Teenagers are exposed to a level of stress as we never had seen before. In my youth (1970-86) things did not have to go so fast. We had time to get drunk and know each other. (Our legal drinking age is zero and people can buy alcohol on their own when they become 16. Most starts to taste alcohol under parental supervision when they are between 13 and 16.)
But we don’t accept people who are a little different as well as before. People have to be mainstream or they will be shut off from their friends and classmates.
Depression sometimes comes from the huge overload of information and it hits widely at both adults and children. No wonder the first thing pilots do when they engage in combat is to shut the radio off. They don’t need people yelling in the microphone about being shot down. They knew that they have to concentrate on their job and choose actively to turn off all communication.
Then there is the drug thing and off course the stress leaves people no time to think about consequences when they do something and then we suddenly have a criminal to care about.
How do we handle this today? We send the troubled youth away either to a prison or to a remote treatment. We are in denial of the dark side in every person. The world is not always saccharine. Life is not always saccharine.
What about turning the situation upside down? If your local town states a zero-tolerance policy against crimes and drugs, what if the punishments would be keeping the troubled youth close to you?
I have a suggestion to a program for children aged 10-15:
First they go before a kind of court in school where a judge and some children from the school are jurors. They are sentenced to some time in the program, based on the severity of their crimes. Fines and truancy should also be converted into two weeks in the program; Drug use 4 weeks.
If the court finds them guilty or they plead no contest, they will get a jumpsuit, sweat and T-shirt, journey with various questions and a curfew between 20.00 and 04.00 all days.
I have the following suggestion for a program.
05.00-05.30 check-in at the local school. (Home-works are checked, drugtest of some of the children and some of the parents are done.)
05.30-06.30 parent and the troubled children go for a walk for a full hour, so they can get some fresh air and talk about what they need to do today.
06.30-07.00 Breakfast (Some children skips this very important meal, but the walk should result in some appetite)
07.00-15.00 Then it is off to School for the children and work for the parent. If the school stops before 15.00, the children have to go to a classroom where they can do homework. The parents arrive shortly before 15.00.
15.00-16.00 Parents and children go for a second walk, so they can get the stress resulting from the school/work out of the system. They should be encouraged to talk about the events of their day.
16.00-17.00 Last count on the day is classes and group therapy. Classes could be parent strategies for the parents and victims of crime could tell about how their lives had been changed as result from the crimes, they had been victim for. Group therapy should be about what they have written in their journals. After Group therapy all goes home.
Each child can get two smileys per day. One for doing their homework and one if they don’t “choose out” from daily workload. 3 negative smileys’ means an extra day in the program.
Saturday morning they use 2 hours doing some cleaning in the park. The parent supervises the child with help from staffs and checks the area for broken glass and syringes left by druggies.
They graduate, when the time is served AND they have answered all the questions in their journal AND they have 5 days with positive smiley’s’.
If the child breaks the curfew or run away, the local town should offer cells with just a bed where parents can bring their child to after dinner and get them again each morning. Video surveillance including the possibility of setting up a VPN-tunnel over the internet to the parent should be offered. No child should miss the social event a dinner together with he or her family is.
By this kind of punishment the parents are forced to spend time with their child and the child learns about consequences. The child does not loose it social network of family and friends. They are kept in the community.
At the same time seeing friends serving their time in the local schools and parks, would send a strong signal to everyone, that crime is not tolerated. Punishment is no longer a subject in the books – it is real just in front of your eyes.
I would be prepared to pay increased taxes any time for a system, which keeps troubled youth in our close community, so both they and we learn that crime does not pay.
