The parents are out

Somewhere along the way, we fired ourselves from the job of raising our children. Not officially, of course. There was neither a ceremony nor a resignation letter. Just a quiet surrender.

We handed their childhood over to glowing smartphone screens, disinterested schools, algorithms, clout-chasing influencers and anyone willing to hold a child’s attention longer than we could. Someone else took over the parenting. We just kept paying the internet bill.

Tragedies used to remain where they happened — but not anymore. A shooting in Leyte sparks a rumor in Cavite by lunch, a Facebook threat in Samar by dinner and a police investigation in Batangas before the week is over.

Last year saw the fatal stabbing of two Grade 8 boys in Las Piñas. In Bonifacio Global City, teenage “genggeng” groups have turned public spaces into stages for street brawls and muggings. Along Road 10 in Manila, kids settle scores with fists, pipes and whatever else they can get their hands on.

The adults have quietly vacated the premises, abandoning much of the daily work of raising and disciplining the children. Still, parents, to be fair, are not always absent by choice.

Many are overseas, working double shifts. Or in the country simply too exhausted from keeping food on the table. But children do not know intentions; they know presence. When parents disappear, something else inevitably fills the vacuum.

Today, that vacuum is filled by strangers — some funny, some talented, some murderous — all just a thumb swipe away. They can teach faster than mothers, comfort more consistently than fathers, reward outrage and glorify humiliation, substituting attention for affection.

Spend enough time online and you’ll eventually learn that being loud beats being kind, being feared beats being forgotten and going viral becomes its own form of success.

Schools are not built to fight that battle. Teachers are expected to educate, discipline, counsel, mentor and somehow compete with phones that deliver an endless stream of entertainment every waking hour.

Government, meanwhile, does what government often does best. It responds after the fact. More patrols. More checkpoints. More meetings. More promises that everything is under control.

Control is precisely what we have been losing.

We have mistaken TikTok for parenting. Giving children a smartphone is not giving them guidance. Enrolling them in school does not outsource character formation. Installing CCTV cameras will not teach empathy any more than metal detectors teach restraint.

The uncomfortable truth is that raising children has always been inconvenient. It demands conversations that interrupt dinner, questions asked at midnight and patience for dark moods that make no sense.

It requires adults to put their own devices down long enough to notice when a child has stopped talking, stopped laughing and quietly retreated into a world where strangers know them better than their own family.

Children did not wake up one morning and decide that violence looked interesting. Someone — or something — sold it to them, one algorithm at a time.

Children are mirrors with better memories. They absorb our tempers, our distractions, our addictions and our excuses. If they seem increasingly disconnected from the adults around them, perhaps it is because we have been practicing that same disconnect for years.

Children need love. They also need limits. Every “no” uttered by a parent today may prevent a police officer from saying “you’re under arrest” tomorrow.

Let us not confuse permissiveness with compassion or discipline with cruelty.