Experts Stymied by Lack of Moral Values Among Young

Early this month, a Canton, Mass., teen-ager was convicted of clubbing a classmate to death with a baseball bat in 1986. At 14, Rod Matthews had planned the gruesome murder. He lured Shaun Ouillette into a wooded area on a cold November day and repeatedly hammered him with the bat as his victim screamed for help. Afterward, Matthews walked to a friend’s house, got into a snowball fight and offered to show his pal the body.

Three weeks later, an anonymous note informed police of the location of the body and implicated Matthews. A withdrawn and troubled adolescent, Matthews had been getting into trouble at school and his home life had become unstable. That fall he had shown an obsession with starting fires. Two of his friends admitted that Matthews talked about committing a murder “to see what it’s like.”

A psychiatrist testified at the trial that Matthews “ . . . doesn’t internally know right from wrong. He knows the theory, but can’t perform the action . . . so that he is morally handicapped.”

Bereft of Morality

How do children like Rod Matthews become morally handicapped? That is a question weighing heavier on a society increasingly confronted by incidents in which the actions of adults and children seem bereft of morality and conscience.

After reviewing statistics of violence committed by juveniles, one Detroit prosecutor said last year in U.S. News and World Report that these children don’t seem “to give a hoot about human life.”

Indeed, their nonchalance concerning their actions sometimes is macabre. Police in Kissimmee, Fla., don’t easily forget the 9-year-old boy who seemed to bask in the attention of his arrest two years ago after he patiently watched the 3-year-old neighbor he pushed into the deep end of a swimming pool drown. Recently, when three teen-age girls were arrested for terrorizing a 90-year-old woman and her 83-year-old sister in a Manhattan apartment, they showed practically no remorse. After cutting the telephone line, stealing $300 and threatening to kill the elderly sisters, the 16-year-old and two 13-year-old girls spent the money on clothes.

While the severity of actions ranges from simple cheating at school to pushing drugs to cold-blooded murder, some experts say the depth of the problem has reached a point where common decency can no longer be described as common. Somewhere, somehow, they contend, the traditional value system got disconnected for a disturbing number of America’s next generation.

‘No Simple Answers’

Neil Kurshan is among a growing consensus of experts who think they know where and how it happened. The consensus scatters, however, when it comes to solutions. “It’s a time when people are really grappling with these questions and there are just no simple answers,” said Kurshan, a rabbi of the Huntington Jewish Center in Huntington, N.Y.

Identifying himself as a liberal theologian who believes in “the power and authority of religion to reinforce values in the family,” Kurshan said the most important goal parents can have for their children is that they grow up to be kind and moral. He also believes that, in a society where excessive materialism and me-first instincts are pandered to, that basic message often gets garbled.

Not long ago, he recounted, a young mother in his congregation was distraught that her conscientious 12-year-old daughter came home from school in tears following an awards assembly. “Mommy, why don’t they hand out prizes for just being nice?” asked the girl. Her mother posed the same question to Kurshan, which motivated him to write his book, titled “Raising Your Child to Be a Mensch” (Atheneum, $14.95)--a how-to on bringing up kids to be “decent, responsible, caring people.”

“There is a concern now that a lot of parents have on raising children with values,” he said. “How do you raise a moral child in a world where there are a lot of distractions and dangers?”

Generally, Kurshan and other experts see the erosion or disappearance in our society of the traditional suppliers of shared values as partially at fault. For instance, the extended family always provided a foundation of values from two or three generations to the next. But the extended family today often exists only through infrequent visits and long-distance phone calls.

Where schools once reinforced common values, according to Kurshan, today’s schools generally tiptoe around teaching moral values so as not to ask for trouble from public factions who object. Kurshan mentions the irony of a recent newspaper headline that read: “Ethics Classes Avoid Teaching Right and Wrong.”

‘World More Secular’

And, point blank, the rabbi states that religion isn’t the “powerful transmitter of morality” it once was, primarily because “the world has become more secular . . . fewer people are affiliated” with churches and synagogues. “When we begin to doubt the absolute goodness of God, and even His very existence, we are left with only ourselves as the final arbiters of morality. . . . We are no longer convinced that certain actions are objectively right and wrong for everyone . . . When values are no longer rooted in an absolute goodness, they become only as good as those who hold them.”

Factors such as the Whatever-Feels-Good pop philosophy and the onslaught of global culture also have gradually forced a consensus of values into a relativity of values. As Kurshan puts it, “If I’m OK and you’re OK, then our child is not OK.” He said even if that jargon is defunct, the principle behind it isn’t.

“The relativity of values is the reigning ideology,” said Kurshan. “It says that your values are as good as mine as long as those values don’t lead to anyone getting hurt.” Kurshan argues that makes it harder for young people to grow up and harder for parents to raise decent kids--like building a condo on quicksand.

With no firm priorities in values, “children become confused and anxious over the array of alternatives. If everything is of equal worth, that process of maturation becomes difficult,” said Kurshan, adding that it also leads to a tolerance of unethical conduct, even to a tolerance of evil. “When a consensus of values breaks down in communities, you get safe philosophies that only muddle the situation. Children need clearly defined values and standards.” Moreover, Kurshan said, the role models and shining cultural heroes who once embodied the best of values no longer exist for today’s children. When a former national security adviser admits he lied to Congress and the President of the United States shrugs and quips that he has effectively done the same thing, where are children supposed to look for models of right from wrong?

Parents are the best and perhaps only hope for re-establishing common ethical and moral grounds, according to Kurshan. “Many adults think their children will just pick up values inherently or through osmosis from the general culture. . . . But a child is not born with implicit values. And children won’t learn the standards and ideals we want them to have from television, the movies, or on the streets.”

Paul Kurtz believes the ethical crisis this nation is facing is too important to entrust to parents. He fears that the high rate of broken families and adults confused about morals in their own lives is all too common today to rely too much on parents. “Obviously you want good parents who love their children and give their children good examples of moral conduct,” said Kurtz, professor of philosophy at State University of New York, Buffalo, and one of the nation’s leading humanist thinkers. “But the home is not always adequate.”

‘Old Absolutes’

In his latest book, “Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism” (Prometheus Books, $19.95), Kurtz proposes that the “moral illiteracy” gripping this country can be resolved through moral education. “People can’t cope with the ambiguity. But they can’t live by the old verities, the old absolutes, either,” said Kurtz. Instead, he calls for the development of “reflective ethical wisdom” in our young people--an ability in each individual to meet an ethical dilemma head-on and to resolve it.

Contending that there is insufficient evidence that God exists, Kurtz believes the standards for good living come from the “common moral decencies that serve as the bedrock” of human community. “Those moral decencies emerge in our conscience: to be truthful, not to steal, not to hurt others, to be kind and helpful.” Kurtz said these norms make the intersocial mechanics of civil society work and always have.

But Kurtz admits that “moral development can be thwarted, suppressed and submerged by other influences.” Hence the need for honest-to-goodness moral education. That must start with the development of “character” in our children, he said, a process that would begin preferably with the parents, perhaps as early as at birth.

“Tenderness begets tenderness, and perhaps only a baby who is loved can grow up into a moral being,” he points out.

‘Ethical Inquiry’

Secondly, he says ethical education must be devised to help people recognize a moral mine field when they stumble onto one and “engage in critical ethical inquiry” to figure out how to survive it in a decent way. Kurtz knows that won’t come easy. “The schools have to develop moral education and they’re scared to. We have got to teach them to teach children to think. But it is not simply technical thinking. It is moral thinking.”

Years of working with troubled children and adult prisoners has led Colorado psychologist Ken Magid to conclude the value crisis in America largely reflects a crisis of parent-infant bonding that has been agitated by several societal influences.

Bonding is that love connection between parent and child that most naturally is made or missed in the first 18 months of a baby’s life, said Magid, the chief of psychological services at Golden Medical Clinic, in Golden, Colo., and co-author of “High Risk: Children Without a Conscience” (Bantam, $18.95). It is, he says, “the glue that holds the child to the parents and society in a healthy way.

“The child who is unattached--not bonded--therefore will have a high probability of not trusting others and not forming intimate deep relationships the rest of their lives. They are phony. They have no internalized parent, no basis for deep love, no understanding of what love is. They understand only manipulation and getting their way.”

Continuum of Risk Factors

Although Magid says failure to bond is one of a continuum of risk factors--from genetic predetermination to other environmental influences--he contends it may be the most influential of those factors and the one that is most readily corrected. Yet he sees a tendency toward more breaks on bonding rather than fewer.

“If there is an interruption in the normal developmental sequence because of an illness that wouldn’t allow the primary care-giver to give consistent love,” said Magid, “or neglect or abuse of the child, or a child-care situation that is inadequate, or a broken and unstable home life, then that places a higher probability that the child will not develop normal patterns of conscience and won’t know right from wrong.

“If you have a half-million American teen-agers having babies and those teen-agers are having to go through their own identity crisis at the same time, they aren’t able to give a value structure to their own infants. There is a cycle just in that one problem area alone that produces a massive number of skewed infants.”

Magid says he lost sleep for weeks after he undertook research into the problem of the unattached child. While careful to distinguish between the “unattached syndrome” and normal teen-age rebellion, Magid blames the widespread outbreak of violent crime, sexual misconduct and drug abuse on people who were unattached since the bonding years.

‘Hate and Rage’

“In the extreme cases, said Magid, “these kids are opposed to good values and are connected with the most evil thoughts. The reason is they don’t have the internalized sense of love. What they have is hate and rage. They can’t identify with love and goodness. They identify with the opposite.

“It is the unattached child who grows up into an adult that accounts for 50% of all pathological crime in the United States . . . And there are lots of people in politics and religion and business--everywhere--who won’t kill you, but who cannot be trusted, and whose values exemplify a me-first instinct with little remorse. I’m saying if we attended to the early bonding crisis in America and to our children’s well being, we could eliminate half of all senseless psychopathic crime within two generations.”

Magid believes the way to accomplish that is through the education of parents about the critical nature of bonding and through attempts to slow the growth of those social problems that produce unattached children. Like other experts, Magid says the value crisis in America won’t be resolved through intervention, even though that’s where most of society’s focus is currently. “That’s not the story,” said Magid. “The story is prevention.”