I find this conversation fascinating because I once interviewed a furniture-less man.
This man had done time in prison, I'm not sure what for, but he'd been out for some some years and had spent that time trying to help his son, a young teenager, straighten up. The dad could see the boy was getting into trouble (and with it, potential danger) -- skipping school, failing classes, hanging out with questionable kids. The dad tried to get the kid to follow the rules with various tactics, including some that sounded overly harsh to me, but he obviously loved the boy and was desperate.
I was there because the kid, at 14, had been killed in a gang-related drive-by shooting.
The kid's mom, by the way, mostly refused to talk to me, which I'd never blame a grieving parent for doing. But she did say, very vehemently, that her son was a good boy and would never get into any kind of trouble.
The dad was very nice and open to talking and seemed to speak from the heart.
When I interviewed him, we sat in the living room of his apartment on those folding aluminum lawn chairs with the nylon webbing. They were just about the only things in the room.