Stealing Neverland

What will this publicity mean for Jake, now 20? A few days ago, President Obama warned students to be careful what they post on the great résumé killer, Facebook (where you can find a Jake Myerson Support Group). "Whatever you do," he said, "it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life." But what if the person putting out images of a teenager smoking a bong is not a stoner friend but a disappointed parent?

In an era of self-revelation and incessant documentation of every stage and age, it's easy to lose track of what is tawdry, self-serving, and mortifying for those either central in, or peripheral to, our own stories. Because children are more vulnerable, there is a far greater onus on the parent writing about the child than the child about the parent.

This is why her decision to lay bare her unhappy home is baffling. Still, reading the book, you can't help but have some sympathy for Myerson, who ached and wept and was bewildered by her gentle son's dramatic transformation. She cannot be the only parent to hanker for the infant it was so much simpler to care for: "his baby body—pale smudges of nipples, the warm fatness of his arms on my bare shoulders, the smell of his baby skin against my face."

But surely the most fundamental, un-spoken pact you make with your children is that you will shield them when they are weak. Surely Myerson too must have also whispered the quiet promises mothers make to wrinkled newborns: I will walk barefoot on the sun to keep you from harm, I will circle you with wool and steel, I will never abandon you.

Kids mess up; parents do, too, when they forget that their only real obligation is to protect the child from the world, not offer him up to it.

Baird is a Deputy Editor of Newsweek.

© 2009