Columnist Sandra Thompson: Children are too free these days

SANDRA THOMPSON is vice president/associate editor of the Las Vegas SUN. She can be reached at 259-4025 or on the Internet at [email protected]

STOP, look and listen.

If we do that, perhaps we can put an end to this horrifying string of school shootings and rising youth violence.

Let's ITALICS stop ITALICS what we're doing and reflect on what we want our children to be. What kind of home and environment do they need? Compare it with the kind of home and environment we have created. How much time do we spend with them? How is that time spent?

Let's take a good, long ITALICS look ITALICS at ourselves and our children. Do we provide them the support and direction they need?

Let's ITALICS listen ITALICS to our children. What are they really saying? Do we understand what they are going through? If a teenager acts out, is it just hormones or a cry for help?

In the days and weeks ahead, as this nation has had to do too many times in the last few months, psychologists, educators, police, government officials and parents will dissect the Springfield, Ore., school shootings.

As of this writing, little is known about the 15-year-old boy or his home life. Early reports are that his family was caring and supportive. But the boy apparently had problems and may have been on medication.

What drives kids to go to such horrifying extremes?

Hunter Hurst, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, thinks children today have too much freedom and parents are abdicating their responsibilities as stewards of values.

Although he couldn't address specifics in the Springfield school shootings, he spoke in general terms about the alarming rise in youth violence.

"Children are in a different state today," Hurst says. "They have more freedom than ever, and those freedoms have grown rapidly. There is a lack of adult supervision and attention.

"In the last two decades, we've unzipped everything, including the backstage of adult life. Are kids ready to handle this?"

Hurst says children's capacity for abstract thought is diminished. Abstract thought is required to recognize cause and effect, action and consequence. Some kids can't make the connection between crime and consequences.

Having more freedom means more choices. It also means the freedom not to develop a social conscience -- and the freedom to make bad choices.

"Put all of these together and you have more responsibility at a younger age with no more innate capacity to handle it," Hurst says.

"There is a diminished social conscience, which comes partly from greatly reduced reading. We seek information, not knowledge. You don't hear of wisdom anymore."

Hurst says that once you free a people, you "can never bring them back to where they were before they were freed."

"We freed children. That alone is enough to ensure the family will never be as it was," he says.

Hurst says we are "defaulting all over the place in the rearing of our children."

"You can't make me love my kids. You can't make me put their needs before mine," he says. "We used to have values that grew out of a culture that made us feel guilty if we didn't do that. That's all gone.

"Our spirit is floating badly because we're not anchored anywhere in terms of a system of beliefs."

Children are under a lot of pressure today, which some adults can't understand. They look at kids who have no "responsibilities," who get everything they want, who don't have to grind out a daily living, and all they have to do is go to school. So where's the pressure, they ask.

Hurst says "mountains of pressure are heaped on kids. The more opportunities we give them, the more pressure there is because there are more choices."

Hurst sees some similarities among the recent school shootings in Pearl, Miss.; Paducah, Ky.; Jonesboro, Ark.; and Springfield. "There was all kinds of insensitivity to human beings," he says. "The school system hasn't learned what the post office hasn't learned. You can't cause incredible shame without raising a reaction or even violence.

"There are identifiable physical symptoms when you touch the right rejection trigger."

Hurst says it appears the shooters in these cases were begging for "someone to look at them with something besides objective disdain."

He says there have been as many students and teachers killed in inner-city schools as in the recent incidents, but they don't get the media attention. The difference is that these latest tragedies have occurred in salt-of-the-Earth communities that are middle-class enclaves.

"In the long run, this (youth violence) will pass, but it's symbolic now of where our children are in terms of coping with the stress of living," Hurst says.

He couldn't imagine himself as a child hitting an adult, much less killing one. "I wasn't free and my generation wasn't free," he says.

Speaking at a news conference after the Springfield shootings, the school superintendent said in a firm voice: "This is not a school problem."

She's right; it's society's problem.

Yet schools are a good starting point from which we can evolve into a better, less-violent society, Hurst says.

Schools are the center of socialization for our children. They are the modern stewards of our values, Hurst says.

"No law requires you to have a family. No law requires you to go to church or have a job. But the law requires you to go to school," he says.

Schools, he says, are the legally sanctioned social institutions that have primary responsibility for the care and nurturing of children. He's not advocating that schools take over the role of parents, but he sees a need for more resources in the school to focus on human behavior and individuals -- and not minds.

To stress the importance of schools, he believes teachers should be one of the highest-paid professions. "We love education, but we don't treat our schools like we do."

But when all is said and done, the emphasis must be on the family.

"They must have someone to hang in there with them," Hurst says.

They must have an anchor.

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