Where I Stand -- Mike O'Callaghan: Making Mom a criminal

LET'S HAVE SOME new laws to punish the parents of young people who get into trouble. Sure, this kind of nonsense will handle all of the evils we watched take place at Columbine High School in Colorado. Yeah, it's a sure cure until some other school has the next outburst of violence that probably will happen not too many months or years in the future.

Put me down for opposing simple answers for complex problems, and the cause of this kind of violence is very complicated. There just isn't any single or simple answer for social problems in this or any other decade.

The popular suggestion to hammer the parents of troublemakers shows little thought and even less compassion. Also it can result in battering an already damaged family into submission and even beyond hopes for eventual recovery. Parents successfully raise six children, but the seventh gets into trouble with the law. So now we have the parents, already upset, arrested and their other six children suffer further embarrassment. Doesn't sound like a reasonable solution to anything.

We can't deny the responsibility parents have to properly raise their families. They must know what they are doing and when possible become part of their activities. Once they become aware that a child is drifting away and coming under the outside influence of bad company they must act. This action, unless done properly, can result in even greater distances separating children from their parents and siblings.

Most of us know how to act or where to seek out professional help, but some parents aren't this sophisticated. Are we to have criminal penalties because of these parenting shortcomings? I don't think so. Certainly we have better thinkers in Nevada than those states that have put criminal laws into effect in an attempt to make lawmakers feel better. Colorado is one of those 13 states and those 15 dead people won't be brought back by any criminal statute.

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, writing in USA Today, admits that demanding parental responsibility "is not to suggest that parents should be held legally responsible for every crime committed by their children under all circumstances. But we do need to reassert as a nation that parents have a profound impact on their children and their children's actions."

After this paragraph the governor, evidently still suffering from shock, drifts off and writes about all of the time the Columbine killers spent on the Internet without supervisors. Also he accurately points out that there wasn't any shortage of other warning signs the parents should have picked up on.

The editors of USA Today said it best when writing, "Gun controls aside, no set of criminal laws can even begin to respond to the yowl of madness heard at Columbine High last week. Indeed, attempting to solve bad parenting by criminalizing it isn't just a fool's goal. It's a hopeless one."

Wisely the editors do see value in holding parents responsible for civil statutes that can require paying restitution and participating in paying for treatment and probation problems. Here again we must be cautious with that family that has a troublemaker who has several good brothers and sisters. Juvenile workers and judges must have the money, programs and facilities to help them. It's counterproductive to take the family funds needed to care for the other children and have them directed to state and county treatment programs. Over a period of time this can only create even more and bigger problems for all of us.

Ellen Goodman, writing in the Los Angeles Times, points to parental responsibility, school responsibility and peer responsibility. Then she asks, "Do we criminalize parents as if they were the sole owner of the 18-year-old?" Goodman also ponders the pain now being suffered by the killers' parents and asks if the law can offer any stiffer penalty.

During my years working in the field of juvenile justice, I listened to crying mothers who asked what more they could do to get their children back on track. There aren't any simple answers, but I did the best I could to help them. Luckily I had many more successes than failures, but threatening the mothers was never part of my approach to helping the family.

The best contact the juvenile court and I had with the juvenile was the bond he or she had with the parent or parents. About the best way I can think of to destroy this contact would be to have a parent arrested. Then I would have two criminals to deal with and they could both view me as part of the system that punishes but does little to help.

The Columbine tragedy shouldn't be made even more painful by making more punitive laws that punish the wrong people.

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