With his son facing 10 years in prison, Michael Douglas did what any father would do: but where does a parent's responsibility end?, asks KATE HOLMQUIST
WHAT’S A reasonable age to expect your children to stop blaming you for their problems and take responsibility for their own lives? In a Los Angeles court this week, actor Michael Douglas tried to keep his drug-dealer son, Cameron (31), out of jail by blaming himself, his bad marriage to Cameron’s mother, his fame and his family history of addiction.
Michael’s handwritten letter to the judge was one of 37 produced at the sentencing hearing by family members, friends and supporters of Cameron, including Michael’s current wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who must be hoping this sad history does not repeat itself in her own young family.
Cameron, a heroin addict, had the first of many spells in rehab at the age of 13. After his father pleaded with judge Richard Berman to waive the mandatory 10-year sentence, Cameron claimed he was feeling the support of his family for the first time in his life and was sorry for having squandered many chances to kick his habit.
Berman wasn’t convinced and told Michael and Cameron’s mother, Diandra, if they hadn’t been proper parents to Cameron before the age of 13, they could hardly be expected to start 18 years later. The sins of the parents could no longer excuse the sins of the son, although Berman halved Cameron’s sentence to five years.
Irish courts, too, see pleading parents trying to explain their addicted children’s behaviour with accounts of unhappy childhoods. “Parents rarely want to see their children go to jail, no matter what they did,” says addiction specialist Dr Bobby Smyth.
Irish judges are probably more inclined to heed such pleas when teenagers are seen to be making active changes, yet people can’t blame their childhoods forever, he says.
“Once teens have attained the autonomy to stand on their own two feet, we parents may regret what we did or didn’t do, but I don’t think we have an ongoing responsibility to pick up the pieces,” Smyth says.
“If Cameron is to begin recovery, he has to say: ‘I am now 31 and I am responsible for my behaviour’,” says Dr Siobhan Barry, of the College of Psychiatry of Ireland. “To try to parent a 31-year-old in a way you should have done when he was a child is too late. The past does provide a certain explanation, but it won’t be accepted as an excuse by society.”
Parents remain parents until the day they die but the relationship should change as the adult child becomes increasingly independent. “The more a parent cossets and enables a child’s irresponsible behaviour, the lesser the likelihood that that child, now an adult, will maturely deal with their life and pay the cost that has to be paid,” Barry says.
Young Irish people are being set back and deprived of the chance to adjust gradually to adulthood, says child psychiatrist Dr Keith Holmes, a child psychiatrist, who blames transition year in secondary school. Becoming an adult, he says, should be a gradual process of growing freedom that ends when the child leaves full-time education. The imposition of transition year means 15- and 16-year-olds are given too much freedom too quickly in fourth year, he continues, only to be shoved back a step during fifth and sixth year when they are expected to study harder and obey parents and teachers. Combined, he says, with the fact 18- and 19-year-olds can legally drink alcohol, this is a recipe for “friction”.
The economic climate is forcing people in their 20s to live at home during third-level education and even longer, past the point that is healthy, Holmes says. Should parents bail these adult children out when they get in to trouble?
Many parents can’t resist, he says: “If, as a parent, you have any sense of feeling guilty or responsible, then it’s very hard to feed your child to the wolves.” Michael Douglas knows how that feels.