Seeing the Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte flail in front of the television cameras--or Donald Trump for that matter (he's raised flailing and buffoonery to a kind of art)...and, on the other hand, seeing others from the Olympics shine, or once in a blue moon, someone in politics do something heroic, it's hard not to think, "What did your parents teach you about life that perhaps helped you fall/rise to such a level?"
I read Barack Obama's first autobiography, and what stood out was his mother waking him up at 4:30 in the morning to make him study, as well as the fact of his father's very brief appearance on the scene, after his parents' divorce when he was very young. The absentee dad from Kenya walked into his life again for just one week when he was around 10, and gave him a basketball. Both parents, in their very disparate ways, pushed him to excel--his mother in a day-to-day, slogging-through-the-trenches manner (at least for the early part of his upbringing--his grandparents mostly took over while he was living in Hawaii) and his father, by having created an almost mythical aura around himself through his absence. Apparently Obama suffered an identity crisis in his teens, which isn't surprising...but he weathered it with remarkable grace, and a remarkable certainty about his future as a global change maker.
What we do every day as parents really matters...but sometimes our absence from our children's lives is just as influential on their development as our presence...I can't pretend to read Lochte's psyche but it's pretty clear that he was ignored by someone; Trump as well.
I don't ignore my son, but perhaps I commit the opposite sin--perhaps I listen and support him too much...he probably could use a mother who makes a little more room for other influences in his life, including all the not-completely-positive ones. Then he can learn to make good choices, when confronted with less than stellar individuals like, perhaps, a low-grade Lochte or a Trump.
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