The Voice Of One Crying Out In Suburbia

From the parenting Hall of Fame...

ABC.com reported the wedding of Windy Hager and Brenton Wuchae (Brenton is the guy since they both have kind of androgynous names). So what? Well what might jump out at you is the age of the bride and the groom. The groom is a robust 40 years old. The bride? She is all of 16. But it is OK, because her parents signed off on the nuptials.

What?!

Yes indeed, her parents gave permission for their 16 year old daughter to marry a man who amounts to a pedophile and child molester. They may have been "dating" for a few years.

During Windy's freshman year, her 38-year-old track coach, Brenton Wuchae, began taking a more active interest in her, offering to give the 14-year-old rides home from practice.

For those keep count at home, that would make him 24 years older and who knows what was going on between them when she was 14. Her parents began to suspect there was something going on, but were apparently helpless to do anything about it...

"We've tried everybody. We've been to the law. We've been to the school board," Betty said. "Our family has come and tried to talk to her. We've had people on the phone with her for hours — family, friends. We've been to our pastor asking for guidance. We've been to his pastor."

She is 16 years old. You can't stop her from seeing a 40 year old guy? Notice it is everybody else's fault that she wouldn't stop seeing him. How about if you exert some authority as a parent. Don't let her go out with him. If he calls or texts her, take away her cell phone. Somehow, kids survived without cell phones and email for years. Can't keep her away from him at track practice? No matter how much she loves track, she needed to stop. If you wait until it is too late to exert authority over your kids, this is what happens...

Meanwhile, the Hagers say Windy withdrew, refusing to speak to them until she asked them to sign a consent form so that she and her coach — a man more than twice her age — could get married.

Although anguished, her weary parents gave in.

"Signing those consent forms was the hardest thing I did in my whole life, but we had to move on, it was going to kill us all," Dennis said.

Maybe the harder thing, but the right thing, would have been to be parents and put a stop to this. She is 16, she is a child! Sixteen year olds do not dictate terms to parents. Better that she be mad and refuse to talk to them, rather than her "marry" a pedophile. They just had to "move on", it was "killing them". That comes with the territory. Surrendering to the whims of children is not good parenting, it is criminal neglect. This guy should be in prison, not on a honeymoon with a sixteen year old girl.

If some pedophile wanted to marry my sixteen year old daughter, I would give him something alright but it wouldn't be consent to marry my daughter.