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Another murder, another teen life snuffed out. And we're all wondering what we can do. First and easiest is to point fingers in blame. That won't cut it any more.

It's not enough to say it's that parents' responsibility.

To be sure, there is a role that parents are intended to play. Our model of society depends on parents to accomplish the socialisation of children they brought into the world. We expect parents to teach

their children manners and respect and how to behave. The tragedy is that there is no manual for being a parent; no universal list of "dos and don'ts", no catalogue of "how tos" and "what ifs". No warrantee or repair manual. And the expectations that society has for what the family should deliver are often a challenge for the most conscientious and well-prepared parents; and impossible for those parents whose own parents weren't able to do the job right.

And sometimes, the parents do everything right, but some quirk in a child resists even the best of parenting.

With all that in mind, it is unfair and counter-productive to

castigate parents of today's troubled children, some of whom wouldn't be able to pass the "parenting 101" exam. Unless we plan to do something to help them.

We really do need to adopt some aspect of a "nanny state", not in giving handouts but in giving out skills so that handouts become less and less necessary.

If we look at the students in all levels of local schools we can

observe the increasing incidents of bullying and other precursors to serious violent behaviour. This says to me that without intervention, the violence we're seeing in the deaths of four youngsters since Boxing Day IS GOING TO CONTINUE, AND INCREASE. The next generation of bullies is on the horizon.

We need several layers of intervention. The Mirrors type programme is attempting to deal with youth of a certain age who have already been engaged in serious acting out. That's good. We need similar intervention to cover nursery, primary, middle and high schools, and school-leavers.

Intervention needed

We need intervention to infuse parenting skills in every teenager,

especially males. As we seem to create an expectation in just about all our youth that becoming a parent is a normal part of their lives, then we had better deliberately prepare every last one of them for that role.

We also need remedial intervention for existing parents whose product isn't making the grade. Of course this needs to be done with a sensitive authority, not a heavy-fisted "full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes" approach.

We aren't much used to community-wide social change actions so this needs to be done diplomatically, but thoroughly. How we approach it will be even more important than what we do. My gut feeling is to pursue several different models of parenting skills - all as pilot studies to start - with a disciplined research approach to determine and measure outcomes.

We also need to monitor and make corrections in the behaviour of our adults. We must recognise the duty each of us has as a role model for others. If we resort to shouting, name-calling, put-downs or physical violence to resolve conflicts between ourselves and others, then we become reinforcers and promoters of violence as a legitimate relationship tool. This is precisely the message we DO NOT want to be sending our youth.

We need a non-blameful way to remind each other - citizens, guest workers, business and political leaders - that, as Gandhi said: "We must be the change we want to see in the world." That's our challenge.[[In-content Ad]]

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