Behind Teen Violence

In the aftermath of yet another teen shooting, the chant of parental blame remains the same only louder. Our only recourse as parents of troubled teens is to get loud ourselves. If we parents are going to be held liable, sued by the families of the victims, disparaged in the media and fined by our local judicial systems then someone somewhere is going to have to give us the tools we need to prevent our children from becoming menaces to society. Are we going to get tax breaks for all the detective equipment such as wire taps, hidden video cameras, and polygraph machines or are these going to be covered under our feeble health insurance policies which seldom provide more than minimal counseling services?

I know hundreds of parents of troubled teens. Each and everyone of them are law abiding, caring, concerned parents. Many of them hold deep religious convictions, all of them know right from wrong and all of them have endeavored to teach their children values. What we all have in common is a society which fails us on many different levels as we struggle to raise our troubled children.

We can't get the most basic loopholes in our already weak gun control laws tightened. We can't get help from our Juvenile Justice departments until AFTER our children have been arrested, and more often than not our insurance companies will only pay for minimal counseling, if they cover psychiatric benefits at all. We have to hire lawyers or become experts in the legal field ourselves just to know what disciplinary measures we can take without CPS descending upon our homes and charging us with abuse or neglect. I can only imagine the reaction of the current administration if we asked for research dollars to be spent searching for the cause of the brain malfunctions which are most likely to be at the root of all these problems. No, our current administration is busily taking up the popular chant "Parents are just going to have to start teaching their kids some morals." Why? Because that way it's someone elses problem. No thought required, no tax dollars spent.

Even though it is often next to impossible to find the proper help or support when we know our teens have deep emotional problems, we are the lucky ones. We are the ones that caught the clue before it was entirely too late. Other parents are not so lucky. Even the most normal teen can lie and manipulate with ease. A teen with dark emotional problems can present a perfectly normal side which can fool parents and professionals alike. In an article titled "Inside the Columbine High Investigation" at Salon.com http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/0... Division Chief Kiekbusch is quoted as stating the following in regard to the teen shooters, Klebold and Harris;

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