I had a pretty good upbringing. My parents were not overly strict, but my household did have rules. Me and my siblings were disciplined if we stepped out of line but for the most part our parents gave us a lot of freedom. IF we pushed to hard as far as that freedom was concerned we would get punished. This was rarely physical, but was around things like having TV time taken away, getting grounded, being forced to stick to a particular schedule, and in my case during particularly bad incidents such as when I had been drinking, backed into another car in a parking lot, then outran the police (I'm secretly quite proud about outrunning the cops and I think my Dad was as well) I was not allowed to go anywhere other than school and back every day for a very long time.
When I was in high school most of the people I knew and hung out with had similar situations with their own parents and of those people that I still keep in touch with, the ones that had parents that were involved in their lives, almost all of them ended up doing quite well for themselves.
There were exceptions though and one of them was named Jason. Jason kind of just did whatever he wanted to whenever he wanted to and I never so much as met his parents and he rarely spoke about them.
[src](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/82/4e/24/824e24a7457010ebe0a24903aafb63b5.jpg)
not his place, but it could have been Jason's situation was a strange one and one that I don't think would have been allowed today. I don't think it was allowed then, but for some reason nobody did anything about it. Jason lived in a house in a neighborhood that belonged to someone in his family, but his parents didn't live there. It might have been an aunt's house or something like that, I don't remember. What I do remember is that people would all go over to Jason's and just smoke, drink, make out with chicks, and whatever else you could imagine that had parents been around, they would have put a stop to.
Jason was in the same grade as me and around the same age as me. I did notice that he would frequently miss school and honestly, given the way that teenagers think why would a person go to school if no one was going to make you do so?
His house looked something like that. While his neighbors were not really close, i'm sure they hated him.
Jason was my friend. He was a nice guy and stayed out of trouble for the most part. What he lacked was any sort of oversight in his life. While I did kind of envy that he was able to do whatever he wanted, I even at that age felt as though he had a bit too much freedom and he always screwed up all the things in his life that while you might not want to do it, you kind of need to do it.
I took it upon myself because I had a car, to tell him that I would pick him up for school. He didn't really need a ride to school, he lived close enough that he could have walked in 15 minutes or so. I was using this situation to try to pressure him into waking up and actually going to school. I don't know how many times I ended up going there and trying to wake him up to go to school and he just wouldn't. He wasn't rude about it, he had just been up really late and probably got drunk because all the degenerates used his house as a place where there were no rules and Jason got stuck with all the mess.
He had furniture but it was pretty awful, and this was made a lot worse by so many people being around his house all the time. There was one time that someone shot themselves in the foot by screwing around with a gun in the parking area out back. It was true chaos there for the most part, and while Jason had a sometimes enviable time as a teenager, soon he would be faced with the fact that his pals were kind of using him and they went and graduated and moved on whereas Jason ended up dropping out of school.
I don't think this is something you can just do as a minor, so that means that some sort of parental figure in his life was able to sign off on him leaving school for good, but didn't care enough about him to actually intervene in his life.
We all graduated and most of us moved on and went to college or moved somewhere a bit more exciting than New Bern, North Carolina and the surrounding areas. Jason didn't have anywhere to go and didn't have any prospects to even try. Jason just stuck around that town in the same house that he got for free and jumped from job to job living the life of a person with no direction.
I did speak to him every now and then because I went off to college at a university that was only about an hour away and would visit my parents on the weekends back in New Bern. It got more and more tragic to see Jason each time I came back. He put on a happy face but you could see that he was very envious of me and other people like me that DID have some direction in their lives and moved away and made something of ourselves.
The high school kids still hung out at his place, but this started to be more and more creepy the older he got. Some of the activities were now entering criminal territory because he was now a legal adult and a lot of the high school kids were not so now he was "contributing to the delinquency of minors" which depending on the situation is quite a serious offense.
He did end up getting busted because some teenage girl got drunk at his house and then crashed into someone on the way home and seriously injured an elderly man. Jason did a bit of jail time for that and the parties stopped, but only as far as minors were concerned. Now he was just a deadbeat hanging out with other deadbeats that also didn't move on to do anything of importance after high school.
Jason would eventually get a GED (high school equivalency) and get some sort of menial job at a local factory, but that was short-lived because his alcoholism was the real priority in his life and employers will not tolerate that sort of thing for very long.
Years went by and I graduated from college and hadn't spoken to Jason in years. Then one day someone contacted me on I think it was FB messenger and was accusing me of "being friends with a Grade-A scumbag." It took some questioning but it turns out they were talking about Jason.
They sent me a link for a news story where a local man had been arrested for animal cruelty causing death for two dogs that were left for weeks without food or water. It was him, it was the same house that I had smoked ciggies at in high school that was in the article.
According to the article, Jason had just lost his job and to make himself feel better, he got into his girlfriend's car and went off somewhere. They ended up smoking a bunch of meth and just didn't come home for weeks. Zero concern was paid to the fact that there were 2 dogs locked inside of his house. The dogs were discovered by someone in the neighborhood that was walking around the area and noticed a very powerful smell eminating from the house. Two dogs were deceased, emaciated, and had worked pretty hard to try to open anything looking for water.
It was a really tragic thing to read and even though I knew Jason and had a soft for him, I wanted the police to throw the book at him. This was in 2019, really close to when Trump signed the Federal Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act into law. The local police now had to prosecute to a high degree because even though he was eventually found not guilty on federal charges the case made some headlines in the news. Jason ended up getting sentenced to 3 years in prison.
Some might say that this is extreme when it was just a dog but I honestly think that this is kind of a light sentence considering the amount of cruelty and harm that was caused by his neglect.
Jason deleted all of his social media after this event because as you can imagine, people from all over the world were coming after the guy. I am a dog lover, so I cut off all ties with him. From what I have heard he still lives in that house and was released early on parole but I will not go and see him. I think he deserves even more punishment than the government was allowed to give him for his crimes.
So what does this have to do with the title of what I wrote here? I truly believe that being a parent and setting boundaries for your kids are the most important thing that a parent must do in the raising of their children. Jason had no oversight at all. Jason got to do whatever he wanted to with little to no repercussions. And to think, I envied this guy between the ages of 14-18 or so. The true reality of the damage that was being caused to him wouldn't really occur to me until years later when all of us had moved on and made something of ourselves and Jason was still living a life of zero consequences until the consequences came crashing down.
I sincerely hope that he managed to make something of his life. Everyone should have some sort of chance to try again if they fail. But after years of attempting to help this guy in high school, I already gave him all the help that I am going to.
