It's 5pm, Do You Know Where the Parents Are?

The last few months have been horrible for youth violence across this country. Every time I cut on the television or read a paper, I'm amazed about the depravity with which some of our youth inflict pain. First, there was the beating of honor student Derrion Albert in Chicago; then, in Florida, 15-year old Michael Brewer was set ablaze by a group of his classmates for reporting the theft of his father's bicycle by one of the teens. The teens allegedly laughed after setting him ablaze. Then, 19-year old Demitry Jackson was murdered by a 15-year old whose mom stopped the car and allowed her son to shoot Jackson and then drove him away from the scene after the shooting.

When you hear about these crimes, it's easy to say "what is wrong with kids today". But truthfully, that's the wrong question. We should be asking "what is wrong with the parents?" Honestly, parents, on the whole, we are failing our kids. Many of them don't accept personal responsibility for their own behavior, or have a work ethic or value education. We haven't taught them that appearance matters or even that life matters.

I wish instead of sending billions to banks and corporations or focusing on climate change, that we work on the real crisis affecting our country: lack of parenting skills. As a country we need to invest more in parenting education because good parenting is more important than any punishment or deterrent measure we can throw at our youth. Truthfully, somewhere along the way we've forgotten how to parent. Many days when I sit and listen to the news or go into the schools or just walk the community and witness all the chaos, I wonder: "it's 5pm do we know where our parents are?" Most often, the answer is no.

Our parents, especially our young parents, need to be taught how to support the emotional and social development of their children. They need to be taught how to invest in their education, how to create healthy and stable homes, how to have conversations with their children, how to love and hug them and how to teach them personal responsibility.

Doing this, I'm convinced, will yield a much higher rate of return for our country than anything else we do to stabilize our country. Parenting is our foundation - it is our core- and without it we remain on shaky ground.