Delinquency is predictable

"Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again."
Ecclesiastes 11:1

"Teenage Time Bombs" reads the cover story of a recent news magazine that depicted the growing problem of juvenile crime. The experts’ gloomy prediction is that things will get much worse before they get better. By the year 2010, the number of juvenile criminals is expected to increase by one-third.

What’s the answer? Treat juveniles as adults and impose harsher sentences? Build more substantial prisons and a whole lot more of them? Confronting delinquents today with the reality and the severity of what they have done is something that should have been done years ago. Responsibility is something which is learned, preferably early in life, and the older a person is before he learns that with every action there are consequences attached, the more difficult it becomes. But aren’t the parents at least partly to blame?

I’m not suggesting that society should not hold juvenile delinquents accountable for their actions. What I’d like to see is a society that holds parents accountable for their failure to teach their offspring the difference between right and wrong. Why should parents be absolved of their failure in producing the delinquent who, without conscience, tears down the door of the elderly woman and kills her after savagely raping her? Why should the father who sired the offspring and then walked away, never providing a day’s worth of support, not be held accountable?

The great failure isn’t the generation who have made gangs their families and the streets unsafe; it is the parents who brought them into the world, and then later abandoned them.

When Daddy isn’t there to give warm hugs, a girl often reaches for love and affection from the wrong source. Every teenager has three basic emotional needs that must be satisfied: 1) to give and receive love, 2) to feel worthwhile to oneself and to others, an 3) to have a sense of security. When parents are not there and cease to meet those needs, teens turn to each other, often in self-destructive patterns.

The sad thing to me is that the future of a teenager who has run headlong into the anger of society is pretty grim. Lacking both the sense of morality and of right and wrong, and having practically no education–apart from the wrong kind–what chance does this kid have to earn a decent living and make something of himself or herself?

Long ago, Solomon told us that when a child received the training he or she should receive, God would honor that. "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it" is God’s promise found in Proverbs 22:6. It’s still true. May God help us get a handle on what counts and come to grips with the consequences of broken homes.

Resource Reading: Ecclesiastes 11