It was more than two decades ago, when Victoria’s Secret was hot. A simpler time, when humanity’s fight for survival against artificial intelligence was a movie plot and not something we debate in real life.
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| Dancer Resting by Edgar Degas at Norton Simon, Pasadena, California |
Where were their parents? How were they paying for them? Who was doing their laundry?
They could not have been more than fifteen years old. One of them was pushing a stroller while cooing at a baby. I instinctively thought how adorable. An older sister taking care of her baby sibling. Then I heard something in their conversation and realized the baby was hers.
I sighed.
I did not think wearing a lacy thong had made her pregnant. Of course it had not. What bothered me was something much larger: how early we had apparently decided that certain adult performances could simply be folded into childhood, then shrugged at when children began confronting adult consequences.
For years, “Where are the parents?” has been treated almost like an unserious question, the predictable complaint of someone who has become old enough to be irritated by teenagers. Perhaps we dismissed it too quickly.
In September, I wrote What If I Told You Tolerance Is Insane? about what happens when we repeatedly tolerate behavior that should have been confronted much earlier. My argument was not that every mistake deserves punishment. It was that tolerance is not inherently virtuous. Sometimes tolerance is simply neglect wearing the much prettier clothes of compassion, patience, or open-mindedness.
Now replace the thong with a gun.
In September 2026, prosecutors in Pennsylvania charged a 13-year-old with murder after he allegedly shot and killed a 16-year-old with a handgun he told investigators he had found about a week earlier. In Chicago, a 12-year-old found a handgun allegedly left unattended in a school-bus aide’s bag and fired it through the bus window. No one was hit. In New Mexico, another 13-year-old was accused of shooting a middle-school teacher multiple times. These are not children merely standing near gun violence. They are children holding the guns.
The question immediately becomes more uncomfortable.
Where are the parents?
Not as a rhetorical demand that every parent be imprisoned whenever a child does something terrible. Children have agency. Teenagers lie. They hide things. They make decisions their parents neither authorize nor foresee. Parenting cannot reasonably mean omniscience.
Parenting is also not simply giving birth and making sure a child is fed, clothed, housed, and otherwise taken care of. Parenting is raising a self-sufficient individual who also grows up understanding that he or she belongs to something larger than the self and has a responsibility to function as a contributing member of society.
That requires more than supervision.
It requires conversation. Challenging conversations. Difficult conversations. Uncomfortable conversations. Conversations about sex, violence, responsibility, consequences, cruelty, empathy, judgment, and the fact that wanting something does not automatically make it appropriate.
Parenting is not about being your child’s friend. Friendship depends on equality. Parenting does not. A parent is responsible for setting limits, making decisions a child may resent, asking questions a child may not want to answer, and sometimes being deeply unpopular in the process.
If you are their friend, who is their parent?
Parenthood cannot mean having no responsibility for what a child has access to, what a child is doing, what warning signs are ignored, or whether an increasingly dangerous pattern is repeatedly dismissed until someone is dead.
American courts have already begun wrestling with that boundary. Jennifer and James Crumbley were each convicted of involuntary manslaughter after their 15-year-old son killed four students at Oxford High School in Michigan. Prosecutors focused on the parents’ response to warning signs and his access to the handgun used in the shooting. They became the first parents convicted in connection with a U.S. mass school shooting committed by their child.
Then came Georgia.
Colin Gray gave his teenage son the rifle later used in the 2024 Apalachee High School shooting. In March 2026, a jury convicted him of charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. He became the first parent in the United States convicted of murder for a mass school shooting committed by his child. In July, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Those prosecutions do not establish that parents should be criminally responsible for everything their children do. They establish something narrower and, perhaps, much more consequential: there are circumstances in which society is no longer willing to accept “I didn’t pull the trigger” as the end of the discussion.
That brings me back to Victoria’s Secret.
Obviously, a thong is not a gun. Teenage sexuality is not homicide. Conflating them would be ridiculous.
The connection is responsibility.
At what point did allowing children freedom become confused with adults surrendering judgment? At what point did setting boundaries become something parents were expected to apologize for? At what point did “they are going to do it anyway” become an argument for doing nothing?
Maybe the question I asked while standing in Victoria’s Secret all those years ago was not as antiquated as I thought.
Where are the parents?
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