Promoting Empathy With Your Teen

Parents held responsible...albeit an ugly notion, upon reading yourn article, my mind immediately went to questions of abolition and free will, and the notion of individual sovereignty. During the days of slavery, were slaveowners held responsible for the actions of their slaves? Before women's liberation, were husbands and fathers held accountable for their daughters' or wives' behavior? Is a dogowner responsible when his dog (treates as property by the law) bites another? Unless we are to change the rules about freedom (currently not often won until one has circled 17 or 18 times round the sun), then the answer will be that the parents are responsible. We should really get around to clarifying this whole issue, because as it stands, it's rather vague and in my opinion, inhumane the way we treat children as property and extensions of the parents rather than whole and free individual creatures. Unless, of course, that is what we intend, in which case, we should at least have the courage to be clear about that, because again, it's rather vague, hence gray areas emerge...I really don't mind whether we call children free or property, it just seriously bugs me that if we are going to treat them as property (which we do in most instances) we can't be honest about it, and face up to the reality of how horrible such a notion truly makes us.

I think our society may tend toward finding parents responsible for the actions of their children (adolescent) because that's what we do with everything else.

Self responsibility is confused with blaming the victim and right now we like to appoint responsibility for life on anything else but ourselves.

Organizations both private and public are held accountable for their individual members to an extent never seen before in human history.

Parents are blamed for their children in the same way. Anytime the finger is pointed at something other than our own belly button we get off the hook.

I've always questioned why some of the same people who will argue that a teenager isn't able to consent to sex will argue that the same teenager is fully responsible for their other actions. Is it one or the other? We know that their brains are different than that of most adults and therefore their mistakes are as much biological as anything else. So why try them as adults? Does the severity of the crime (whatever it may be) somehow alter the fact that they're not as capable of impulse control or understand causation as adults are? It seems to me that throwing them into the chaos of the justice system and incarceration simply increases the likelihood of them becoming MORE scarred and more dangerous to themselves and others. Yet we remain a vengeful society, more interested in payback than preventing this sort of behavior from reoccurring.

Some people like to point a finger at "liberals" who believe therapy cures all ills for how "bad" things are getting (fact is that in many ways we're growing more civilized--not less. We're simply made more aware of the screwball things people do than we used to be) the fact remains that many people rise above childhood traumas to be good, decent people. They pass beyond the impulse control issues and gain some understanding of cause and effect in this respect.

Maybe we should spend some time trying to understand the things that cause some of the impulses they cannot seem to control, and find the least common denominator and work to change this. I know that some studies suggest that a very high percentage of career criminals carry a history of abuse. Even though some of us rise above it, some seemingly cannot. We should seek to find out why.