THE Fourth Commandment — Honor Thy Father and Mother — doesn’t get much traction in this pagan, post-Christian society.

Older parents who gave so many years of their lives to their children report a widespread phenomenon of neglect, psychological abuse, cold-heartedness, manipulation and downright cruelty.

At Sheri McGregor’s website […] thousands of older parents have written in with their stories. They speak of children who never or rarely call or visit. Children who are openly ungrateful and demonize parents’ faults, sometimes with the help of psychotherapists and social media personalities who may have a vested interest in stoking certain kinds of family conflict and in creating cults of dependency around themselves. Children who are covert manipulators, outwardly civil but carrying daggers in their hearts.

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Children who disagree with their parents’ or in-laws’ politics or religious views and in true, Bolshevik fashion, cut them off, sending them to a virtual gulag in punishment for their thought crimes. Children who simply don’t like their loving parents or are bored with them, who have zero patience for anything that doesn’t provide instant gratification or enhance career success or win them popularity and think this is reason to pay hardly any attention to those who gave them life itself and who sacrificed their fortunes, time and energies for them.

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Many of these difficulties directly stem from divorce, sexual immorality and contraception. Some adult children have had chaotic childhoods or experienced neglect. Families are unnaturally small and many children more spoiled. Older parents are paying the price for their sinful choices. Many parents failed to properly form their children, leaving them to secular, government schools and the result was predictable. But, the sins of the parents do not justify crimes of neglect and abuse.