In the recent riots in England, many have been asking, “Where are the parents?”
Diane Sawyer asked it in this ABC News clip:
It is a good question, but it doesn’t get to the root of the issue. As this Guardian article points out, the reason that parents don’t restrain their kids is that they long ago lost – or abdicated – their authority.
Head teachers’ [Principals’] leader Brian Lightman explained to the BBC:
He warns that too often schools are faced with pupils who have never had any boundaries in their home lives – where there has never been a sense of right and wrong.
“Parents are not willing to say ‘no’. That short, simple word is an important part of any child’s upbringing,” says Mr Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.
“It’s desperately important that children have a sense of right and wrong. But we often come across children who have never been told that something is wrong.”
Likewise, Prime Minister David Cameron has charged, “There are pockets of our society that are not only broken, but frankly sick.”
Riots take a decade of character formation
How does a pocket of society get to the place of wanton looting? Very slowly.
It takes practice: doing the same thing again and again. Abdicating authority. Refusing to say ‘no.’ Treating children with contempt. Ignoring children. Leaving them to their own devices. If you do these things repeatedly over the course of a decade (or more), you will form the sort of character in a child that says, “We’re doing this to show the police and the rich people that we can do what we want” and that it “is the government’s fault.”
For better (or in this case for worse), children learn from their parents what is normal and normative from the earliest years of life. The question is not just where the parents were over the past week that their children were rampaging on the streets. The question is where they were over the past 10 to 18 years. The answer to that question will point more clearly to the sort of slow, hard solution that is needed.