WHAT’S HAPPENING TO OUR YOUNG?

“There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity”    - A Schopenhauer

William Blake really is important, my cornerstone. Nobody ever told me before he did that childhood was such a damned serious business.   -Maurice Sendak

All children wear the sign: ‘I want to be important NOW.’ Many of our juvenile delinquency problems arise because nobody reads the sign.    -Dan Pursuit

Your children are not dead. They are just waiting until the world deserves them.    -Robert Browning

Childhood should be a time of carefree escapades, unconditional love and boundless dreams.  But something has gone terribly wrong.  Instead of gazing at stars,  our children are gazing at pornography.  Instead of watching the Brady Bunch, they are watching Family Guy.  Instead of singing nursery rhymes, they fill their ears with Heavy Metal.  Instead of praying, they party.

And the results are devastating.

A new survey, came  out Monday, showing that 1 in 5 college age students has a personality disorder. 

Almost one in five young American adults has a personality disorder that interferes with everyday life, and even more abuse alcohol or drugs, researchers reported Monday in the most extensive study of its kind.

The study was released Monday in Archives of General Psychiatry. It was based on interviews with 5,092 young adults in 2001 and 2002.

Olfson said it took time to analzye the data, including weighting the results to extrapolate national numbers. But the authors said the results would probably hold true today.

The study was funded with grants from the National Institutes of Health, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the New York Psychiatric Institute.

What’s sadder is that only 25% of these students seek help. 

The disorders include problems such as obsessive or compulsive tendencies and anti-social behavior that can sometimes lead to violence. The study also found that fewer than 25 percent of college-aged Americans with mental problems get treatment.

Imagine if more than 75 percent of diabetic college students didn’t get treatment, Hirsch said. “Just think about what would be happening on our college campuses.”

These disorders did NOT include substance abuse.  When those were figured in the results, the incidence rose significantly.

Counting substance abuse, the study found that nearly half of young people surveyed have some sort of psychiatric condition, including students and non-students.

Personality disorders were the second most common problem behind drug or alcohol abuse as a single category. The disorders include obsessive, anti-social and paranoid behaviors that are not mere quirks but actually interfere with ordinary functioning.

Coincidentally, the Washington Post also came out with an article.  It claims that 64% of high school students admit to cheating…

In the past year, 30 percent of U.S. high school students have stolen from a store and 64 percent have cheated on a test, according to a new, large-scale survey suggesting that Americans are apathetic about ethical standards.

The Josephson Institute, a Los Angeles-based ethics institute, surveyed 29,760 students at 100 randomly selected high schools nationwide, both public and private. All students in the selected schools were given the survey in class; their anonymity was assured.

Other findings from the survey:

· Cheating in school is rampant and getting worse. Sixty-four percent of students cheated on a test in the past year and 38 percent did so two or more times, up from 60 percent and 35 percent in a 2006 survey.

· Thirty-six percent said they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment, up from 33 percent in 2004.

BUT…

Despite such responses, 93 percent of the students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character, and 77 percent affirmed that “when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.”

2 weeks ago, an 8 year old boy, living in Phoenix, was accused of murdering his father, and the father’s friend.

Yesterday, in Pembroke Pines, Florida, a 7  year old boy robbed a 6 year old boy at knifepoint.

Consider this:

From 1970 to 1991, the death rate from homicide for teenagers between 15 and 19 years of age increased 220% (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1993). Homicide has become 1 of the top 2 leading causes of death for that age group. Homicide direct effects only on a small but increasing portion of the population (approximately 10 teenagers per 100,000 residents). Other less extreme forms of violence, however, have been found to affect a much larger group of adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

So why is this happening?   Is it the higher incidence of broken homes?  Latch key kids?  Children having children?  Lack of involvement of fathers?  Abortion and the general disregard for human life?

Is it coincidence that these crimes and mental illnesses have been steadily rising since Roe V Wade, the advent of Sexual Revolution and our drug culture? 

We’ve taken prayer out of schools and replaced it with comprehensive sex ed.  We’ve taken away parental authority and allow children to kill their children without their parents knowledge.  We’ve inundated them with violent images in movies, music, television, video games.   We hold the parents accountable when their kids have a party with alcohol, but don’t hold them responsible when they are sexually active at 13.  We feed them  moral relativism, telling them tacitly, that whatever feels good IS good.  We give them everything they could possibly want materially, but give them nothing spiritually.  Or we leave them in homes where they are abused or neglected.   We send them off to college, unsupervised, without properly preparing them to deal with moral issues, money issues, temptation and self mastery.

But most importantly, children learn from example.  They do what we do, not what we say?  So what are we doing, or not doing, that our children are imitating?  Are they learning this from us?  Do we pray?  Do we cheat?  Do we lie?  Do we shirk our responsibilities?  Do we live without a moral code? 

We need to take a good, long look at why this is happening.  Our children deserve better.  Shame on us. 

“Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work is pure, and whether it is right.” Proverbs 20:11