TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

I appreciate a book that makes me wonder if I'm pruning my children to be criminals.

My book club's selection for this month was to participate in One Book, One Bakersfield, One Kern fall reading selection, "The Other Wes Moore." One Book's website describes it as: "[A] true story of two kids with the same name and similar backgrounds who both lived in Baltimore. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison."

If children share the same circumstances, my question is, what's the turning point that forces two similar paths to diverge? Whether you have two kids growing up together in the ghetto or in affluence, with two moms who want the best for their kids, it would appear -- at least at first blush from the book -- there is an invisible trigger that makes one succeed and the other fail.

I wondered: What if the turning point was arbitrary? What if it was luck? What if it was some little black rain cloud that stops at one house and not the other?

Taking away the choice . . . no wait . . . the hope I have of being able to lead my kids down the right path and at least have a fighting chance to see them stay on it, made me panic if it were all truly arbitrary, or left to luck.

It thus became a mission to find something in the book that separated one mother from the other, the tipping point in creating either a scholar or felon.

Let's start with the felon's mother: out of the two women, she was probably the more even-tempered woman, but that meant precious little considering what she had hidden in her closet. Literally. A bag of marijuana. The first time her son got high was on her stash. Then, there were the frequent nights she gave her kids to friends or family so she could stay out all night, drinking and going home with men. For a while, she kept a boyfriend, but he happened to keep a wife on the side.

Now the scholar's mother: She had to work long hours, but didn't trust a situation where children are, in essence, raising themselves, so she moved in with her parents. If she couldn't keep her eyes on her kids, then someone in her gene pool should. From the author's accounts, she didn't give in to drink, drugs, or even casual relationships. She did everything in her power to do the right thing, the sometimes painful and sacrificial thing to keep her kids out of trouble, and did so by staying out of it, herself.

I know this isn't a hard-and-fast formula, and that sometimes a good parent has a kid in lockup, or a moron manages to raise a missionary. But the differences between these two women reassured me that raising good kids isn't as arbitrary as I sometimes dread it is. The book reaffirms this as well. It's about influence.

It's indubitably about influence.

See, I think when a parent crosses certain lines, even if they think they're not hurting anybody, like smoking a little pot on the weekend, doing a little bit of loose and adulterous loving, or even lying and cutting corners at work or with obligations, seeds are being planted. Every time a parent gingerly sticks his or her toes over to the other side of what's wrong and right, making excuses that it's acceptable in this or that circumstance, or that they somehow deserve it, the watching child has less respect for both that line and for those who first disrespected it: mom and/or dad.

The seeds of misdeed grow, the line gets blurred, and the kids end up doing 10 times worse than the parents could ever expect. The story of Adam, Eve and their first two sons exemplifies that -- a path of dishonesty to murder in the span of one generation. "The Other Wes Moore" is a modern day analogy of the same -- pot-smoking adulterer to a son with a felony murder conviction. Again, only one generation separated the smaller sins from the larger ones.

In the book, only one of those mothers toed the line: the scholar's. And now that I ponder it, I hate using that idiom in this context when I'm talking about parents who think there's no harm in just sticking a toe over it one time here and one time there. A successful parent doesn't merely toe the line, they stand several feet back from it. I mean, isn't that what you hope your own kids will do?

If so, it's better to show them how.

Heather Ijames is one of three community columnists whose work appears here every Saturday. These are the opinions of Ijames, not necessarily The Californian's. You can send email to her at heatherijames@hotmail.com Next week: Inga Barks.