Speaker 1: I'm Joy Pulman, the executive editor at The Federalist, joining
me for another Federalist Radio hour as Adam Coleman. He
is the founder of Wrong Speak Publishing and the author
of both Black Victim to Black Victor and the newly
released book The Children We Left Behind. That second book
is out this week and it's why I have Adam
with us today. Adam, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot in this book and I actually
had to sometimes put it down reading it just because
the emotional weight of it is too difficult for me.
And I was wondering about I mean, well, why don't
you just start with giving our listeners, you know, maybe
whatever summary of kind of the life story that ye're
unfolding in this book that you want to present to
them as a starting point, and then explain why you
really needed to share these you know, sometimes dark and
there's absolutely a lot of hope in the book too,
you know, but this difficult kind of background that you have, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I.
Speaker 3: The best way to kind of explain my childhood has
been inconsistent and at times chaotic, So you know, I
grew up with my mother and my sister.
Speaker 2: You know, I was born in Detroit. We left Detroit
when I was.
Speaker 3: I think around six or so, and we moved to Virginia,
and then about a year later we moved to New York,
up state New York. So like we were moving a lot,
and actually that was that's like the theme of much
of my my childhood and actually my adult life, just
moving a lot, not feeling a sense of home. On
top of that, you know, when I was younger, we
were holmost twice for different reasons.
Speaker 2: And yeah, all that for.
Speaker 3: Any child's experience while not having their father around, to
be unsure if you're loved, cared for, to have that
person to rely on, even economically, emotionally, all these different things.
You know, it's very clear in one of the particular
chapters where I describe me having a mental breakdown and
being admitted into a mental hospital at the age.
Speaker 1: Of eight, very young, very.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, very young. And listen, and my mother admitted
me because this was the professional advice that was given
at the time. You know, this is the early nineties.
So whether that's the right decision or not is a
different story. I've had people say that it's actually a
bad decision, you know, that just re traumatized as a
child and makes it far worse that talk therapy is
far more preferable, which I.
Speaker 2: Tend to agree with.
Speaker 3: But I never harbored any sort of resentment towards my mother,
was angry at her even when I was a kid
for that experience.
Speaker 2: For much of my.
Speaker 3: Life, I kind of just blocked out that that happened.
But just like anything else, when you try to block
it out, it it doesn't actually go away. Just trying
to think about it, it still affects you. And so
you know, throughout this book, even just in the process
of writing this book, I'm confronting those things so I
can resolve it. That's how I've gotten better, That's how
I've grown in my life is by confronting these things.
And it's a struggle, and it's hard to talk about.
It's hard to confront these things, you know, Telling the
truth about how you feel sometimes makes other people uncomfortable. Yeah,
you know, it takes me uncomfortable at times. It doesn't
give me pleasure to conclude that my father never loved me,
you know, So it's it's something very difficult to to
come to these particular conclusions. But I think that the
truth and I can't be afraid of the truth. I
think actually that's the only way that I can heal,
like you know, confronting the truth.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I when I, you know, reading more of
your story, because I've followed you for quite some time
at Wrong Speak several several years now, because you have
such fresh perspectives there from you and from your writers.
And but I what I was listening or you know,
listening to you speak through the book, I was just
struck by. I really think that there's many, many children,
you know, who feel the way that you expressed or
along similar lines, and not very many of them are
able to grow into capable adults who can give a
coherent account and, like you said, confront those difficult things.
You know, you point out in the book that you
know many many you know of of our criminal class.
You know of the people who you know are in
homeless on the streets. You know, people who are struggling
in their lives have childhoods like you did, and so
they don't have, you know, an articulate voice to be
able to say, somebody look at you know, the issues
of parental abandonment, of the lack of family formation that
really are at the root of so many people's very
deep pain. And so I thought that one of the
remarkable aspects of the book is that you went through
what so many of those people who are unable to
speak for themselves have, and yet you have a very
well developed voice. You have a very strong, manly voice
that comes through. I also found that striking in the book.
And so can you kind of tell me a little
bit about do you?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Do you what are your reflections the you know, the
thought that you are not the only little boy in
America feeling this way. There are millions more like you,
and and you're right, you know they it's it's not
like they just are all in a cave somewhere not
affecting other people. But you know, when their pain spills over,
it typically hurts other people. They don't, you know, they
don't tend to grow up and become contributing, self controlled
adults like you or managed to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The the the criminal that is breaking into your house
is not a happy person.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: The person who is violating someone else is not a
happy person. The child or the teenager who's drinking and
doing drugs is not happy. You know, every drug user
that I've come across, even just watching documentary pieces and
things of that nature, they always say the same thing,
they started using when they were teenagers. Now, why would
a teenager be to start, you seeing drugs? And it's
because they're trying to manage something. They're trying to cope
with something. It's not always like when I was a kid,
they always painted the only reason a.
Speaker 2: Kid who want to use drugs is because you know,
peer pressure.
Speaker 3: And it's like, no, because I was around drugs and
I made choices not to and my friends never tried
to push me, but they did it.
Speaker 2: But when I look back at them.
Speaker 3: Many of them had, like I would say, harder life
issues than I did. Everyone's issue is is different, right,
So I've been told not to like compare, like, oh,
your your trauma's worse than mine. But you know, I
have a friend at the age of sixteen, you know,
we were friends, and he disappeared for a while and
he was in rehab for alcohols and he ended up
dying from an I guess you could say an accident,
an overdose.
Speaker 2: In his early thirties. And you know, the people who
gave him the drugs actually got prosecuted.
Speaker 3: It was two of his dealers were prosecuted because of
his death. I didn't know he was using. I didn't
know he was still using. And you know, this is
a guy outside like if you just saw him, you know,
he looks a little rough, but the kindest heart, like
you do anything for his friends.
Speaker 2: And I think.
Speaker 3: About him every so often. I miss him, and I
know that he was struggling at home. There were things
that were happening inside of his home and that's why
he was drinking, and that's what he was struggling with. Yeah,
there are so many young people who become adults who
are struggling with rejection. They feel rejected. They felt rejected
at home. It's a familiar feeling that they don't like.
And then they go on into the world and they
carry that of rejection. So something doesn't go their way,
which life happens, You don't get everything you wanted.
Speaker 2: It's that constant feeling of rejection.
Speaker 3: Then they put everything into the external maybe if this
person loves me, so they run towards anyone who accept them,
and often that leads to even more issues. Even more
people who are rejecting you. This constant cycle that eats
away at your hope. So it's something that's far deeper. Obviously,
like the big examples of homelessness, drug addiction, all that,
but most people obviously coming from broken family situations with
a divorce or single parent homes like me, don't do
those things. I never got into issues with the law.
I never did drugs. I didn't even drink. I was
actually very afraid to get any part of that. Didn't
do a recognitionally, I actually didn't even start drinking into
my thirties, so I stayed away from all that stuff.
Speaker 2: Well, I suffered. I suffered a lot. You know.
Speaker 3: I struggled with suicidal ideation well into my twenties, you know,
so I struggled with all of these different things, getting
my life together, figuring out how I want to structure my.
Speaker 2: Life, how to become a man.
Speaker 3: I had so many areas where I lacked because I
didn't have anyone to give me guidance on how to
become a man. Meanwhile, I'm trying to raise my son
to become a man. So it was a lot of
trial and error, a lot of mistakes, and you know,
by the grace of God, I didn't do anything that
I can't take back that would negatively affect my son today.
Speaker 2: So in some ways I feel lucky.
Speaker 3: Some ways, I feel like it's a miracle that I
didn't go down particular road and I could have, you know,
but I just didn't make certain choices.
Speaker 1: Now, I think a lot of people know, you know
that you know, criminals, homeless addicts come you know, from
neglect and abuse as children. But I think a lot
of people also don't know what it's possible to do
about it. And you do write about this also in
the book Kind of You. You encourage people really and
I think you also yourself apply social pressure to people
who are, you know, making decisions to neglect and abandon
their kids, their families and their duties. What kind of
do you think are the options available for addressing the
you know, the fact that it hurt people, hurt people,
and you know kids who are hurt at home, not
all of them, you know, but the disproportionate numbers of
them do grow up to become people that taxpayers have
to pay for in one way or another.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, I do think that we do need to
lean on forgiveness as well.
Speaker 2: There's no perfect parent. I'm not a perfect parent me neither.
You know, there's no such thing.
Speaker 3: And so I don't want anyone to take anything away
from this book as me chastising parents and I'm the
perfect parent.
Speaker 2: You're all doing it wrong. That's not the point.
Speaker 3: The point is that we make mistakes, but we have
to acknowledge that we're making mistakes so we can change it.
You know, there's a chapter in there where I talk
about I was spanked as a kid, and when I
had my son.
Speaker 2: I would pop him, but I didn't like it.
Speaker 3: So I made the conscious choice to not do it
because I saw that there was something wrong with it.
And so I initially was doing the wrong thing in
my opinion, and so I changed my behavior. I recognized
what I was doing, I saw it was a mistake,
and I changed my behavior and had a great relationship
with my son. Always been well behaved, open line of
communication with my son to this day. So I'm not
a perfect parent whatsoever. I do think that there is
a bit of protectionism from allowing parents to recognize that.
Speaker 2: They're doing something wrong.
Speaker 3: The idea that your friend must affirm all your decisions
that you're doing. Oh, you know, what, I'm just going
to divorce my husband and I'm just going to.
Speaker 2: Go halfway across the country. Oh okay, yeah.
Speaker 1: You response you right?
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly? Power right, or power or or.
Speaker 3: The husband who says, you know what, I'll see them
every other weekend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh okay, you know what. You're an involved father.
Great job.
Speaker 3: At least you see them every other weekend. Some fathers
don't see their kids at all. Like it's just this
lowering of a bar as to how involved men should
be with their kids. You know, I love my son tremendously.
I didn't have issues with his mother. We co parented great.
But it's will not the ideal situation. I would never
advocate for my son. A matter of fact, I have
told my son, don't do it like how I did it.
Speaker 2: Right. There's anoun.
Speaker 1: That takes a tremendous amount of humility, a virtue that
is in very short supply today.
Speaker 2: Well that yeah, and that's the problem.
Speaker 3: There's there's an unwillingness to point out your flaws and
talk about your flaws because even from a Christian standpoint,
we all sin, we all we all do something that
is wrong. There's a humility aspect, right, if you don't
recognize that you sin, then you believe that you don't
do anything wrong. So then nothing changes, nothing improves, and
you're just living a lie. So I'd must rather live
in truth then be, you know, have people affirm a
lie that I've conjured up myself where people are putting
onto me. So I think what I'm trying to attempt
to do is have have an honest reflection as to
what people are doing, or at least to have them question.
You know, when when.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about being a selfish parent, I'm giving these
giving these reasons or these examples of what a selfish
parent does and how they approach these things. You can't
help but to think like, ooh, am I a selfish parent?
Speaker 1: I did, for sure, right, and maybe you.
Speaker 3: Aren't, or maybe there was a time that you did
sometimes a bit selfish.
Speaker 1: I think it's a spectrum, right, none of us is perfect,
and so you know, I try to be always horribly selfish,
but of course I am selfish regularly, right, right, And.
Speaker 3: There's been there have been moments where I was going
to make a very selfish decision when it came to
access to my son and things like that, and so
that's what I'm saying, Like it's not It's not to
say that I've never made a selfish move.
Speaker 2: Or dying better than anybody else.
Speaker 3: Else is to say that I didn't do those things
because I reflected on it. And I'm now telling people like,
don't make the mistake that I made right or I
was about to make. And we really need to be
careful of our actions and how it impacts our kids.
And there also has to be a social dynamic. There
are too many people that I've come across where they
have family members who have kids somewhere that no one
else knows except for the family, and no one ever
talks about it. And they pretend this child does not exist.
Yet they're alive and well, and some of them are adults.
Speaker 2: Now, you know, this is a.
Speaker 3: Real situation and that I see all over the place,
and yet no one says anything. Yet this person gets
to be comfortable. Meanwhile, that child grew up their entire
life feeling rejected by you know, the person that created
it or help to create them. And that's an unfair thing,
and you're allowing it to happen, you know. So there's
not enough social pressure when it comes to these particular things,
even if let's say the child isn't being abandoned. We've
been around people who talk to their children like they're dirt. Yeah,
and that is something like if you know that person especially,
you should interveneing. You don't have to scream at them,
but bring them aside, like why are you talking to
them like that?
Speaker 2: Like you hear how you sound. You have to show
that it is not acceptable.
Speaker 3: And sometimes it's not enough for that one person just
say something like other people need to say it, like
we are concerned. Right, maybe your kids can't be taken
by the state because you're not abusing them, so to speak,
but you're not treating them well, like you can do
better than that. We love you, and we love those
kids even more and you should. You should change your
approach to how you're treating them.
Speaker 2: Right. So, all this is easier said than done.
Speaker 3: It is difficult to step into the place and and
talk about someone else and how they reason their kids
because everyone gets defensive. How dare you tell me how
to raise my children? But sometimes there are things that
are so blatantly obvious and wrong, like child abandonment or
emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, all these things, and
so many people know that it's happening, but they turn
a blind eye, or.
Speaker 1: They have clues that it's happening, and rather than following
up on the clue, they just look away.
Speaker 3: Exactly, they don't want to know. Like, listen, it's none
of my business.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: If if the uncle is doing something to the child,
you know, I see he actulutely bit weird around the kid.
Speaker 2: But you know what, I'm not around the lie. It's
not in my business.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to inquire because if it's true, it's
really uncomfortable to acknowledge because I love both of them
and I.
Speaker 2: Don't want to think that about the uncle.
Speaker 3: And you know, it just becomes this entire thing that
it's about how you feel instead of about protecting the child.
Because what's worse that you say nothing and it is true,
or that you say something and actually.
Speaker 2: It's not true that nothing is happening.
Speaker 3: I'd much rather err on the side of caution and
have it investigated, have it looked into, and the guy's
not doing anything, right, then that's that's what it is.
It sucks to be accused of something like that, But
at the same time, hey, listen, you should understand because
if someone came to you about your child being hurt,
you'd want someone to investigate it. You'd want someone to
acquire about it.
Speaker 2: So I do think.
Speaker 3: That there needs to be and there are some people
who step in, especially with like really egregious things like
you know, the sexual sexual abuse and molestations. More people
are willing to speak up about that because it's so egregious.
But there are people who say nothing, who defend, who
say that's not really happening. And I've seen a whole
bunch of examples of the kid who grows up to
the adult, and they've.
Speaker 2: Been saying the same thing for decades.
Speaker 3: I was being sexually abused by such and such, and
the family is angry at the person making the accreation,
not the person who was actually doing it.
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Speaker 1: I have seen that, not just not in sexual situations,
but also other situations. You know, when some will say, basically,
the person who spoils the you know, the peaceful silence,
it's kind of like an uneasy piece, right, but kind
of breaks up the cone, you know, the kind of
tacit agreement to go along, to get along, and that person,
of course, then typically becomes you know, the scapegoat, the outcast,
because you know, they stuck their head out and said
the uncomfortable thing, and now everybody else has to deal
with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and why is that the case?
Speaker 3: It's that that's the case because we're caring about the
feelings of the adults. Right, you don't want to feel
like this person actually did something. You don't want to
feel like maybe you're partly responsible for the child being molested.
You know, there's a chapter in there talking about the
monsters we let inside our home.
Speaker 1: Right, that was wow. Anyway, you are a very direct writer.
But you know there's so many Yeah, that was one
of the ones who're like, whoa, here we go. Well,
I mean, so, I mean you are I mean everybody.
I mean, I think a lot of people just know this,
but we don't talk about it. And part of it is,
you know, political correctness absolutely, you know, creates this cone
of cone of silence around you know, the abuse of
children via like you're saying adult selfishness and so you know,
so one of the things you point out in that
chapter is basically that the highest risk to a child
comes you know, from his mother's boyfriend, either a physical
sexual abuse or otherwise. That's the number one contributor to horrible,
horrible things happening to children. Is exactly that situation right there.
But again, people the political correctness says, don't talk about
that because but I think the fake reason actually is
the race issue. I don't really think. I don't think
the real reason is the race issue, right because it's
oh disproportionately you know, certain groups of people. But that's
the reason that's given to you know, basically excuse non
protecting children.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then in.
Speaker 3: The meantime, if we want to make it a race issue,
in the meantime, how many black boys and girls are
being sexually abused obviously?
Speaker 2: Right, And I'll tell you a quick story.
Speaker 3: I had a at a dinner with an NYPD detective
who was black himself, and you know, I told him
about the book and so on, and he opened up.
He said, listen, like you know, as a detective, you
make arrest, you get the purpse and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Some of them.
Speaker 3: Sometimes you have to go to these hospitals or maybe
you're waiting for processing and you're just alone with this
guy who's under arrest, this criminal, and you're just having
conversations and they're just talking, and the more they talk,
the more they start revealing things about themselves in their lives. Yeah,
he said, you would not believe how many of these
black men have been molested totally when they were children.
Speaker 2: He's like, you would believe it.
Speaker 1: I totally believe it. I mean, because I mean, I think,
I mean all of us who have family friends in
those sorts of positions. I was just talking a couple
of weeks ago with a woman part of an interracial couple.
You know, so she's worked in basically, you know, helping
troubled children. You know that they're sent to when they
when they can't stay in school anymore. You know, they
go to kind of a special school. And she was
one of the teachers there, and she said, every single
one of them has a dysfunctional, totally dysfunctional family, you know.
So we you know, like you point out in your book,
the kids are kind of the tip of the iceberg
right there, you know, the canary and the coal mine,
Like they're the thing that we see and focus on.
But what really is going on is there's other adults
in their lives who are grossly screwing up, and nobody
is you know, putting them in a reform school or
or you know, or whatever the case ought to be.
You know, the point is the kids are, you know,
the kind of the symptom and the outward kind of
consequence of other things going on that are not the
child's fault.
Speaker 2: Very often, that's exactly it.
Speaker 3: You know, when when that child starts misbehaving as a teen,
you can turn them over to the state, you can
throw them in some institution, you can advocate for them
to be thrown into juvie because they're not acting right
when the reality is that these kids are reacting to
their environment.
Speaker 2: One thing that I became very aware of, especially in
recent years. You know, I don't know if you watch
a lot of talk.
Speaker 1: Shows years ago, like no okay for anti TV, so
I don't seen much.
Speaker 2: Okay, So there's a show like Sally Jesse Raphael and
one of like her main theme shows was like bad
teen episodes. Oh sure, but if you go back you
watch it was always I would say ninety plus percent
at a time, it was bad teen girls, and it
was always the mother who was bringing them on the show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think I maybe like exactly, that's exactly it.
There was never a father that was there. And then
you start hearing the child was running away.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: Back then, it was like, oh, they're just so, there's
such bad kids.
Speaker 2: They're just run away. They think they're grown.
Speaker 3: But as I've gotten older and I started watching even
more content of these, you know, started learning more about
psychology and especially childish psychology. They're not just running away,
they're running away from something. They're running away from someone. Often,
so especially if mommy has a boyfriend that lives in
the house. Yea, And she says, your boyfriend makes me uncomfortable,
and mommy says, well, you shouldn't be wearing that.
Speaker 2: As she's a developing girl. She's running away because no
one's protecting her in that home. She's not running away.
Speaker 3: Because she wants to be on the streets and wants
to become a prostitute, right because she has no place
else to go. Like, she's running away from some thing,
and it may be one person and maybe two people,
but she's running away for a reason. And the biggest
thing I could tell you about how I understand psychology
is everybody does something for a reason, whether they are
consciously doing it or subconsciously doing it, but everyone does
something for a reason. And so someone is taking, especially
like a child, taking a big action of being naive
about the world and running into the world with no resources,
no guidance, and no one to advocate for them, no
shelter protection.
Speaker 2: What do you think is going to happen? They're going
to get eaten.
Speaker 1: By the devil by traffickers, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Picked up by traffickers. But you know what, they probably
rather be in that situation, at least initially, they're thinking
I'd rather run into mystery than deal with what I know.
Speaker 1: And in our public policy, you know, their answer to
them to that child is to say, oh, well, will
legalize that and call you a sex worker? Now, so insane,
what a world.
Speaker 2: We'll give you a webcam and you can start her
OnlyFans account.
Speaker 1: Totally.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's but that's essentially what's happening. I actually wrote,
excuse me, I wrote an article because when I heard it,
it was like alarm bells. So there's the whatever podcast
that invites all these different guys on there, and they
invite OnlyFans girls to talk about relationships and stuff like that.
It's kind of a ridiculous show. I don't really actively
watch it, but I came across this clip because they
clipped it because it was.
Speaker 2: So it was so outrageous. And it was this girl
who said that.
Speaker 3: At the age of she said nine or ten, she
was addicted to porn.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. And that which, by the way, ten
eleven is the average age of first exposure. Now, so
she's completely within the norm.
Speaker 2: And that's yeah, that's a whole other thing.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 3: But then on top of that, she said that her
parents eventually I think kicked her out, but before they
kicked her out, or I said parents, her mom kicked
her out. But before she was kicked out, she was
so hyper sexual that one guy would enter through her window,
finish with that guy, that guy would leave, and then
another guy would eventually come through.
Speaker 2: And so she's describing how she's running through men like
within a twenty four hour period, like a ridiculous amount.
But when I heard that, I'm like, oh, it sounds
like she was molested.
Speaker 3: She was actually abused, and of course she's started waking
drugs yep. And by the time she's talking about it,
it sounds like she's kind of on the other side
of her addiction and getting in control over what she
was going through. But from the media standpoint, they're just like, WHOA,
that's crazy.
Speaker 2: These girls out here are just so promiscuous.
Speaker 3: And I'm in my head, I'm like, she's a victim
of something or sure, like that is not normal.
Speaker 2: That is not a normal circumstance for a child that
age to be not just exposed to it, but addicted
to pornography, because that is usually a gateway, like someone's.
Speaker 1: Rumors use that with children. We all know that we're
supposed to forget what we know all the time and
shut up about it, which is one of the things
I love about your book because it's just like, I'm
not shutting up about all these things that are psychotic
and need to be addressed.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And the more we want to pretend that this is
not this is not happening all around this, the more
our children are being harmed. And that, to me is
the alarming thing. It's like, well, of course this is happening, Like,
of course these things are going on. When you see
people over respond to stuff, act hypervigilant, you know. I
used to have someone I was in a relationship with
who one time I left her alone with like a
police officer and like some other guy.
Speaker 2: They were just talking about something. No one was under arrest.
Speaker 3: She was very angry at me, and she said, you
left me alone with them, and something could have happened.
Something myself, What do you mean something to happen? You
were next to a.
Speaker 2: Cop, like in my head, like he had right right, Like.
Speaker 1: He's probably the samest place for you to be, right.
Speaker 3: But what I didn't know, and she had to tell me,
is that she was raped at sixteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and even her family didn't know. Wow, and she
got pregnant, had to have an abortion.
Speaker 1: Whoa.
Speaker 2: And she's close with her.
Speaker 3: Family and now she's telling me. So that is why
she's so hyper vigilant being around men, strange men alone
by herself. And I'm supposed to be her man to
protect her. And in my head, I'm like, there's a
copra here, we good to go, Like I'm gonna go
to this other area and we're handling that. But like,
she's carrying that, and I don't I haven't talked to
her in a long time, so I don't.
Speaker 2: Know if she ever even revealed that.
Speaker 3: To her family, but like to me, she's carrying that
and that Once I found that out, other things started
making sense as to why she's carrying this fear right,
which is not an irrational fear, so to spe because
it stems from something, but it's it's holding her back
because not every man is dangerous and she shouldn't have
to feel that.
Speaker 2: She also shouldn't have to feel that she needs to
keep this secret. And if she reveals this secret.
Speaker 3: Of being some sort of shame onto everybody else because
someone violated her, you know, and this this is the
type of burden that a lot of men and women
are carrying a lot of shame for something that they
didn't have any control over. Somebody violated them. They're the
ones carrying this burden of knowledge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you write about that. You know, That's one of
the themes in your book is the culture of silence
that is foisted on children who grow up in dysfunctional
homes and circumstances. And you talk about you're saying, you know,
you risk ostracization for telling the truth. Now I do.
One of the things that I thought about is, you know,
a lot of this book is about the you know,
your father's abandonment of you and how difficult a struggle
that you know, really affected your your entire life, your
whole family. You know, for obvious reasons. That's a very
big deal. And so but I'm writing, I'm thinking about
you know this, and I thought you point out in
the book. I'm going to give a book reveal here, folks.
So if you don't know, want want this plot twist
known for fast forward the next thirty seconds. But you know,
so your father died I believe it was twenty sixteen,
and you found about that through a family members Google search.
So all of that to say, however, I wonder, does
it is it easier to kind of talk about that
relationship because your father is gone, right, He's not alive
for you to have him, you know, say, hey, what
are you doing talking about me? Or whatever the case is,
or you know, if he were alive today, would you
still have written this book with all of the challenges
in it that you have directly to him, talking about
really what a poor father he was.
Speaker 2: I'd still write it. Uh huh.
Speaker 3: It sounds terrible to say, but even when he died,
I didn't really feel much of anything, yep, because my
father was always a stranger yep. And and so no,
like this is this is my story, and I'm just
to be one hundred percent transparent.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm still managing the feelings of my mother. Yep.
You no.
Speaker 1: And I wonder about that too reading it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and my mother some sort of regret for maybe
she feels like maybe I didn't push his father to
be more involved. And I've explicitly told my mom, you
cannot make my father love me.
Speaker 2: You just can't.
Speaker 3: Either he wants to be with his kids or he doesn't.
You can call him as many times as you want.
You can invite him over, you can encourage him to do.
Speaker 2: The same time.
Speaker 1: He is responsible for his choices, just like we are
at the end of all day.
Speaker 3: For his choices, right, And it's not to say that
my mother made the best of choices at certain times.
Speaker 2: And I told my mother, like, you're not perfect. I'm
not perfect. I've made mistakes.
Speaker 3: This isn't about rehashing the pastor or even you know,
trying to slander my father, because at the end, I
forgive my father, I'm.
Speaker 2: Not angry with him. That is how I move forward.
Speaker 3: What I'm doing is using my story to one tell
other kids who are in my situation that you're not alone.
And two to use my story as a cautionary tale
for the parent who might be leaving their children behind
or who is on their way to making a bad decision.
And they're like, you know what, I need to sacrifice
how I feel right now for my kids because I
don't want this to potentially happen to them.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So I'm just using my story and I emphasize I
love my mother. I love my mother a lot, and
I've even said as so much like I haven't been
the perfect son, Like there are things that I regret
and how I treated my mother, So there's blame that
can go all the way around because we are coming
from a imperfect, dysfunctional situation from my childhood and we're
all still grappling with it. It's still real.
Speaker 2: But it's my story.
Speaker 3: So I don't tell my mother's story, like I don't
tell my mother's childhood or anything like that.
Speaker 2: That's her story.
Speaker 3: I'm telling my story even more so, I'm giving my
perspective of how I felt as a child, what I saw,
and I think it's.
Speaker 2: Fair for me to do that.
Speaker 3: And you know, I do think that there's a bit
of everyone's afraid of feeling embarrassed and like, oh, they
made a mistake and now other people are going to
learn about their mistakes.
Speaker 2: But it's the truth, and we should not be afraid
of the truth. And even more so, those.
Speaker 3: Mistakes that you made, you would not tell the next
person to do the thing that you did, right, And.
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking about my own self same, right, don't
do what I did, y'all.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And that's that's that's what's really important.
Speaker 3: We're all going to make a misstep, We're all going
to do something like, you know what, in hindsight, I
shouldn't have done that. But if the next person comes
to you and says I'm going to do that thing,
you would tell them not to do it, right, That's
ultimately what I want. What I'm questioning is that person
coming to you and say I'm about to do this,
and you say, well, it's your life.
Speaker 2: You do whatever you.
Speaker 3: Want to do, and you don't warn them, and you
don't try to intervene, like and you just allow them
to do.
Speaker 2: Well, that's your life. I wouldn't make that decision, but
that's her, their life, how they want to do. So
you know there's this Yeah.
Speaker 1: You can finish your thought if you want, and then
I can ask my question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was just going to say, there's this passivity
for the things that we know are true.
Speaker 2: They're statistically true.
Speaker 3: You know, there are so many examples of it, of
this truth happening, Like you know what's about to happen,
Like you know that things are going to become extremely chaotic.
You're going to hurt your kids, you know that. But
you see the person that you claim to care about,
the other adult, the other parent, about to make that
choice and you say absolutely nothing. Yeah, that's what I'm questioning.
Speaker 1: Well, And the thing I was thinking of here is
I think a lot of people have lost the muscle
of having hard conversations and even of truth seeking, you know,
because I think you know, we have we do have
this really censorious, fearful culture about what we say and
if you say it in an in artful way, you know,
or or you kind of stumble through words because you
don't have practice with it, or whatever the case is. Right,
It's not like we have grown up from childhood through
adolescence into adulthood practicing lovingly confronting people and being lovingly
confronted and having the sort of you know, healthy feedback
loops in our lives. People are increasingly really just siloed
and isolated emotionally, physically in all the rest. And the
family breakdown absolutely relates to this because, as you you know,
you write about this in the book too Right, you
are trying to recover some of your childhood by being
a good father even though you didn't have good fathering.
So you've had to learn how to do that the
hard way without having someone kind of intuitively teach you
as a child, right, you. I'll let you, you know,
kind of talk about that if you want. But but
the point being, I think kind of the family breakdown
as well as the PC sort of environment contributes to
this is because people lose the modeling, the mentoring, the feedback,
the practice at doing this from little all the way
up to adulthood to help us be better at knowing
when you should say something, knowing ways you can say
it that would be more effective, you know, and that
other other people are being more willing to hear you,
et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: That's exactly true. And I don't I don't know where
that's stemmed from, you know, how how we necessarily got
here the point where we think that being honest with
people that we care is one thing. You see some
guy in the street and you tell them some something true.
But to tell that person it's different story. And I
completely understand, but it's it's another story when it's your
family member, it's your friend, it's someone that you see
all the time and you say nothing. And especially if
you know that child, you see what's going on, and
you still say nothing. You don't try to protect that
child because you're so worried about keeping the image of
your relationship with the adult intact.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: You don't want to see them as that other person.
You don't want to see them as a terrible parent.
Speaker 2: You want to see them as a great guy, a
fun mom, you know something like that. You want to
hang out with them, you don't want to You don't
want to ruin how you how you picture them.
Speaker 3: But I think by doing that, more and more kids
just get hurt. And there's just so many examples of
our society thinking about the comfort of the adults rather
than the prosperity and safety of child children. And I
know there's a narrative about us becoming you know, child
centered and you know, hovering children and things like that,
when really like that attentiveness of helicopter parents, all that
is stems from is anxiety. Usually it stems from childhood
anxiety of themselves. They're fearful of whatever happened to them
as kids, of that happening to their kids. Right, So
these transfer that anxiety onto their kids. That's not good either,
right or the the My favorite to criticize are the
parents who want to be their kid's friend. M H,
I love my son, I'm friendly with my son, But
I am not his friend. And friend is a status
just like being a parent is a status. The difference
is that being a parent is an authority position, right,
so I have to tell him what to do.
Speaker 2: Joey, you and I are friends. I can't tell you
what to do. I have no authority over you. And
so if you make a.
Speaker 3: Child who requires authority, who requires someone to look out
for them, to tell them no when they need to
hear no, who doesn't allow them to hurt themselves, even
though that kid might think that there is going to
be something wonderful on the other side.
Speaker 2: Of it, you have to tell them and dictate what
they do. They don't want to go to school, too bad,
you must go to school, right.
Speaker 3: I am not your friend. I am an authority figure
to you. I'm responsible for you. Matter of fact, if
you disobey me and go out there and do whatever
you want, I get in.
Speaker 1: Trouble and I will punish you, and I will punish
you in an appropriate way.
Speaker 3: Because I'm ultimately responsible for you so much so that
I can get in trouble by the law for what
you do. That is how much. That is how entangled
our guardianship is and our authority position is when the kids.
If you want to get rid of all that and
put yourself on equal plane with a child who still
has a developing brain, who doesn't who can't see around
the corner, can't see the consequences that are coming, you
can see it.
Speaker 2: You say nothing.
Speaker 3: Because you're taking the easy road. It's easy to be
a kid's friend. You just give them whatever they want, right,
you don't stand in their way.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: And what I think some parents who do that, and
I think most of them who do this don't realize
what they're teaching their kid is that my mother or
father doesn't love me enough to even challenge me on
what I'm about to do. It's like years ago, and
I remember this happening in the nineties. Like at these
talk shows I was talking about, you would get the
bad parents who come on and say I allow them
to drink and smoke wheat in the house because you
know at least they're doing it in the house, and.
Speaker 1: Or give them condoms when they're fifteenactly, come.
Speaker 2: On, exactly, but with it. They think that they're they're being.
Speaker 3: Like the cool parent, and my child likes it because
I'm supporting them. But What they don't realize is that
the kid sees it as my mother or father doesn't
love me enough to.
Speaker 2: Tell me no.
Speaker 3: Like they're letting me like they know that smoking weed
isn't the right thing to do, they know that drinking
alcohol every day is in a good thing.
Speaker 2: And my parents are letting me do this, like they
don't even love me enough.
Speaker 1: To stop me, yeah, to challenge me.
Speaker 3: Like so, just in the same way, the absence.
Speaker 2: Of action.
Speaker 3: Is not loving either, you know, and I don't think
certain people understand it that way. But if you go
online and say that you are not your kid's friend,
you're their parent, You're.
Speaker 2: Like, oh, you're this mean, terrible person.
Speaker 3: I think being a parent is so important and so
much more valuable than a friend. How many friends have
we had for five years and he disappeared?
Speaker 2: You never talked to him again?
Speaker 3: Right, friends leading, But you're a parent. That's permanent. That
is something to be honored. And you are friendly with
your kids and you love them enough to tell them
the thing that they don't want to hear. Like that
is something that is completely entirely different than being some
friend of the moment who just hangs out with their kid.
But then they're shocked when their kid doesn't listen to them.
Speaker 1: Well, the other thing I think that people are and
I think, you know, basically, it sounds to me like
you're saying you're asking for the same action of the
parents to the kids as well as the friends to
the parents. Right, some are panmped and imposing some reasonable
boundaries or checks on out of control and foolish behavior.
And the thing I was thinking, one of the reasons
I think people don't do this is because they try
it and it blows up the relationship. You know, I
have seen this happen also where you know, even you know,
well many people who I think are doing the right thing,
they step in and they say, hey, look, you know
this situation is inappropriate. What are you going to do
about it? And all of a sudden they're completely cut
out of that person's life, you know, for the rest
of time.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And so it's hard we have our society has so
many different dysfunction it's very different, difficult to kind of
find ways out of them because once you get that
spiral going, you know, the steps upward are so much
harder than the slide down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, there's there's a risk in everything. There's
always going to be a risk in telling people the truth.
I think, and you know, and you understand this as
a writer as well.
Speaker 2: It's how you say things, it's how you introduce things,
it's how you approach it. The words that you use
them can help. That can help.
Speaker 1: I think there's going to always be you know, probably
a sizeable number at this point of people who no
matter how you say it, they are going to do
what they're going to do, and they resent you for
telling them the thing, even in a super nice way.
But absolutely, if people it does help, you know, of course,
to have some practice and facility with framing things in
a more positive, encouraging way rather than I'm judging you
sort of way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my suggestion would be, and this is part of
the point of writing the book the way that I did,
is that any person can put a bunch of stats
together and make some academic argument as to why the
nuclear family is beneficial and blah blah blah blah, and.
Speaker 2: No one would care.
Speaker 3: The reason why someone would care based off of what
the arguments that I'm making is because I'm humanizing it.
More so, I'm giving the child's perspective of how a
child feels. I do believe even for that person who
might be selfish in that moment, it's because no one
is helping to realign them. And if you say, listen,
I know you're about to do this thing, but let
me tell you here's what's going to happen to your
child and bring the focus back on to the kid.
It may or may not work, but I think that's
the best way to try to approach this is to
try because I think many of people make bad decisions
as parents, and they love their kids, right, they're just
they're reacting to whatever is going on. They're being impulsive, right,
And it's easy to think about yourself.
Speaker 2: So it's no shade to parents.
Speaker 3: Who think about themselves or give a moment like that's normal.
I think that's that's fine. But the thing is we
have help. We're supposed to have help. We're supposed to
have people say listen, I know you're struggling with this thing,
and i know you're thinking about making this decision, but
I'm just telling you your child, this is what's going
to happen to them.
Speaker 2: You know, here, read this book.
Speaker 3: Right, like give them information, right, but always make it
about the kid.
Speaker 2: Don't make it about yourself, like I don't like that
you're doing this. Well, I don't care what you like,
and I don't like.
Speaker 3: You have to make it about the kid and what's
about to happen to that child. And so I think
that's probably the best way to check somebody on what
they're about to do, or something that they're currently doing,
or even something that they've already done.
Speaker 2: If they have abandoned their child.
Speaker 3: I'm one of those people that believes that there there's
always hope. I think every child wants a relationship with
their parents. Every child wants a relationship with their biological parent,
even if you've disregarded them for so long. I've said
this before, even though my father always kept me at
arm's length and didn't act like he cared.
Speaker 2: If my father was to call me at the age
of thirty and say, you know what, I was wrong,
I want to start new and I want to have
a relationship with you.
Speaker 3: I would have started new with my father. You can't
go back and fix the pass, but I could at
least hear him out, hear his reasonings. Maybe he doesn't
have a good reason. Maybe he says, you know, I
was being self. He's owning it, he's being accountable, he's
doing all of those things. I personally would have given
my father a chance. He never reached out to me.
I never ignored his calls. So I do think that
it's possible. I've seen it happen, and there are just
there's a lot of situations where children are really struggling
to connect with their parents.
Speaker 2: A quick story I was.
Speaker 3: I was talking to this guy just recently, I think
it was a few weeks ago, and we're engaging in
this topic about the book and everything, and to the side,
he's telling me how after he got divorced from his wife.
Speaker 2: Those kids were a little bit older, I think they
were teenagers, but after.
Speaker 3: They got divorced, it created the schism and the wife
was saying things about him and the.
Speaker 2: Kids primarily with her, and there's a.
Speaker 3: Lot of frustration from the kids towards him, and he's
losing hope. He loves his kids, but he's losing hope
because they're like, I don't want to talk to you.
Speaker 2: They're keeping at arm's length.
Speaker 3: What I had to explain to him is like, one,
you don't give up on them, because by giving up
on them. It just validates what they're saying. And two,
your kids are hurting and this is their way of
making you feel like how they feel, and so you
have to deal with it. You have to work off
of their time. And on top of that, because I
think one of the mistakes he was making, He's like, well,
tell me specifically what I did, and I said, that's irrelevant.
Speaker 2: How they feel is how they feel.
Speaker 3: But you just have to acknowledge that there was something
that you did that made them feel the way it
they feel, and you are sorry for it. You never
wanted to actually hurt them, and your apology you're not
trying to rationalize, well, you're mis remembering.
Speaker 2: Because I actually did this. That's a mood point.
Speaker 3: Your kids want you to hurt like they're hurting, and
so you have to ease your way into their life.
But you first have to one be accountable to acknowledge
their pain, and three be willing for that to still
lead to them still keeping your arm's length.
Speaker 2: For a period of time.
Speaker 3: But you keep persistent, you keep reaching out to them,
you keep telling them that you love them, and I
actually need to follow up with them and see how
things are going. But he at least had hope after
that conversation, and he said, you know what, I'm going
to reach out to my oldest daughter who lives close
to me, and I'm going to I'm going to try that.
So I don't know if he had success with it
just yet, but I'm hopeful that he will. He's a
sincere guy and he really wants to be in his
children's life, but it very clearly sounds like his kids
are hurting. So I do think that's why part of
the solutions is you need to forgive your parents. Like
your parents, you're going to become a parent one day,
just like I I've admitted to my mom, like, I
get it.
Speaker 2: I completely understand your perspective.
Speaker 1: I've said that to myself so many times. You know,
when you're a kid where you're like, oh my parents,
my parents, la la lah, and then as the adult,
you're like, WHOA, I know where they were coming from now.
Speaker 3: Right, You know, like my mother a single parent, trying
to raise two kids, dealing with all the economic pressures,
managing us, not making enough money, homelessness, all these different things,
and I'm like, man, my mom's high strong.
Speaker 2: As an adult, I get where my mom's high strong.
She is stressed. Yeah, she has a lot of pressure
on her.
Speaker 3: It's just her and we're moving a lot because she's
trying to get support from other people, you know. And
we never went in the system. We weren't on welfare
or anything like that. The closest that we were to
any sort of social safety that is, we were in
a homeless shelter that was only for there was like
two or three months. There was like two months that
we were there. But my mom was always working. She
worked a lot, and she's trying to take care of us,
and I get it, like she's not going to be
a perfect mom.
Speaker 2: She's going to be stressed because of all these different
things that are going on.
Speaker 3: And so I acknowledge these things, and I've said that
to her, and I've apologized or misunderstanding what she was
going through.
Speaker 2: I've apologized or.
Speaker 3: Staying at arm's length from her because I'm dealing with
my stuff, you know. So I do think that at
the root of this book, there's there's healing. It's not
just everyone is bad, everyone's doing these things wrong.
Speaker 2: That's not my approach.
Speaker 3: My approach is we have if we're going to change anything,
we have to acknowledge that there's something wrong, right, and
we all do something wrong. I've done stuff wrong as
a parent. We have to acknowledge it if we're going
to change it right.
Speaker 2: But we can't. We can't heal if we pretend that
everything is fine. And clearly, I'm looking all around me.
Speaker 3: Every person I've told you about this book when it
was coming out, just regular people. I'm like, by the
way I'm writing this book always about tell them the topic. Oh,
I know someone, my cousin, my sister. Everyone knows someone
who's dealing with the outcomes of divorce or single parenthood.
Speaker 2: Every one. And I'm like, if you knew if every
person you came across knew someone who died of a
drug overdose, she'd be like, drug it overs it's a
really big deal, right, But we're dealing with family separation,
and everyone knows someone. If you have to come across.
Speaker 3: Someone who's never known anyone in their life personally, that
isn't going through some sort of divorce.
Speaker 2: Or single parenthood situation.
Speaker 3: My wife, she grew up in Brooklyn. She said every
house was the mother leading the house. There was no
father except for one family, and they were from the Caribbean.
Speaker 2: Wow, So like her, it was normal. Yep, that was
a normal situation until we got together and we really
talked about these things, and she grew up without her
father and we discussed these things. She's like, Man, I didn't.
Speaker 3: Realize how impactful, how that affected me as a young woman.
And as I'm looking in hindsight like, oh yeah, not
having my father, that's why I ran into these situations
and ran into these particular guys and stuff like that,
and I'm just like, it's all around us. We pretend
that everything is fine, and I think that is It
is this delusion that's keeping us almost like stagnant.
Speaker 1: For more of this, you can look up the book
The Children We Left Behind. It is out this week
everywhere books are sold. Wrongspeak dot net is also the
website we can read more from Adam Coleman. He's on
x as well. Just search for his name and you'll
find it. Adam, thank you for joining the Federalist Radio
Hour today.
Speaker 2: That was my pleasure. I had a good time.
Speaker 1: And ladies and gentlemen, don't forget to lovers of freedom
and anxious for the fray. We'll see you next time.