With summer bearing down and all of us up to our neck in suntan lotion, it’s hard to think about the fact that school will be starting is a few short weeks. That’s either good news or bad news according to whether you are the one being dropped off at school, or the one doing the dropping off. But at any rate, kids are about to take over our lives again. While pondering that inevitable reality, I ran across a very interesting article in the newspaper…USA Today has made a remarkable discovery. They have discovered that more and more kids, at younger and younger ages, are becoming involved in criminal activity. Without sounding too crass, someone needs to look at USA Today’s crack investigative staff. This is not exactly earth shattering or breaking news. The current wave of juveniles who commit crimes didn’t just hit the beach today. In fact, the wave, which is now of tsunami force, has gone far past the beach and has flooded our cities.

The USA Today article reports that the major reason for the reverse of a downward trend in our nation’s crime rate can be attributed to the number of kids who have become involved in criminal activity. I agree. The article further states that the reason for so many juveniles becoming involved in criminal activity is due to poverty and financial uncertainty. I sort of agree. But the article failed to mention one important factor of the dramatic increase in juvenile related crimes. They failed to mention what role the parents of these delinquents may have played. But maybe it is understandable why parents were a non issue in the article. For many of these kids, the parents are a non issue in their lives.

We must not make the blanket assertion that parents are the only make or break factor that will determine the eventual outcome of a child. I’m sure that there are some parents out there who were the most caring and nurturing parents that they possibly could be. The fact is that there are some kids who are just rotten to the core and I am not sure that anything will change that. But those kids are very rare. For most of these kids, it only takes a minimal amount of investigation to see where the trouble began. So many of these kids are from broken homes, with single parent or no parents scenarios. More grandparents are raising their grandchildren than in any time before. And for those who are lucky (and I use that term loosely) enough to have both parents in the house, these parents will never be in the running for the Better Homes And Gardens “Parent of the Year” issue.

Instead of supportive parents who combine discipline and love, we find parents who are dealing with substance addiction, domestic violence, and putting their lives, desires, and their own issues before anything that has anything to do with parenting. How can they be surprised when their children fall into trouble? The truth is that many of these kids are a smoldering volcano that is ready to erupt. We see the signs of the impending explosion but we choose to ignore the warnings and hope that the pressure of the situation will just subside. It most often will not. And when the explosion occurs, we all stand around with our hands over our eyes with a “how could this happen” attitude.

Children are growing up in a time that is unlike the times that most of us grew up in. The temptations, the opportunities, the pressures, and the exposure that our kids have to them are very dangerous. It is so important, more so now than ever before, that parents play an integral and constant part in the lives of their children. We must be there for them, we must teach and guide them, we must nurture them, and we must stand them back up when they fall.

Unfortunately, based on the absence of some parents, once their kids fall for the first time, they will continue to plummet and spiral out of control until they too are nothing more than a statistic as to another young life ruined. Hey, they’re your kids. Take responsibility for the most important thing that you will ever do. Their lives depend on it.