"Without Love"

Surfing for news this morning I came across this startling article: 5-year old Handcuffed By Police For Tantrum. Huh?

The almost daily incredulities that are going down in schools these days make you to wonder just what the hell is going on...are the schools at fault, are the parents to blame or can we just slough off this massive problem to the decline in cultural values?

My friend and mentor, Ron Dart, recently wrote an excellent piece, titled "Without Love,"
on the turmoil going on in schools and the lives of our children...sometimes very young children.

What do you think about an urban school district that, in the first three months of school, had 19 reports of weapons confiscated and 42 assaults by Kids. That’s awful, you say.

What a shame, you say. Yes it is. But that’s not the half of it: That was in kindergarten and first grade.

Ron goes on to cite a Time Magazine piece covering unruly gradeschoolers:

Claudia Wallace, writing in Time magazine, reported this from Philadelphia. It would be terrible if this were the case in only one city. It is not. According to some authorities, violence among kids is getting a younger and younger face. At first, it was high schools that had to have special schools for disruptive youngsters. Then it was the intermediate schools. Now it is elementary schools that have to have special schools for unmanageable kids. Something terrible is happening to our youngest kids.
I could give you all the statistics. I could give you examples of bad kids that would curl your hair. But I am not sure you would grasp the significance of what I am saying. Claudia Wallace cited a an example of a three year old who took a fork and stabbed another child in the forehead. At one school in Fort Worth, a youngster was asked to put a toy away. The kid began to scream. She was told to calm down, but then knocked over a desk, kicked it, dumped out the contents of all the drawers. And then things began to really get bad. Still shrieking, she stood up and began throwing books at her terrified classmate who had to be ushered to safety.

No one who is associated with the problem doubts for a moment that something really bad is going on. Why is it happening? What is causing this?

An experienced elementary school administrator in Miami, Karen Bentley, said something piercingly simple: “Kids aren’t getting enough lap time.”

Those words leaped off the page at me, because they pulled together a broad range of impressions about troubled youth. Kids aren’t getting enough lap time. One teacher says simply that a lack of socialization at home is responsible for the wild behavior. What we are getting is a kid whose body is six years old, but has the emotional response of a three year old. “Imagine a child with the terrible twos in a six year old body,” he said.

It is true that aggressive behavior in children is absolutely linked to the violence in movies and on television. But that is only a part of the story, and not the most important part at that. Children are dying for a simple lack of lap time. Their lives are being ruined because they grow up without learning how to love and be loved.

When kids can't get love and positive attention at home, they will often seek a very poor substitute for it elsewhere:

They were good kids from good families, but there was a common thread that ran through all the interviews. The kids were starving for attention and affection. Their upwardly mobile parents were often divorced, always busy, always neglecting the emotional needs of their children.

One girl I will never forget, spoke to the interviewer: “Sex sucks,” she said, “It’s just something for the guys.” She was expressing something reflected in interviews with other girls as well. She was the one who put it succinctly. Then why do the girls do it? That’s easy enough. They do it for the attention, for the touching, for the love. At least something they think is like love. These kids had managed to get into their teens before their lives started to come apart. Hearing their stories, I don’t know how they made it that far.

Have you ever noticed two people you really don’t like very much holding hands? Maybe putting their arm around each other and leaning affectionately on the shoulder. Have you ever been surprised to learn that someone you don’t even like is lovable to someone else, that there is something lovable in that person that has completely eluded you?

What is it about love? I suppose evolutionary theory would connect it to sex, but if there is one thing that was clear to me in watching the Lost Children of Rockdale County, it was this: love and sex are two entirely different things. Sex does not explain love. It may explain initial attraction or it may not, but it does not explain love.

If you've got kids or observe what's going on in schools and society in general, you'll appreciate this piece. Please be sure to check the entire essay.