What's Happening with our Kids?

I read or watch the news everyday and more and more lately it has become apparent that there are serious issues with this nations children. From a threat at Palisade High School to a murder in Chicago of a child by other children. It has gotten out of control.

I have been trying to think of all the possible reasons why this is happening to our children and here's what I came up with:

1) Removal of prayer from schools. If you take away God you have nothing. No morals to follow, no guidelines to live by.

2) Criminalization of spanking children. When I was in second grade I made the mistake of kissing the girl holding the door as our class was being lead into the school. The teacher noticed and I was yanked from the line(literally)and was taken to the front of the whole class, once back to the classroom. The teacher then brought out a ruler and slapped my hands with it on my palms. I do not remember any pain (though I do remember her breaking the ruler). What I felt at that time was shame. So much so I never wanted to do it again. My punishment was not complete though because when I got home my father had also heard about the incident and I got another spanking then and sent to my room for the evening. From this I learned to respect authority and follow the rules the best I could.

3) Television. During my generation in the 70's was the start of children being raised in two income households. When both parents work parental guidance is left up to a day care, a babysitter or simply the television. The television is not a good parent and our children are gathering their moral values from television personalities.

4) Video games. Yes I believe that as children are allowed to play games which graphically depict murder and the use of murder to get "to the next level",it is training for children that is OK to kill someone to achieve your goals. Even on a lesser level that it is OK to "stomp" your peers to achieve more. What happened to helping people can't we depict that in a game. How about a game where our goals are to actually follow the 10 commandments instead of destroy them.

5) The creation of the Department of Education. We have removed all the control of our children's education from the hands of a more local government or state government to the hands of our federal government. This was one of Jimmy Carters poorest decisions (and he had so many). The education of our children should be left up to our local school districts or even better, the parent.

6) Not teaching history. I am not just talking about what you are supposed to learn in schools (of course that is good). I am talking about history of people the children know. It is much more affective if grandpa tells about his time in the military or mom talks about the time she got into trouble with grandpa and got her bike taken away for a week. I think children need to learn we too are human and have made mistakes. I heard children say "Why do we have to learn about what somebody did 200 years ago? How is that going to help me? My answer in a nutshell is if you do not learn what was done then you will repeat their mistakes an their problems.

7) The phrase "I didn't do it." Every day I deal with that phrase. It is the phrase everybody and I mean everybody uses to shuffle the blame from themselves. When you work maintenance all day you encounter problems that are; shall we say, "Human created". The first thing out of the mouth of the human involved is "I didn't do it." 9 out of 10 times when I hear the phrase it makes me cringe. If people take responsibility for their actions it makes my job much easier. Let me explain with this example: A customer's child flushes a large plastic toy down the toilet, the toilet backs up and the maintenance crew is called in to fix it. They ask what happened, the customer replies "I don't know what happened it just backed up." The maintenance crew spends an hour or two trying to remove obstruction using plunging or chemicals to no avail. After much strife the toilet is removed and quickly a plastic toy is located and removed. A situation where our crew spent 1 or 2 hours trying to unclog a toilet the conventional ways could have been eliminated if the crew knew what actually happened. The job would have been complete in less than 30 minutes.
So I guess I said all that to say this: We need to teach our children to take responsibility for their actions.

I know I don't list much in the way of solutions here and I am sure I don't have all the problems listed (I didn't even have time to go into the teacher unions). I do think we better take a real serious look at the problems, because if fail our children we have no future.