Another day, another safeguarding alert, another tragedy of the soul laid bare in the cold light of a news report. Vincent’s parents, it seems, never told him he was good enough. So he turned to a middle-aged online couple for the validation denied him at home. We gasp, we tut, we share the article. But do we understand the civilisational decay this represents?
Let us cast our minds back, not to the Victorian era, where the family was a fortress of moral instruction, but to the late Roman Republic, where the patria potestas—the father’s absolute authority—began to crumble under the weight of indulgence and neglect. The Roman paterfamilias was meant to mould his son into a citizen of virtus. Instead, he produced a generation of effete, entitled brats who gave us Nero and the fall of the Empire. Vincent is their spiritual heir.
Today’s parents, paralysed by the cult of self-esteem, have swung from one extreme to the other. They do not discipline, they do not praise wisely; they offer empty affirmations or crushing silence. The result is a generation of young people hollowed out, desperate for the approbation of strangers on the internet. Vincent’s story is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of a broader intellectual and moral decadence.
We live in an age where the family has been deconstructed by the very forces that claim to protect it. The state, the school, the therapist—all have usurped the role of the parent. But no bureaucratic apparatus can fill the void left by a mother’s approving glance or a father’s firm hand. Vincent sought a surrogate family online, and the result is a safeguarding alert. How predictable. How tragic.
The Victorians understood that a child needed both love and expectation. That the parent’s duty was to prepare the child for a world that would not coddle. Today, we either crush our children with demands or abandon them to the digital wilderness. We have forgotten the golden mean.
What is to be done? First, we must stop pretending that the family is merely a social construct. It is the bedrock of national identity. A nation that cannot raise its young properly is already in decline. Second, we must revive the concept of filial piety—not as blind obedience, but as a mutual bond of responsibility. Parents must learn to praise genuinely, but also to set boundaries. Children must learn that worth is earned, not gifted by a stranger online.
Vincent’s case is a warning. The barbarians are not at the gates; they are in our living rooms, whispering through screens. If we do not reclaim the art of parenting, we will continue to produce hollow men and women, ready to be preyed upon by any passing charlatan. The safeguarding alert is the least of our troubles. Our civilisation’s future hangs in the balance.
