by Klaus Rohrich
January 17, 2005
Last weekend I was driving through the parking lot of a shopping mall and noted a young mother attempting to keep her son from running out into the roadway. The boy who was maybe five-years-old darted off the sidewalk just to be nabbed by his mom, as he was about to have an unfortunate meeting with an automobile. as the woman grabbed the boy, the boy began hitting and punching her, while she escorted him across the roadway to her parked vehicle.
What I found interesting was not the fact that the little boy was physically attacking his mother, but her reaction to it. She walked serenely on, paying no attention whatsoever to the blows the little boy was raining upon her, as if this was a perfectly normal occurrence. It’s interesting to note that more and more parents are allowing their children to be violent toward them, or to be unruly in public, as if somehow restraining them were an infringement on their children’s rights.
How often have you been in a supermarket or other public venue where young children are totally out of control and the parents behave as if their tantrums were perfectly normal? In some cases they are even rewarded for their poor behaviour by being offered a candy or cookie as a bribe to behave.
at the risk of sounding like a typical old fogey, it seems to me that parents no longer have the will or desire to teach their children what is or isn’t appropriate behaviour. It seems that modern parents are much more interested in being friends with their children than with providing them with a well-rounded set of social and moral standards. Consequently, the parents are loath to be critical of, let alone prepared to discipline unruly behaviour.
This sends a rather quirky message to children as they enter school and encounter the current "zero tolerance" policies toward violence that seem to be all the rage these days. It could be a real shock to children that have had free rein during their formative years who are now being kicked out of school for striking their peers.
What is interesting to me is the contrast between the attitudes of the schools and the attitudes of the courts toward children. While the schools are staunchly intolerant of behaviour that involves physical violence, the courts somehow seem to be able to excuse it at every turn.
The new Criminal Youth justice act (CYJa), which replaced the Young Offenders act in april 2003, actually constrains judges from sentencing violent young offenders to prison time. Instead they are given community service or probation. The new act is so flawed that it has no provision for dealing with young offenders that do escape from prison until they have managed to escape three or more times.
as a society we are failing our children because we do not accept the responsibility of teaching them to be caring, productive members of society. While I am not an advocate of corporal punishment, the laws that prohibit parents from spanking their children aren’t doing the children, the parents or society any favours because they deprive the parents of the responsibilities of parenting. So children grow up in a family atmosphere of general permissiveness that does nothing to teach children what is or isn’t socially acceptable.
Then we send them to schools where in their eagerness to avoid lawsuits, school boards impose bizarrely arbitrary "zero tolerance" rules that results in kindergarten children being expelled for pointing a finger at other children in imaginary gunplay, or in having a grade two student arrested and charged with sexual harassment when a young boy expresses his ardour for a fellow student by attempting to buss her. Instead of taking incidents such as these and turning them into teaching opportunities, our schools choose to totally wash their hands of the matter.
as teenagers, many kids are suspended or expelled for violent behaviour, even when it is committed in self-defense against bullies. When young people are finally arrested and charged with a crime, they all know that nothing will happened to them, as they are protected by the CYJa, and it seems that the kids know the act better than most judges.
Laws such as the CYJa and the abrogation of parents’ responsibility for teaching their children right from wrong are yielding tragic consequences. How else could a 16-year-old boy and his friends think it’s okay to beat and torture a younger brother to death and then attempt to kill the stepfather, as happened last fall in Toronto? How else can a 15-year-old kill another young man by smashing him in the head with a billiard ball stuffed in a sock and be sentenced to one day, as happened in Winnipeg last year? In another case, a 17-year-old fractured another boy’s skull with a rock and the presiding judge was upbraided for imposing a six-month sentence on the perpetrator by an appeals court.
Doing the right thing is not easy. On the contrary, doing the right thing is often a lot more difficult because it demands bravery and resolve in the face of adversity. Whether it’s a parent who doesn’t’ want to "hurt a young child’s feelings" by strongly indicating that being physically violent toward parents or others is wrong, or a school that chooses to suspend or expel a child for inappropriate actions, no matter what the circumstances, or a law that essentially protects violent criminal behaviour by refusing carte blanche to incarcerate those young offenders found guilty, the end result is the dissolution of societal norms that have served to preserve our civilization for thousands of years. and while it may alleviate the responsibility of imposing consequences from parents, schools, or the justice system, in the long run, it isn’t doing our children any favours.
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