The real problem is rotten parents

The Boston Herald

June 8, 1993

Beverly Beckham

It is an idea born of frustration, holding parents criminally accountable for their children's violent actions. But Mayor Ray Flynn, fed up with violence, as are we all, is advocating just that: punishing parents who fail to keep guns out of their children's hands.

Last week he ordered Boston Police Commissioner Mickey Roache to convene a task force to draft legislation that would penalize parents whose children carry guns. Should the plan win final approval, it would affect only those living within city limits.

The mayor's heart is in the right place. It always is. But his energy would be better spent convening a task force to figure out ways to train people to be good parents.

This is the root of the problem: parents who don't parent, who don't know how, who didn't learn from their parents that you don't beat a kid or denigrate him or put him last on your list of priorities, and who aren't learning any of these things from the people around them. Parents who yell and hit and demean and demand, who treat their offspring with indifference or contempt, will not, by virtue of a punitive law, suddenly learn how to be effective. By the time a kid totes a gun to school, it's way past the go-to-your-room, no-TV-for-a-week stage.

Learning how to raise good children has to start early. It has to start in the schools and continue through high school and beyond, in night courses and community courses. For the wrong kind of learning is going on in too many homes.

You see examples of bad parenting everywhere. A mother screams at her child constantly. Screams when she cries. Screams when she spills milk. Screams when she forgets to take out the trash. Screams to get off the phone, clean her room. Name it and she screams about it.

And what happens? The girl grows up and screams back. And the mother says, with true bewilderment, "I don't know why she treats me this way," totally unaware that she learned this behavior from her.

Treat a child with kindness and that child will grow up to be kind. Expose him to love and he will learn to love. Treat a child with disdain, expose him to meanness, and in time he will hold all human beings, including himself, in contempt. Children are pure potential, flesh and blood sponges who give back what they take in. It's as basic and simple as this.

On a bus last week, I watched a woman with her two children, a boy about four and a girl 11 or 12. The woman clearly disliked the girl. The girl got on the bus and chose a seat. The woman pushed her and told her to move. The girl chose another seat. The woman snapped, "Not there." The boy sat in the same seat. The woman said nothing.

"Give me that package," the woman said to the girl a minute later. The child handed over a bag she was holding. The mother glared at her and snapped, "Not that one!" The child retrieved a package, which was on the floor. The mother opened it, took out a plastic toy, gave it to the boy, and helped him decorate it with little stickers. The girl asked, "Can I help?" And the mother said no, and actually pulled the toy away.

Someday when this girl grows up and gets in trouble - and she will - her mother will wonder why. The sad thing is, she won't have a clue, because she obviously didn't think she was doing anything wrong or she wouldn't have been behaving so hatefully in a public place.

In the grocery store a few days later, I watched another child running up and down the aisles, bumping into people, grabbing things off the shelves, screaming and shouting, out of control.

And what did his mother do? She yelled. "Stop that right now or I'm going to hit you." "I told you not to run." "Give that to me." "You're such a pain in the ass." On and on she went, pushing her cart, never once attempting to stop him, never even looking at him. Didn't anyone ever tell her that you have to interrupt inappropriate behavior, not just nag about it? Doesn't she know better? Obviously not. Obviously this is how shewas raised.

You can't be a good parent if you've never been exposed to good parents or good parenting. Mayor Flynn would do the city a far better service if instead of using limited resources to punish parents, he invested in programs to teach them - not after their children have been caught with guns, but long before.