Bad parenting is a constitutional right

Ceramic plate by Keaton Henson

In the past few days hundreds of you have given me feedback on my post about Rob Reiner. I’ve learned a lot from the comments section. This post organizes ideas that have come up in discussion.

The day after Rob Reiner was killed by his son, Nick Reiner, a New York Times podcast revisited Rob’s relationship with his own father. Rob had said that even as a young child, he felt his father hated him. When Rob’s brother died, Rob believed his father wished Rob had died instead. Years later, Rob admitted he had not bonded with his own son, Nick, when Nick was young.

Failure to bond with a child is abuse

When there’s shocking gun violence, the media takes an opportunity to debate the balance between the right to bear arms and the right to feel safe. But when there’s shocking family violence, we refuse to talk about the balance between the rights of parents and the rights of children.

We avoid talking about children’s rights because psychological abuse is often more damaging than physical abuse, and acknowledging that would implicate many of us who think of ourselves as good parents.

Bad parenting distorts your baseline

People with psychiatric vulnerabilities partner with people who have similar vulnerabilities, because it feels familiar. Their children then inherit both the genetic predisposition and the relational environment shaped by those traits.

This month, groundbreaking data published in Nature mapped the genetic overlap across psychiatric disorders. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are genetically almost the same. Depression, PTSD, and anxiety strongly overlap. Many of the same genes influence all psychiatric disorders. Autism and ADHD form a distinct neurodevelopmental cluster, separate from mood disorders and psychosis—but people in the neurodevelopmental cluster often activate mood disorders under stress.

This creates a symmetry that parents rarely recognize. Adults with neurodevelopmental differences are parenting children with similar differences. Some children are, in fact, harder to parent. But when faced with a difficult child, parents without neurological differences tend to make decisions that reduce harm. Parents with neurological differences are more likely—through rigidity, overconfidence, or emotional blindness—to make decisions that worsen the situation.

Parents lose the child before the drugs

Many children have bad childhoods. Very few kill their parents. When a child does, it signals that something went catastrophically wrong early on. We should scrutinize that parenting.

I watched more than 50 videos on a documentary channel where parents, hoping to help other families, tell their story about losing a child to addiction. In every video, it’s clear the parent lost their emotional bond with their child first, then the bad choices followed. Sometimes the parent sees it, often they don’t.

For these videos to help anyone we have to acknowledge that failure to maintain connection is itself a form of abuse. Naming the problem is how help becomes possible.

Money insulates bad parenting

Parents have near-absolute rights over their children, so unless they are on public assistance, we cannot force them to get help. Wealthy parents in particular use their resources to resist criticism. And most parents do not believe they need help until it is too late.

Rob Reiner and his wife discuss this openly. When Nick was addicted to heroin and cocaine at age fifteen, they sought expert help. But when the experts challenged their permissive approach, Rob and his wife decided the experts were stupid. Rob and his wife rejected oversight. Nick was hiring prostitutes in Los Angeles before he could drive.

Bad parenting takes two main forms: being too controlling or too permissive. Both neglect a child’s need to feel emotionally valued. And both feel “just right” to the parent, because parents judge themselves against their own childhoods, not against healthy standards.

Children can’t compete with parent ambition

What children need more than anything is to feel special to their parents — to feel that they matter. No one else can give them that. Making a child feel special does not mean being entertained by them. Parenting is often boring. It’s easy to prioritize something more interesting.

But when parents prioritize self-expression, status, or public validation over presence, children internalize the belief that they do not matter. Or that they need to make their parents look good in order to matter. Those children spend adulthood trying to prove their worth instead of giving their children a sense of worth.

This is what failure looks like

Judge parents by how they respond to a broken bond. When Nick was a middle-school addict, Rob was traveling the country campaigning. When Nick tried to tell his own story, Rob directed the film, rather than finding a way to connect with his son outside Rob’s professional identity. Rob did not hide these choices. He believed they were reasonable. That’s the pattern.

Wanting to be a good parent is irrelevant

When we try hard at work and fail, someone tells us. Parenting is the only domain where there is no mechanism to tell educated, financially secure people they are doing harm and must get help.

In the United States, parenting is a fundamental constitutional right. Children do not hold independent rights; they are treated as property of their parents. State intervention requires extreme physical abuse. We have a good understanding of psychological abuse, but we don’t address it in law or public discourse.

We need to treat bad parenting the way we treat irresponsible gun ownership. Leaving a gun unlocked does not cause death by itself, but it is illegal because it is dangerously predictive. Psychological neglect should be treated the same way.

Bad parenting is not one thing. It shows up as emotional unavailability, excessive control, excessive permissiveness, chronic criticism, unpredictability, or prioritizing adult needs over the child’s emotional reality. The outcomes are predictable: addiction, aggression, anxiety, emotional collapse.

We have the vocabulary to describe bad parenting. Refusing to describe it is why bad parenting is everywhere.

Rob Reiner’s death is a personal tragedy. But the lack of honest discussion about parenting is a societal tragedy. We will not stop these stories by talking about children like they’re the problem. We’ll stop these stories by holding parents to societal standards that center on the child’s needs rather than the parent’s intentions.