There was a time, not so long ago, when the shaping of a child’s character was seen as a sacred duty. The family was the primary site of moral development, emotional regulation, and behavioral learning. If a child misbehaved, the mirror turned first toward the home, the parents, the example set. But today, we live in a world that has forgotten the weight of this responsibility. And in its place, we’ve built a system that outsources the hard work of parenting to institutions, specialists, and diagnoses.

One of the clearest reflections of this shift is seen in the conversation around autism.

As someone trained in neuroscience, I can say confidently: there is no brain scan that will tell you whether someone is autistic. No biomarker. No definitive chemical imbalance. Autism is not discovered by imaging the brain. It is diagnosed through observation of behavior. That alone should give us pause.

Autism is not, in most cases, a disorder of anatomy. It is a label applied by people, based on how a child acts. And how a child acts is shaped deeply by how that child is raised, what that child sees, what they are exposed to, and who they are exposed to it by.

This is not to say that autism isn’t real, or that it doesn’t have biological roots in some cases. But it is to say that much of what gets diagnosed as autism today could just as easily be the behavioral symptoms of broken homes, disengaged fathers, inconsistent mothers, or overstimulated environments. And no one wants to say that. It’s easier to say the child has a “condition” than to accept that they may be reacting exactly as a young human does when their early years are mismanaged.

Since the end of World War II, we’ve seen a steady erosion of self-ownership. Men have grown weaker, physically and morally. Women too have been pulled away from traditional strengths and repurposed for economic roles they didn’t ask for. With both parents less present, less sure of themselves, and more distracted, children have become orphans with living parents.

Into this void steps the system: teachers, therapists, government programs. And they are all too happy to provide answers. “It’s not your fault,” they say. “Your child has autism. It’s neurological. Here’s a pamphlet.” And the parent, instead of reclaiming their role as steward of their child’s development, accepts this with a sigh of relief. They stop asking hard questions. They stop looking inward.

This creates a feedback loop: schools expect less of parents, parents expect more of schools, and the child is passed between the two like a hot potato no one wants to hold too long. The end result? A society that diagnoses what it cannot bear to take responsibility for.

It’s time we call this what it is: a failure of presence. The modern parent has outsourced the core of parenting (discipline, attentiveness, moral grounding) to others. And the price we pay is confusion in our children, and a rising tide of behavioral diagnoses that may have more to do with broken homes than broken brains.

If you are reading this as my child, know this: I did not bring you into the world to hand you off to someone else. Your upbringing was not a project for the state, the school, or a label. It was mine. It was your mother’s. And we took that seriously. Because how you behave is not a mystery of biology, but a mirror of our effort.

Be the kind of parent who owns that mirror. And never let the world convince you that the responsibility lies elsewhere.