We must find effective ways of disciplining young people

FRIDAY, MARCH 2: All of us, I believe, know of a young person in need of conduct intervention.

While the conduct may range from continuous back talking, and the blatant refusal to obey a command, to physical attacks — many adults are left shaking their heads in disbelief and despair about what to do.

We are all familiar with the saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ but most villagers, when they observe youngsters going off track, do absolutely nothing!  It is this complacency that has given rise to ‘youngsters gone wild.’

Children live what they learn and parents are their first teachers. The signs of misbehaviour can usually be clearly seen when a child is young but they are often overlooked by the adults responsible for them.

The toddler learns that when he says “no” and the adults laugh because it’s “cute” that the behaviour can be repeated with little consequence.

When a young person misbehaves in school this behaviour is justified when one parent verbalizes to the teacher in the presence of the child that the conduct is exactly as the other parent behaved as a youngster. So the young person feels validated to carry on.

When young people see the aggressiveness of their parents toward their teachers by way of body language or harsh words sometimes spoken in the home, the child learns that respect has no parameters.

Fighting parents, feuding neighbours, arguing leaders, negative interactions with technology, and exposure to inappropriate material can create an angry, volatile young person who refuses to accept behavioural limits – and worse yet continues to reject them when he is corrected. Without intervention these out of control young people become the adults in our community that we refer to as the gang members, the trouble makers, the misfits.  They are the ones people cheer about when they are sentenced to prison.

No structure

People fail to realize, in their rejoicing, that at some point in time, these same individuals will return to live among us. Left untreated, we end up with an individual worse off among us than he was when he was incarcerated. Each of these people, were once someone’s precious child but they were not given structure or discipline. Parents failed somewhere along the way and the whole community pays the price for it.

Very few people seem to want to talk directly about the root causes for misbehaviours.  People are afraid of “stepping on somebody’s toes”.  Many adults are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their job, their friends, or even their dignity if it’s their own offspring creating problems. Or have adults simply become afraid of the youth?

Is it because it’s just easier to pay lip service to the surface issues? Getting to the root of the problem and exposing the findings takes a lot of work. The revelations can be painful, embarrassing, and downright depressing to accept. But what’s going on under the surface of our ‘youth-gone-wild’ must be addressed and exposed for the sake of us all and parents must be forced to accept their rightful responsibility for their offspring.

While we debate the consequences of bad behaviour and whether to spank, suspend, jail, bail, send overseas, and so on, many of our young people have learned very well that adults will continue to act as they have for so long now – that they’ll do nothing!

On Monday, March 5, the topic on Generations will be about reaching out to troubled youth. Dedicated school counsellor and advocate for our young people, Anthony Peets, will be the featured special guest on the show.

• Shawnette Somner is the host of Generations, which airs on DeFontes’ Broadcasting Company’s 1450AM Gold, 7.30-9pm every Monday. Send an e-mail to the new address, [email protected] with comments, questions, or show ideas.  Call in live during the show on 295-1450.