Where are the parents? In Philly, they are placing themselves between children and bullets.

In a viral video of a Philadelphia youth football game last week, a man filming briefly wonders about the popping sound that suddenly interrupts the din of the game.

“What is that?”

He quickly recognizes the noise as gunfire, but not before the young players on the field have already hit the ground, some belly crawling to safety.

It was a heartbreaking scene, and one that has played out in football fields and basketball courts and recreation centers and classrooms and any of the once safe spaces for young people across the nation. Our children are now fluent in fear.

This was the second time in 14 months that some of the fourth graders who were on the North Philly Blackhawks’ football field at 11th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue on Oct. 1 experienced gunfire during a game. In 2022, a drive-by shooting broke out at the opposing West Philly Panthers’ home field next to Shepard Recreation Center. Five people were injured after nearly 100 gunshots were fired.

During the latest shooting, a 14-year-old boy was shot in the leg. Police said he was not an intended target when a group of masked men began shooting at each other. Other children were trampled and bruised as they rushed to safety.

In the aftermath of senseless episodes of violence in Philly, too many ask a rhetorical question dripping with condescension (and, usually, racism): Where are the parents? The answer is implied: The parents are nowhere to be found, derelict in looking after their kids.

But that’s almost never true. And it certainly wasn’t true on that day.

“All you hear about is a shooting at the field, but every adult out there was looking for their kids, random kids. Wherever they could grab a kid to protect them, they were doing it,” said Ernest Moore, whose 10-year-old son is a quarterback for the Blackhawks. “Every coach and every adult was trying to get all kids to safety.”

We saw the same instinct on display during another violent episode that got a ton of media attention after a woman jumped out of her car in Center City when a dirt biker kicked in her rear window while her young children sat in the back. Video of the incident went viral.

Where are the parents?

Right there. Not backing down when the dirt biker slammed his helmet into her face, not when he showed her his gun, not when all of his buddies idled nearby on their bikes.

It could have gotten ugly. They all could have attacked her. She could have been shot. But the mother stood her ground and literally pushed back.

Maybe the better question is: Why is it still so easy to get a gun?

Or: Where are our leaders, the ones who keep saying they have a plan to make our city safer?

Or, how about: Why are people so quick to lean into tropes that paper over the reality that many adults — parents and siblings and caregivers and a host of grown folk who want better for our city’s young people — are right here, sometimes literally putting themselves between children and bullets?

The parents are right here and there and everywhere, tirelessly working to keep children — both their own and others’ — out of harm’s way, through activities and programs and countless other ways that will never go viral.

But then, that kind of on the ground, daily work doesn’t fit a narrative rife with misinformation and racism, where people get to scream about lawlessness in cities like Philadelphia and then absurdly blame it on calls for police accountability. (Spoiler alert: Wanting police to be held accountable for their actions doesn’t increase crime.)

It’s much easier to erase the people most impacted by violence while doing nothing to actually help them — until the next viral video, when everyone goes back to the same tired script, back to their corners to pronounce judgment — all but ensuring nothing changes.