At-Risk Kids

What are the Answers?

Some Things to Think About

Trend yesterday:

• Juvenile Courts.
• Programs to give kids hope and a new direction.

Trend today:

• Zero Tolerance.
• Boot Camps.
• Metal Detectors.
• Law enforcement officers in schools.
• Software which builds student profiles to predict those most likely at risk.
• Lowering the age at which a child may be tried as an adult.

Reasons:

• Younger ages of offenders.
• Increasingly violent crimes.
• Frustration from inability of adults to understand and find effective solutions.
• Failure of parents to effectively meet the challenges.
• Schools overwhelmed from responsibility by default and by parents who
• increasingly become adversaries instead of cooperative allies seeking what is best
• for the child.

Media-reported Samples of Breakdown:

• Columbine
• 5^th graders putting soap in a teacher's water.
• Internet threats of violence similar to Columbine.
• Public fight which attracted Jesse Jackson after students were expelled for 2 years.
• Boot camps which turn into camps where kids are abused in the name of tough love.
• Kids being charged with possession of a weapon without giving credence to the student's story.
• A teen who is so distraught and alienated following the death of a parent that he turns to self-destruction by violence similar to what the media has shown as the way.
• A boy who is so afraid of the system that he doesn't tell of his mother's death.
• A child who tells the teacher of her mother's death and isn't believed.

Reasons for breakdown:

• Disconnection between parents under stress (sometimes self-imposed) and children who fill the void by parenting themselves or turning to less desirable leaders who offer to fill the void
• Disconnection within the community between schools, teachers, families and children.
• Media influence
• Patterns of speech and behavior which may appear acceptable in a brief program, but which point the way to a breakdown of communications in the real world.
• Media images which glorify violence and degradation as opposed to the devastating consequences in real life.
• Shortened attention span which studies show roughly corresponds to time between commercials.

• Societal stress from increasing instability

Jobs

Lack of a living income for many

Divorce

• Lack of sufficient acceptable outlets for youth free time

• Athletics which, if they aren't becoming more violent, are easily viewable by everyone including those who may be less discriminating about emulating the violence
• Music which incites anger, blame, revenge, disrespect of others and of values
• Hero worship without discrimination
• Media and public disrespect for the "office" as well as for the "person" holding the office
• Individuals in public life being held to a higher level of accountability than the accusers, and usually for the accusers' personal benefit
• Public personages who seem to believe they are above respect for commonly held standards of values