What is happening to our children?

When I woke up this morn­ing I wasn’t really sure what I would blog about. I started my daily rou­tine and my mind drifted to my chil­dren who were still fast asleep and I thought about how grate­ful I am for their being safe and sound and in warm beds. That instantly made me think of Derrion Albert the sixteen-​year-​old boy bru­tally beaten to death by a group of other chil­dren. At that point it truly dawned on me. These were chil­dren who beat another human being to death. To death. And it star­tled me. What is hap­pen­ing to our chil­dren?

Of course, this isn’t the first time chil­dren have been respon­si­ble for the death of another child or an adult. The other night I watched an episode of 48 Hours that fea­tured the story of Eric Smith who killed another child that was on his way to a recre­ation pro­gram. The offender was thir­teen and the vic­tim Derrick Robie was four. The young mur­derer claimed he was the tar­get of repeated bul­ly­ing by other chil­dren as well as abused at home and said he wanted to hurt instead of always being the one get­ting hurt. Isn’t that a sad state of affairs?

Obviously the most noto­ri­ous crimes com­mit­ted by chil­dren was that of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s shoot­ing spree of Columbine High School killing thir­teen and wound­ing twenty-​one. Progressively though crimes like this by chil­dren have become less of a rar­ity and more com­mon­place than ever before. As a child I had never heard of another child mur­der­ing any­one. In fact, my biggest fear was hav­ing to meet some­one after school at three o’clock or dis­obey­ing the com­mand to not step inside an invis­i­ble cir­cle that a peer had drawn around him­self.

Today, even a child car­ry­ing out daily activ­i­ties are con­stantly accosted with vio­lence. The abil­ity to walk home from school for most chil­dren is a rite of pas­sage, but now it may cause them to lose their life as in the case of the young Mr. Albert who was walk­ing home from a local com­mu­nity cen­ter.

Many times in these sto­ries we can’t help but to ask where were the adults or par­ents? That’s a good ques­tion. In gen­eral, when chil­dren are left unsu­per­vised they can get into all kinds of mis­chief. But in the case of Derrion’s mur­der there was seem­ingly no adult super­vi­sion or inter­ven­tion. So when the ques­tion is asked where are the adults? I mean the kind of adult par­tic­i­pa­tion in a youth’s life that would keep a child from going down a mur­der­ous road. This would have to hap­pen at home first.

In this world with its mount­ing prob­lems as the par­ents of these chil­dren we need to work as effec­tively as we can to ensure that our chil­dren truly appre­ci­ate life. Not only their own life which will help them avoid reck­less behav­ior, but also the lives of oth­ers.

So as par­ents even though we know we have out­side forces work­ing against us (peer pres­sure, vio­lent games, and music to name a few) we have to do all that we pos­si­bly can to pro­vide a lov­ing and nur­tur­ing envi­ron­ment for our chil­dren even if we our­selves never had one. That doesn’t mean that vio­lence by chil­dren will stop though because based on my per­sonal belief sys­tem I believe the atti­tudes we see in our chil­dren reflect the times we are liv­ing in and will only esca­late, but are we doing what we can indi­vid­u­ally to stop what is hap­pen­ing to our chil­dren?

Thanks for read­ing,