'The Children We Left Behind' puts a face on America's fatherlessness crisis

Think of that joke meme from "The Simpsons," the one in which a character asks, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

It pokes fun at the kind of people we modern Americans call “pearl-clutchers.” Whenever someone asks the question honestly — what is the effect of this music, this culture, on children? — our impulse is to smack it down with snarky comedy. After all, people who worry about what we’re doing to children are all prudes who really want to spoil our adult fun.

'The Children We Left Behind' includes enough of Coleman’s personal experience to connect the reader to a real person, a real child, who lived out the dysfunction the book identifies in society as a whole.

And anyway, what’s the big deal with obscene lyrics in rap and rock? That meddling old Tipper Gore was just a fuddy-duddy. Besides, it’s no big deal — kids are resilient!

No, they’re not. Children are not resilient; they are plastic, they are moldable, and they are vulnerable.

“Kids are resilient” is what self-centered adults tell themselves to justify their carousel of spouses and boyfriends, their quick divorces, their abandonment of their offspring to smartphones and the addiction of the internet.

A question worth asking

Won’t somebody please think of the children? In his forthcoming book "The Children We Left Behind," Adam B. Coleman asks us to take this question seriously — and to answer it like the grown-ups we purport to be. As Coleman’s book shows, modern parents are handicapping their children for life through their solipsistic obsession with their own adult wants while leaving their children’s genuine needs neglected.

“As an abandoned child, I’ve watched the adults in the West make the family unit about themselves, solely hinging on the relationship success or failure with their spouse rather than being motivated for the betterment of their children,” he writes.

As unwelcome as that statement may be to many parents, it is quite obviously true. “Divorce him — your kids need to see that their mother is happy,” we say to bolster our friends. Or, “You need to live your best life, and it’s great for your kids to see a working mom in action!”

Adam B. Coleman

"The Children We Left Behind" is part memoir, part social commentary. Coleman’s father walked out on him, his mother, and his sister in the 1980s before Coleman was old enough to go to school. As his mother took the small family from town to town and state to state, they found themselves homeless more than once. A family member or friend would sometimes offer them a room to stay in while they got on their feet, but sometimes, what seemed to be a kindly gesture turned into a trap when their hosts revealed themselves to be unstable, cruel, or dangerous.

Coleman’s mother tried to keep a steady job while Coleman and his sister tried to make new friends at a new school, over and over, as they went from one drab apartment to another with little hope of stability.

Single mom as superhero?

He notes that America has swung from demonizing single mothers 40 years ago to another, even more unhelpful extreme. Today, we make them into heroines. We say that single moms are superheroes and put them on a cultural pedestal so that any criticism of divorce and its effects on children are characterized as “attacking single mothers.”

But Coleman’s mom could not be both mother and father no matter how hard she tried. No mother, no father, can be both parents. Wives need husbands, husbands need wives, and children need a mother and a father.

The family’s peripatetic and unstable life led to a crisis in young Adam’s life that even jaded readers will find shocking. At 8 years old, Adam Coleman wanted to kill himself.

In the fourth chapter of his book, “Alone and Abandoned in Hell,” Coleman tells of how he ended up committed to a mental institution at age 8, punished for his inability to bear up under the weight of abandonment and inadequate parenting.

Neglected and abused children usually pay the price for the sins, and sometimes the crimes, of their parents. When children act out in distress because of unstable or abusive home lives, they get sent to institutions — child prisons — not their parents.

Tell me again how we prize children’s welfare above all other concerns.

'I'm fine'

Eight-year-old Coleman could not bear up under the strain any longer and had what we call a “nervous breakdown.” In one of the most affecting remembrances in the book, he tells us what happened that landed him in a psychiatric institution surrounded by other troubled children.

“‘If you love me, you’ll help me die,’ I implored my mother. I had verbalized to my mother my wish for me to crawl under my bed and pray for my bed to crush me to death so I could end the anguish I was experiencing. Even my sister remembers her broken little brother lying underneath the kitchen table, crying hysterically and seemingly inconsolable.”

Coleman spent months in this institution, and the only thing he learned was how to better hide his despair so that he never ended up behind bars or a locked door again. “I’m fine,” became his standard answer when someone would ask why he was so quiet.

"The Children We Left Behind" includes enough of Coleman’s personal experience to connect the reader to a real person, a real child, who lived out the dysfunction the book identifies in society as a whole.

Sadly, there is no happy ending for the relationship with his father. Aside from occasional visits to town, maybe once every few years, Coleman’s father never evinced any interest in the welfare of his son. “Visits” were really about his father making business connections and bunking down in a room that his son happened to be in at the same time.

Like most children from such broken homes, Coleman didn’t have a role model to peg his own behavior to when he became a father himself in young adulthood. After a year of dithering over whether to try for a career several states away (in hopes of giving his son a higher quality of life), Coleman finally decided that his son needed his father in the flesh now, not sometime later after everything else was put in place. He got in his car and drove back up north to be with his son and find his way to a better job with the boy at his side.

Coleman enacted what this reviewer sees as the book’s primary message: He made a choice to do the right thing. He made the choice his father should have made.

No excuses

Twenty-first-century Americans don’t want to hear this, but it all comes down to individual moral choices. We like to let ourselves off the hook by complaining about how bad the job market is, how many “systemic forces” make it hard or impossible for us to do the right thing by our families and children. But these are just excuses, and no excuse will fill the hole left in a child’s soul by a parent who doesn’t care enough to put his offspring first.

The book’s final chapters offer the reader Coleman’s prescription for bringing up whole, healthy, secure children. Like most good advice, it’s simple and straightforward, a reminder of what we all really know already. The chapter titles are self-explanatory:

“Put Your Children Before Yourself and Don’t Be a Selfish Parent”

“Love Your Children More Than You Hate Your Ex”

And for the reader who was abandoned or neglected, the very last chapter speaks to them: “If You’ve Been Left Behind, Don’t Lose Hope.”

The hard work of hope

For anyone who came from neglect, abandonment, or abuse, that can be a tall order. Early childhood mistreatment changes a person permanently, and no children from such a background will have an easy time emotionally or spiritually. Re-raising yourself in adulthood, gaining the skills and perspective that you should have grown into naturally under your parents’ guidance, is damned hard work.

But it can be done, and Coleman did it.

Not because he “turned out fine.” He didn’t turn out fine. He became a stronger man and a good father in spite of his childhood, not because of it. No reader should look at Adam’s current success — a grown adult son, a happy marriage, and burgeoning career as an author and podcaster — as a kind of permission to leave one's children to figure it out on their own. The book’s subtitle warns against that default thinking: “How Western Culture Rationalizes Family Separation and Ignores the Pain of Child Neglect.”

Will we stop joking and ask ourselves seriously, finally, if anyone will think of the children?

"The Children We Left Behind" will be released on April 1, 2025.