(The Nationalist, February 2002)
In Dublin, children aged 12 to 14 years steal cars, joy-ride with them and then set them on fire. In Belfast, children of the same age go to the off-licence and come away with six-packs in plastic bags. When it’s over, the boys and girls disappear into the bushes and other things happen there. Teen magazines feature “Position of the Month”. In Carlow, similar children gather at a toilet block in a public park to buy drugs. The internet, which can be such a useful learning instrument, is a pornographic playground for some children.
I sometimes listen to discussions of these problems on radio or television. A common response is to blame schools, or the police, or local authorities, or the social welfare and child care system. The answers suggested are usually to allocate more resources in the form of money, personnel and administrative structures, with legislative back-up if needed. And that’s fair enough, too, as far as it goes.
But I have to admit that such discussions leave me with the feeling that they miss the point, the difficult point, of parental responsibility. Or maybe not so much miss it as refuse to face it.
I know, for example, of where residents of a housing estate have complained to neighbouring parents about vandalism or other forms of anti-social behaviour by their children, only to be met with a blank and solid wall of denial. ‘Our son (or increasingly, our daughter) wouldn’t do a thing like that’. In a few cases, the denial by parents went further, by threatening to take the complainants to court for defamation of character.
There is a Nigerian saying that ‘The neighbour who does not correct my child is a traitor’. That’s worth thinking about. By contrast, we have lost so much of what is termed “social capital”, or a sense of community, that such an attitude is not possible to us. The neighbour who dares to correct another’s child might risk a court case. Community is out; individualism is in. (Is individualism another word for selfishness?)
But if parents do not exercise their responsibilities by training their children in good conduct, and by correcting them when they do wrong, how are the children to learn? Children need to be taught; they don’t learn it all by themselves. It seems that there are not a few parents who let this go by default. The consequences are there to be seen, in small matters as when a toddler is allowed to rampage at will through a restaurant, or the more serious situations described above.
Society needs parents who do the job of parenting. The word parent is a verb as well as a noun.