Juvenile Delinquency - Who is Responsible?

Canada is introducing a law that makes parents responsible for juvenile infractions.

One can say that the buck stops with the parents.
But the State also bears responsibility.

The problem here is that most parents are themselves the product of a dysfunctional upbringing by parents who were also the product of a dysfunctional upbringing…
The problem goes all the way back to the start of the industrial revolution, when people came off the farms and congregated in cities.
That move broke up the family unit.
The parents ended up on the mass production lines
The kids were stuffed into crowded classrooms and indoctrinated to chase after the buck.
Family values went out the window

So now we are left with Catch 22.
Parents don’t know how to parent.
I was one of them and have a dysfunctional 1st son to prove it.

I broke the cycle 2nd time round.
I said to hell with the system, retired to the desert on a tiny income and devised my own home-school curriculum. One that put family values and personal ethics first and let academics look after itself.

It has worked perfectly.
I have eight kids.
All 1st class self-tutored A grade scholars
Their personal integrity is 100%
Not one black sheep
I have never had a sleepless night.

Solution for the state.
Reestablish the family unit
Support both parents in the home
Let them educate and produce model citizens

The industrial revolution is over
Machines can man the production lines
Developing nations need production lines
that our out-sourcing brings them

That solves the unemployment problem
Gives graduates a secure spot on the work place
and helps foreign relations

It also puts and end to office romances and adultery
Brings down the divorce rate
Its win/win/win
Especially for the kids

The source of national power
is sound family values
The source of national wealth
is creative graduates

The waste of national power
is endless policing

Teach the kids ethics
THAT is the source of creative intelligence

That is the REAL value of the GNP.

MM with the industrial revolution came the financial ability to be autonomous from the traditional 3 generation family. Chasing the buck is in our nature, but the morality that our western societies had when the majority of the population followed the tennants of Christianity was certainly higher than at present.

Taking the kids away from the urban peer group and insulating them certainly works, but along with ideals teach them about the foibles of human nature that they will have to confront once emancipated from their home enviroment.

I don’t think you can take full marks as you controlled the enviroment that existed for the nuturing, thereby mitigating threats to the outcome.

To achieve this end you relocated away from the urban climes and dropped out. This is not possible on a grand scale

The dream a philosophically sophisticated society evolving from the industrial revolution has been the line used to sell in all technologies. I example the business communications revolution. From the advent of pagers through to the mobile phone we were told that the increased efficiency that instant contact would bring would in turn give us more leisure time. My experience has been that it gives us more time to do more business, and we are still short on leisure or contemplation time.

MM, you are taking responsibility away from the parents and foisting it on a thing. Gov’ts are not creatures or beings they are things, machines. As such it lacks the empathy needed to raise responsible humans. The parental shoulders must bear the burden of raising responsible adults. The Gov’t cannot.

I am not putting down the economic need to move from a Bronze Age farm-based system to an Iron Age of national industrialization. That was an essential step in the evolution of consciousness. That move from an oral-based communication system of management, to a national focus of authority required that an authoritarian religious Scripture had to be in introduced. It ensured that the farmer became not just a craftsman, but also an extremely conscientious literate one.

What I am saying is that there had to be price to be paid - the break of the family unit and its natural parental ability to rear kids who retained the essential family values that define the national character. That has been gradually eroded while industrialization flourished.

I am now saying that era of human development has served its purpose and has to be gradually phased out and let machines and undeveloped nations take over the load. The advanced nations that initially forged industry must now be allowed to return the education of the child to its natural healthy base. There is enough unemployment to justify supporting the home and paying both the parents to teach. (The father is an essential males presence, especially in the home workshop and garden.}

As it stands now, the state is only achieving 1% excellence in the classroom. The drop our rate and cheating is pandemic. We can do far better than that at home. We have to get the kids out of the crowded classroom and its one-sided indoctrination system that makes then think chasing the buck is the ONLY worthwhile challenge in life.

All of human dysfunction comes streaming right into our living room over the TV and the internet. I let them watch everything and anything without restriction. It might be virtual, but they get the point. They know what naughty is.

Yeah, but I am training soldiers that can handle themselves whenever it does come. In the process I am saving the state seven grand per kid per year - and putting a well-trained worker on the line who will give of their best…

I had to do that because my method of throwing away the books until puberty was illegal. Any home anywhere with loving parents at hand is better than any state classroom. And with the HeartStart system, any parents with only the basics of an education can achieve the same excellent results I did. Each child is born with 100,000 generations of ancestral smarts already built in. Good personal ethical encouragement from a loving parent taps directly into that vast ancestral reservoir - especially of you emphasis estate pride and family pride. By puberty the child is rearing to go and conquer the wolrld all by themselves. You do not have to drag them to the text books They love to self-tutor themselves, Surfing the net for information comes naturally to them. They love education. not hate it.

The dream of utopia is still alive. Man will not slave into eternity. Right now we still need full employment operating every piece of technology we have in order to accomplish the next phase of our evolution. The name of the new game is planet management and our first task is a massive clean-up job. Sustainable global stewardship has the potential of perpetual motion - using the planet’s own gravity, atmosphere and ocean energies to drive the machines.

MM, I appreciate the dream that all nations may work cohesively towards bringing back what we have degraded, but it will be out of shear necessity. Once we have fixed the effect we are still left with the cause. The same social conscience that evoled to rectify the problem (more than likely from necessity, did I mention that) will evolve again to the “short term gain mentality” when the catastrophies are a memory. You have more faith in the genetic stock than I do.

Back to the thread. One of mine went off the rails for no valid reason in their mid teens. The last straw for me was a response to his mother along the lines of “so and so was put in a boys home and he said it was cool” . At that point it was ten in the evening and my teen had just arrived home from school with poor quality lies and explanations. I grabbed him and we drove to a juvenile justice correctional center 20 minutes away. I rang the nightbell, told the officer of my problem, and he led us in through two sets of locked doors to an office area. He asked my son not to speak as he asked me questions. He then asked my son if I had lied in any of my answers, no was obvious. He phoned for a female officer and they asked if they could take my son in for a private intervew, yes. Fourty minutes later they came out and asked if my son could accompany them on a tour , sure.

When he emerged he was back to his old stubborn but loveable persona. The dehumanising aspect of the institution scared him, the lack of rights. Not to mention the inmates who called to him through the perspex as he toured the center. Ben the officer who greeted me gave me a full briefing on the tour and my teens reaction to it. MM this coupled with the fact that he knows I will not allow any member of my family to bring on going heartache to another, I would exclude the culprit as a last resort, and he knew it was not a hollow promise. I was lucky, I found something that scared him and he had the intelligence to understand the ramifications of his behaviour.

The 20th century advent of the career woman has changed the mother and child dynamic, as for dad he was always gone during daylight hours. But I allude to the third generation that is not an integral part of a modern childs upbringing, the grandparents. They were a part of the household 24/7 up till the early 20th century. The discipline and reasoning that the grandparents bring to the social makeup of a child is obvious and relevant when assessing the social maturity of a child or youth. Re the introduction of literacy for the ongoing plans of the Patricians I think it was more a supply and demand thing. Public (not religious) schools are a product of the industrial revolution and Guttenberg has a lot to answer for.

We have become too sophisticated for devolution, the only answer is de populate and start again. MM you really do dream, but you live your lifestyle so there is a credence in it, sort of.

The whole conceptions is backwards…

This will just give kids the idea that they can commit crime and not deal with the consequences…

I don’t believe in punishment, so as a rehabilitative technique, punishing the parents as an incentive to make them better parents is just a bad idea. Obviously the kid who comitted the crime need the rehabilitation, and punishing the parent will only create negativity between the child and adult.

In America they cut funding to schools who are below standard. These schools fail and go under…

They do this thinking it will stimulate them to work harder, to get more money, they problem is that they cannot reach par because other schools have so much funding.

They say these schools failing are a good thing, and the kids can just go to a different better school…

But what happens in the few years leading up to the schools failure? what of those kids who receive sub par educations before the school is laid to rest?

Competition disgusts me as a solution for society. It only helps the elite.

Hey MM, some questions:

I agree with your feelings, but think you assume that Joe the Plumber is as brave as you obviously are/have been. He’s not, neither’s his wife.

Saddening.

W the bible line about the sins of the father visited upon the son in reverse, ie the parents doing the time for the siblings crime is social worker wank. Accepting personal responsibility for your actions is the basis for all interpersonal relationships. Would you want to associate with some one who will let an innocent take responsibility for their mis deeds.

A simplistic observation, not worth espousing.

The term I use is evolutionary imperative.
That has been the case since the end of the Stone Age.
As human population explosions impact on regional environments, so they are forced to develop new technologies and new social contracts in order to meet with new challenges.

The cause is constant, the drive to evolve ever higher states of consciousness.

The end of each old age always drags on beyond the point it should/. We cling to out-dated customs even when the environment tells us we should move on to the next phase.

You miss the point. The internet is the new classroom. The Iron Age school classroom is redundant. The parent and child have the same access to data as any professional teacher. Returning to the home environment is a question of sound emotional health. The schools are killing creative motivation. Without that we are dead meat. My theory has nothing to do with devolution. It is all about moving UPWARDS into the Nuclear Age.

Solution for the state.
Reestablish the family unit
Support both parents in the home

2 million home school families have already proved they get better results than the state. There will always be some level of cheaters. About 4% .
Why should we always consider such a tiny negative fraction to be the reason we do not do anything positive?
That is insane.
The money we spend policing and protecting ourselves from that tiny fraction is insane?
They are all dysfunctional people seeking negative attention.
The best therapy is to ignore them and get on with our lives.
They are pests - like mosquitoes.

Let them educate and produce model citizens

You have not paid full attention to my posts. The parent only needs to be loving and pay attention to developmental ethics - sharing, chores, personal, hygiene. share family and national history etc etc. Basic stuff. The child will educate itself

MM, your premise is clearer now, thankyou. Although… you are taking for granted that the population as a whole will home school, and to moniter this a system of registration or participation would have to be enacted to assure a large percentage of the population gets an education. What of the curriculum, who sets it? You are not unfettering the learning process of anything, your just moving it to an enviroment that insulates the student from social interaction. Yes I understand that they will have mum and dad on hand 24/7 but they won’t be living the substantial portion of their lives with their parents, it will be with others, perhaps better equipped socially than the shut in student.

I am too old and cranky to take anything for granted.
No child can live at home and not be educated
It starts before weaning and never ends.
especially of you make them do chores
gardening and workshop
video games get them intersested in the electric media
They will want to surf the net by puberty.
So I tell them,
teach yourself to read then you little bugger
I am too busy washing your clothes and cooking your food
If you have any questions
that are not on google
ask me.

My kids grabbed First Grade books “The cat sat on the mat” at puberty
I had already taught them to chant the alphabet and how to do mental arithmetic
They asked a few question about vowels and syllables and that was that
they were writing sophisticated essays three months later.
I have posted one on this forum somewhere.
They self-tutored themselves through the all the standard school text books within 3 years and matriculated at 16

The lack of heavy-handedness is responsible.

Juvenile delinquency is conceptually bullshit in my opinion.

This is what you need to do:

1.) I don’t know if this is the case anywhere except the United States, but once you hit the age of eighteen, all of your misdemeanors and quite a few felonies go away completely from your record, they just don’t exist if they were committed before you were eighteen.

That law needs to go.

2.) These, “delinquents,” need to not be stored separately with all of the other child delinquents. They need to go to general adult prison populations like everyone else. I think that the kids under eighteen should have their own cells, holding areas and shower times, but aside from that, let them work their asses off and eat in the cafeteria with the adults. These kids want to rob people, vandalize shit, deal drugs and sell guns like adults then they should be punished like adults.

3.) The delinquents also get fines for the crimes they commit which are then forced to be paid by the parents. Maybe a parent can get the kid to pay the fine to avoid correctional time, maybe the parent can’t. I suppose the choice belongs to each individual parent, but when my kid grows up I am not bailing his ass out if I know he was guilty of something.

4.) Correctional time for dumb shit like underage smoking and underage alcohol consumption needs to go. Those are stupid crimes to get punished for and the kid does not deserve the punishment. A kid is ready to drink or smoke cigarettes when he/she is ready to drink and/or smoke cigarettes, leave that for the parents to decide.

5.) Automatic Emancipation:

This is a little off of the topic, but I think that if a kid under eighteen willingly gets pregnant or gets someone pregnant the parent (s) should have the choice to have their kid emancipated and that kid becomes a legal adult. I think this business where these kids are going off and having sex and having kids and then living with their parents is bullshit.

I saw something on Oprah once (I don’t watch Oprah, but I was waiting for a Doctor’s Appointment) a couple of years ago that had this one fifteen year-old girl on there (who had sex voluntarily, by her own admission) crying and all of that happy shit because she wanted to be treated like a regular kid at school. Perhaps my opinion is a little extreme on this one, but I think the little girl forfeited, “Regular kid,” rights whenever her and her boyfriend got pregnant. I mean, she didn’t even have it hard or anything like that. She lived with her Mom (Neither of whom were employed) she went to high school and took a full day’s classes, then she went home and did her homework and watched her baby.

She’s doing all of this bitching about how she never has any time to talk on the phone or hang out with her friends…blah, blah, blah…

Kids these days piss me off, and I’m not even that old!!! I don’t recall being an irresponsible little prick when I was under eighteen. Did I drink, yeah, smoke cigarettes, sure, but I had a goddamn job (two, at one point) went to all of my classes and took some goddamn responsibility for all of my actions.

I’m really curious
why magnet
is now typing
in stanzas.

MM, my eldest is entering uni this year, and in the last two years of high school he did half of his subjects as an external student as the subjects he chose conflicted with each other class time wise. I had my doubts as to the focus he would put to these subjects given that time allocation was in his domain. But he surprised me with strong results across the board.

MM keep the old stuff to yourself…I am well seasoned not old. :slight_smile:

Pav, what of ADD, it is used as a blanket explanation for any social dysfunction exhibited by the young. I may also add that if you are to be socially inept, when your young is the time to do it. The pharmaceutical segment have got the educaters to thank for that little gold mine. Every teacher has become a clinitian, suggesting to parents that any cheeky student in need of discipline is a candidate for ADD medication. What we have to remenber about educaters is that the talented generate and the others teach.

ADD does not particularly interest me, regardless of any psychological problems an individual may have a certain degree of accountability for ones actions is still necessary. Perhaps if this ADD causes the individual to be completely out of control as it relates to their actions, then said individual should be committed instead. As it is now, the majority of the juvenile detention centers just lump the delinquents and the crazies together in the same place.

There is never a time for social ineptitude as I understand you to mean the term.

What the really “cheeky,” ones need is a good punch straight in the fucking mouth. Of course, that’s a crime now so we can’t hit our own kids. Of course, not every parent has to resort to violence and a parent that does have to is probably a poor parent. That being said, it is probably preferable to knock the kids around a bit then have them purse-lifting little old ladies.

It’s a delicate balance, and there is a point where discipline crosses that ever fine line into abuse, but still, it is impossible to physically discipline your kids now without risk of going to jail. I consider myself a good parent, though. My son is one year old (as of four days ago in fact) and I don’t do the whole baby-talk thing because I want to teach him to speak intelligently. I think that the best way to parent is to consistently explain to kids the potential effects of their actions not related to punishment, that’s my plan and I guess we’ll see how it works.

Don’t tell them what to do or not to do, just tell them what may or may not happen if they do something and let them perform their own cost/benefit analysis. Obviously, there will have to be punishment to a certain extent, but that would only be in serious situations.

The old cliche’, “Those who can do and those who can’t teach.”

Honestly, I don’t think that I agree with that. Obviously, there are going to be some crap teachers out there who are not fit to attempt to show someone how to tie their shoes, but I think the majority of teachers are ok. I’ve seen teachers in my time that give a lot more of a shit about some of the kids than their own parents do.

The other problem I have with the cliche’ is how can you teach someone to do something that you yourself do not know how to do? That just doesn’t make any sense. In that sense, you would only be attempting to teach them to do something, but not actually teaching them anything.

Pav, that was a mouth full, youre going to make a hell of a father figure.

Did you mean that in a good way or a bad way?

Either way, when you quote me, can you please quote my entire sentence from henceforward?

Neither the inflection does not purvey right or wrong, good or bad, it purveys a presence.

[/quote]
I did chop of some but because the verbiage was the point not the ongoing thought process, sorry.