True. But parents can live up to that responsibilty and still produce a deviant. Teenagers have freewill and can be held soley accountable when they exercise it.
I have seen, as mentioned earlier, a family of five have four great kids and one ‘bad’ kid. Still, the ‘bad’ kid may have been a loser ten different ways but he was never violent either. He still had certain values instilled in him from his family and at some deep level those things stuck.
You can’t give your children all of the answers but hopefully you equip them with the tools that they can use at a later time to make good decisions. Even so all but the best or luckiest kids are going to make a fair share of bad decisions anyway. Still, they usually manage to avoid the truly horrible decisions if they have been given a good foundation from the parents.
I grew-up in a single parent home as a latch-key kid and was glued to the TV and video games…many of which were violent. To this day I can barely bring myself to harm a fly (literally…friends were playing firefly baseball last summer [smacking fireflies with whiffle bats] and I was the only one who wouldn’t join in the ‘fun’). Call me a putz or weenie if you will but that non-violent streak came from my family (and as the youngest of 5 kids I got beat plenty by my older siblings so it’s not as if I was coddled).
How out of touch with your children do you have to be to not notice the slide to madness that Dylan and Eric must have displayed? I seriously doubt they dispayed a face of happy-go-lucky teenager till the moment they went on a rampage. My dog can’t speak a word of english but I’m in tune with her enough to know when something is wrong. I may not know what but I know enough to start looking around. I certainly don’t ignore her.
I firmly believe in doing something even if it is the wrong thing. In my experience doing nothing is usually the worst choice. So, you send your son to a psychiatrist or to military school or you move or you sit with him every night and make him talk or you go on an extended family vacation or something. I’ll grant there are no guarantees and you may get it completely wrong and your child could still go wacko but at least you tried.
To this day I disagree with about 90% of the things my parent’s chose to do in my upbringing (that’s with the benefit of adult hindsight…as a teenager I thought it was more like a 99% error rate). Nevertheless I know in my heart that my parent’s always did what they felt was best for me no matter how screwed up it was. In the end that simple distinction made a big difference.
I’d have to agree with the position that it’s nobody’s fault. Some people just turn out to be killers. No amount of perceived consequence will stop them. No amount of love and affection is going to change that. Sure, they won’t kill people who show them love and affection, but they’ll still kill others. I’m of the opinion that they enjoyed playing Doom because deep down inside they were cold blooded killers. Not that playing Doom turned them into cold blooded killers. I would say it’s impossible to prove either way, but if I was being sued, my defense would be exactly that. I’d try and show that they were already cold blooded killers, and playing doom just “got them off” so to speak. If they didn’t have the game to play, they would probably have been blowing up frogs with firecrackers to get their fill.
Anyway, it’s true. Shit happens, and there’s noone to blame except the attackers.
Lets blame the medical industry. If they never made so many advancements then those spawn of hell might never have been born successfully.
By the way, I usually stay away from Great Debates, so go easy on me.
To date, more than 5 million copies of Doom, Quake, Quake II, and Quake III Arena have been sold. Less than half of the twenty or so children and teenagers implicated in school shootings in the last ten years played video games regularly, let alone popular first-person shooters. Suing the video game manufacturers isn’t even scapegoating–it’s just a cynical attempt at grabbing money with an emotionally plausible villain.
Whack, as you pointed out, there are plenty of bad kids with good parents who never turn violent. So how were the Kleybolds and the Harrises supposed to distinguish between their children having a tough time being a teenager, and being the kind of predators they turned out to be? Again, it’s your own difficulty imagining that the parents might not have been able to prevent Columbine by doing something differently that is the reason you’re blaming them, not specific evidence that they were bad parents, or that they missed obvious signs. I see ten moody, loner teenagers a week. The one thinking about shooting up his school doesn’t carry a sign, and the one in a million who’ll actually do it isn’t clearly marked for my convenience.
Sorry bernse, I can’t agree.
Maybe before I had children, I thought that they would be something to be shaped and molded. Wrong. They are little individuals, from the moment they are born.
Of course you can teach, try to instill values, and guide. But although you can lead your colt to water, whether they drink will be 100% their own decision.
And Whack a Mole- with your upbringing, you should be about ready for a tri-state kill spree.
No? But why not? Are you saying that even though you were exposed to the same stuff and the same environment, you came out different?
Go figure.
I think that’s exactly the point I was trying to make. I was exposed to all of these terrible influences and yet I am one of the least violent people I know. How could that be? Could it have anything to do with my upbringing? Nahh…couldn’t be that. I must just be lucky or something.
What gets me here is all of the people absolving themselves and/or parents in general of any responsibility:
…and so on.
I completely understand that kids are not robots under 100% control of their parents but neither are they totlly out-of-control. To suggest that a kid is going to do whatever a kid is going to do, regardless of the parent’s efforts, is wrong. If it is right then your kids really have zero need of you beyond providing food and clothing.
Think of a screwy relative or neighbor or Charles Manson and tell me if you’d mind having those people raise your child and then try and tell me how little real control you have over the person your children become.
Parents are IMPORTANT. Even if your teenager hates your guts you’re still IMPORTANT to him or her. Don’t sell yourself short on the effect you can have on your kids life…for better or worse.
[hijack]
tracer, there’s a good deal of evidence to suggest that the popular conception of idiot jurors fueling a litigation explosion by falling all over themselves to make absurdly excessive awards to plaintiffs is an urban legend, propagated largely by insurance and other business interests. Take a look at this thread where I cite some sources for that.
[/hijack] Back to your regularly scheduled debate…
No one here is suggesting that quality of one’s parenting is totally beside the point. It’s just that even the best parenting is sometimes, not in all cases, not enough. Thier are murders and rapists and psychopaths out thier who had great parents. Parents that did everything that it is possible for a parent to do, and it wasn’t enough. There are murder and rapists and psychopaths who would have been OK if they hadn’t had terrible parents. In cases in which we have no other information, we haveto reserve judgement because parenting may or may not be a factor in someone’s being a twisted fuck.
I’m a liability actuary working for a big insurance company. I LIKE big awards, because my company gets to collect more premium and make more profit. There have been periods when claims go up rapidly, and the premiums we had collected weren’t enough to pay the claims. But, once things stabilize, higher claims means higher premiums and higher profits.
Business interests pay a lot of these premiums, but things aren’t so rosy for the public. They pay the business interests’ costs in the form of higher prices. And, when a governmental entity gets sued, the public pays more taxes (or gets less services.)
So, why do consumer advocates like Ralph Nader, Consumers Union and the New York Times support big awards? IMHO they’re in the pocket of the plaintiff’s attorneys. Talk about supporting the rich! Plaintiff’s attorneys make far more money than insurance company executives. In the Texaco-Pennzoil case the attorneys got almost $1 billion (if I remember rightly). I think the owner of the Washington Redskins bought the team on his earnings as a plaintiff’s attorney.
End of hijack…
Maybe I am not being clear (wouldn’t be the first time!). If you can come out of that environment fairly normal, then why can’t the converse be true? Why can’t a kid who comes from a good home go bad?
I am not trying to absolve the whole world of guilt or anything like that. But if parents have done all they can to teach a child values and ethics, why should it be their fault if the child later goes nuts?
I am not talking about the extreme cases, like Dahmer vivisecting squirrels when he was a kid. But at some point, the child’s actions are his own. Too many people want to blame everyone but the child, maybe because the idea of a young person planning and executing such a heinous crime is to disturbing.
TOO disturbing, like my typing skills
FTR I wrote in my first post to this thread:
“I’m sorry but if anyone is to be blamed beyond Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold then it would have to be their parent’s.”
I agree absolutely that Eric and Dylan are primarily to blame. I just don’t know that their parents can claim 100% innocence.
You’re missing the point, Whack. People here aren’t absolving parents of responsibility for their kids in general. Everyone here agrees that parents and the values they impart are generally the most influential part of a child’s upbringing.
What we’re rejecting is the idea that parents are always and totally responsible, including freak cases like school shootings.
december: *Why don’t consumerists fight runaway awards? [various insinuations about greedy plaintiff attorneys and consumer advocates who are “in their pockets”…] *
Mmm-hmm. If you actually read the sources I discuss in the thread I linked to, you’ll get an idea of the other side of the story.
Before I began raising a child, I probably would’ve been on the “parents are to blame” side of this argument. My idea of parental obligation has changed quite a bit from the experience. EJsGirl is correct; children are little individuals straight out of the womb. And parents can provide them all the moral information they can hold, but it’s an individual choice by each child whether he or she bases his or her actions on that information. (I used to think moral actions were based on encoded behavior. After much observation I’m now convinced that belief was idiotic!)
Parents are obligated, at minimum, to provide their children with the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong, to impart to them the understanding of their responsibilities to themselves and to society, and to try and instill in them the habits of thought and action they will need to exist competently as adults. These minimum obligations are also pretty much the limit of parental ability as well; once parents have provided the basic tool kit (moral code, societal info, know-how), they have very little influence over the actual choices made by their kids. Children follow their own inclinations. The most a parent can do is give them “character building” experiences and appropriate guidance.
I’ve seen no evidence presented that the Kleybolds and Harrises failed to provide that basic package of knowledge and skills. If they failed in some verifiable aspects, I suppose they would turn out to be failures of attention rather than of guidance.