A toddler needed Narcan twice in Wildwood — I can’t stop thinking about it
A 2-year-old in Wildwood needed two doses of Narcan this week, after testing positive for cocaine during what should have been a family beach vacation.
According to the Cape May County Prosecutor's Office, Alexander Moles, 39, of Ringwood, was watching the child at an Airbnb while the child's mother showered. When she got out, the toddler seemed unusually sleepy. Moles was already driving the child to the hospital, telling her by phone he thought the boy might have taken "pain killers." She told him that was not okay and called 911 herself. First responders administered Narcan twice on the way to Cooper University Hospital Cape Regional. The child's blood came back positive for cocaine. A search of the Airbnb turned up a bag of white powder, tinfoil packets, a partial pill, and straws. Moles is now charged with child endangerment, drug possession, and possession of paraphernalia. He has a lawyer. He is presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a court of law.
I do not know this family. I do not know exactly what happened behind that door. But I know what it means when a toddler needs Narcan twice at a beach house, and I know I cannot stop thinking about it.
SEE ALSO: Wildwood just didn't warn about a takeover — they made an arrest
A pattern I keep seeing
This year alone, I have written about towns up and down the Shore that have had to become substitute parents. Long Branch shutting down an early-season gathering before it spiraled. Seaside Heights and Wildwood running curfews with visible police presence. North Wildwood issuing zero-tolerance warnings ahead of the Fourth of July. Wildwood police tracking down and arresting the person behind an organized boardwalk takeover. Every one of those stories involves the same basic dynamic: municipalities and police departments doing the job that used to belong to parents standing on the boardwalk with their own kids.
I have seen the smaller, quieter version of this myself, in towns that never make the news for it. Sea Isle City. Even squeaky-clean Ocean City. Groups of kids out well past a reasonable hour, being genuinely disrespectful to younger families and couples just trying to enjoy a boardwalk evening. It never escalates to real violence in the moments I have witnessed. But it chips away at what is supposed to be a carefree summer vibe, one rude interaction at a time. I see a version of it in restaurants too — not toddlers being toddlers, which nobody should judge, but kids well past the age where they should know better, loud and unmanaged while a parent stares at a phone three feet away.
Vacation from your routine, not from your job
There used to be a PSA that ran on New York television, a stark, simple line: it's 11 o'clock, do you know where your children are? I think about that line more than I expected to at this stage of my life. Maybe it needs some modern version of that reminder, because a lot of parents seem to have quietly decided that a beach vacation is also a vacation from actually parenting.
I say this fully aware of how it sounds. I am old enough now that "ok boomer" is a fair response to brace for. But I do not think this is really a generational insult so much as an honest observation. Something in how a lot of younger parents approach the job looks different than it did a generation ago — more path of least resistance, more prioritizing their own comfort over their child's supervision, in ways that show up everywhere from a boardwalk at midnight to a restaurant table to, in the worst case this week, an Airbnb in Wildwood where a two-year-old ended up needing Narcan.
I am not saying every young parent is failing. Plenty are doing this harder job better than my generation ever did. But something about how casually parenting gets treated as optional right now, at least by a meaningful slice of people, genuinely worries me. It might be a bigger, quieter crisis than we want to admit — not as visible as COVID, but running through a whole generation of kids who are growing up with less actual supervision than they need.
That 2-year-old in Wildwood did not choose any of what happened to him this week. He is the one who has to live with it. That is the part of this story that should stay with all of us, long after the charges work their way through court.
