EDITORIAL - What's with the young these days?

What is happening to young people these days? There must be something wrong when young people take their own lives after a scolding by their parents. There must be something wrong when young people take their own lives after failing to secure clearances in schools. We say something must be wrong because taking one's own life is never right, whatever the reason.

And we are not even talking about religion. Roman Catholicism, which forbids the taking of any life, whether of another or one's own, has got nothing to do with the questions asked. They are asked simply because they need to be. It is an alarming phenomenon that more and more young people seem to have no qualms taking their own lives.

Maybe it is time the government steps in to arrest this phenomenon before it becomes a real trend, considering how the young can be so impressionable at times. And by stepping in, the government should not limit itself to merely summoning all the social, behavioral and mental experts it can get its hands on to a summit or something to discuss what it can do.

Maybe the government can also call in legislators to see if some of our laws do not need a little tweaking to fine-tune how society seems to be dealing with its young. Any society that cannot understand the manner in which it is losing the young will one day find itself unable to move forward. The young after all is the hope of the future, the talent pool of future leaders, the skill base of tomorrow's achievements.

The seemingly too shallow threshold of tolerance and self-discipline exhibited by those who took their own lives points to something we may have neglected to see in our desire to give the young more rights, protection, and privileges. In ensuring that the young have their rights respected, their beings protected, and their desires enabled, we may have inadvertently made them intolerant to challenges and irritants that are supposed to be a part of the normal balance of life.

A few decades ago, when the operative principle in bringing up children was still "spare the rod and spoil the child," children were made to see the difference between right and wrong the hard way. In those old almost forgotten days, mischief always earned a sharp rebuke or a scolding, at the very least, and a spanking at its worst. But children moved on into adulthood wisened by the hard facts of life. Nobody took their own lives then. Instead they became disciplined and better persons.

Believe it or not, at a time when filching things resulted in a sharp rap on the knuckles with a ruler, children grew up learning it does not pay to be a thief. Today, children as young as below 10 roam the streets of Cebu City as marauding bands of snatchers, secure in the thought that, if caught, they will have to be released on account of child protection laws. Kids have wised up the wrong way. If you scold them or put them into situations they don't like, you know what happens.