ON Father’s Day, Instagram was awash with gushing tributes from celebrities and muggles alike to the men who sired and nurtured them. Even the site’s owner Mark Zuckerberg joined in, posting a photo of his dad Ed surrounded by his children and grandkids and the caption: “Happy Father’s Day to the man who started and continues to inspire our whole family.” But what of those for whom a father figure has always been, and remains, absent? If there’s a strong mother and wider family support network in the picture, then that’s a good foundation from which to potentially build a happy life.
But if a child’s starter years are, at best chaotic, worse, neglectful and abusive, then the chances of them staying on the straight and narrow diminishes greatly. Details are starting to emerge about the background of the two 12-year-old boys who fatally stabbed 19-year-old Shawn Seesahai in a West Midlands park and it’s a predictable tale of parental failure. By contrast, Shawn, an aspiring engineer from Anguilla , in the Caribbean, enjoyed a close and loving relationship with his father Suresh and mother Manashwry.
They were gracious enough to say they felt sorry for the killers’ parents, but his mum added: “Twelve-year-old kids should be at home doing school work and then going to bed. I have two children and at 7.30pm they had to go to bed because they have to follow the rules of the house.
” Hear hear. But it sounds as though much-needed parental boundaries were sorel.