences and disorders. Like all human beings, they’re going to have urges and emotions. Our job as parents is to help them process, channel, and make sense of all this. Our job is to help them learn how to do the hardest but most important thing in the world: To deal with frustrations and our limitations. That begins with our own self-awareness and emotional work and also our willingness to seek help from doctors, from experts, and from teachers.
Marcus Aurelius was not to blame for who Commodus was. He was to blame for the positions he put Commodus in, he was to blame for not helping Commodus understand himself. The same can and will be true for us.
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