Hello and welcome to this interview of The Lotus Seaters. Today I'm pleased to present you, Adam P. Coleman.

Thank you very much for being with us, Adam. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Welcome. It's been a pleasure and the podcast was really good. Yes. I had a lot of fun.

And I really like your contributions as well. Thank you. So people can find you on X. The handle is at wrongspeak and the account name is Adam B. Coleman, proud father, an imperfect man.

Yes. And I think that this name sets sort of the tone of the conversation we're going to have that surrounds your book, The Children We Left Behind,

whose subtitle is How Western Culture Rationalizes Family Separation and Ignores the Pain

of Child Neglect.

So that's a very interesting topic.

It's a topic that comes close to heart to me because I'm Greek and

Greek society is very much family oriented and I've seen all sorts of family drama.

In the wider family but also in friends. So I do think that we are going to have a very

interesting conversation.

So let me ask you, what motivated you to write this book?

So I started writing for different publications, major publications like The New York Post,

and I would see these different stories that would come up in the media.

And I always saw like a family element to it, whereas other people, they were focused

on maybe the racial angle or they were focused on the guns.

You know, if it was about mass shootings, they would focus on the gun element.

But for me, I was like, well, how did that person get there, right?

How did that kid enter that school and shoot up people, right?

Is it about the guns or is it about years or decades of what happened to them?

And for many of these cases, they are coming from households that were broken apart,

...