Lori Falce: We could all be these parents

Where are the parents?

Since Sunday, when Jaiden Za’mar Brown of North Braddock and Mathew Steffy-Ross of Pitcairn were shot and killed at a party on Pittsburgh’s North Side, I have heard that phrase repeated several times.

I feel it each time like a punch I see coming and have had just enough time to brace against. It’s the kind of thing I might have said myself before I was a mom — back when I thought I knew everything about parenting.

Today, I know that those 17-year-old boys were just that. Boys. Children. Kids who probably thought they understood the whole world. Kids whose parents dearly wished they had more answers to give them — not that it mattered because teenage boys are brimming with emotion and activity and just life and have no room for advice from adults.

Social media has amplified that very adolescent idea because of speed and efficiency. A thousand years ago when I was a kid in 1988, a party like the one that rapidly grew out of hand at the Airbnb-rented house on Suismon Street would have been harder to have happen. Fewer people would know, and it would take word longer to spread. Also, I didn’t have a credit card to rent a house, but, hey, kids always seem to find a way.

Out-of-control parties have been a staple of movies and television shows for decades, but a 200-plus-person party on the night before Easter seems peculiarly born of the intersection of Twitter and Instagram. Like a flash mob or a pop-up restaurant, it is fed by its own buzz.

And that is something parents are hard-pressed to access, much less control.

While we have long been told to monitor our children’s internet access, that is hard to do when we can’t take away the laptop because of school projects. We can’t ground a kid from his cellphone because there are no more payphones to call for a ride after baseball practice or the movies. The whole world is set up around the devices that make restricting social media like restricting oxygen.

So why is the first instinct for some to blame the parents? Especially in a case like this, where Brown and Steffy-Ross are the victims, we should be empathizing with the families and offering a shoulder to cry on. Instead, the shoulder many offer them is stone cold.

My son is 14, and I am chillingly aware of how easily he could have been either of these boys, or one of the nine others wounded by gunfire or others hurt as people fled the violence. While I monitor his activity with apps on my phone and spot checks of his chats and game rooms, I am not naive enough to think I know everything he is doing online.

I can only do the best I can. Offer the guidance I know will make him roll his eyes. Draw the limits that will elicit loud, exasperated sighs. Do my best to model the behavior I expect from him.

In the end, it’s all any parent can do. But it doesn’t make the criticisms — the “where are the parents?” comments — hurt any less when you fear for your kids and know how easily that parent could be you.