Second Opinion / OTHER MEDIA : Democracy Belongs in Government, Not Home

The blame for the crimes of the younger generation can often be placed squarely on the shoulders of the people who cry out the loudest. This is because they usually are the ones who do absolutely nothing to prevent these type crimes from recurring.

. . . It is up to the parents to instill the proper values in these children as they grow.

For the most part, however, parents have forgotten the values they have learned and, consequently, have forgotten how to teach them to their offspring. Instead, they have become permissive and failed to maintain the proper amount of discipline and the youngsters have run amok as a result.

Conversations with most parents older than 35 will reveal that, in their own youth, there was no buddy-buddy relationship between parents and children. The children had their place and they stayed in it under penalty of extreme corporal punishment.

In other words, if a child got out of line, the parent took a “hickory stick” and corrected the problem. But, today, nobody seems to really care enough to remember those days.

People have conveniently forgotten that this old-fashioned type of child-rearing brought dramatic and totally predictable results for the most part. Certainly, some of the youngsters went wrong, but there was nowhere near the present rate of incidents.

In the past, parents ruled their homes and democracy was something that took place in government, not in the home.

It will be interesting to see how long it is going to take parents of today to look at themselves and realize that it was the pure and undiluted attitudes about discipline held by their parents that brought them, the parents of today, as far as they have come.

It will also be interesting to watch permissive and lackadaisical attitudes change at some point or another, when some of these parents realize that our parents had our best interests at heart and were willing to do whatever was necessary to make us wholesome human beings with a certain sense of values.