Why So Many Young People Are Going Off The Rails

[Rebbe]

To All:

I sometimes have had reservations about topics and observations of life that issue forth from Melanie Phillips. But this short article was thought-provoking and downright "on the money." Consider her thoughtful contribution.

Why so many young people are going off the rails
Even after the horrific Texas massacre, the principal cause remains the great unsayable
   
Melanie Phillips

   
In America, an anguished debate continues about the implications of the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18 year-old boy murdered at least 19 children and two teachers in an elementary school by gunning them down.

This debate has been dominated by the argument between those who want to prevent the widespread availability of guns and those who claim that gun control is irrelevant, and that more attention should be paid to a moral sickness that has developed in American society.

To a British mind, it is almost incomprehensible that guns are available with so few security checks and can be obtained by people who are mentally disturbed or otherwise grossly unsuitable for gun ownership.

Surely, however, this is not a matter of either/or. It’s possible that something is going wrong with American society and that it is necessary to restrict the availability of guns.

There’s one particular aspect of current American culture which is arguably the most important factor of all but is rarely even mentioned. That is mass fatherlessness and the destruction of the traditional married family.

New York’s Mayor Eric Adams almost got the point but then missed it last week when, as police reported a dramatic spike in weapons being recovered from students in city schools, he pleaded with parents to become more involved in their children’s lives. The New York Post reported:

    In the wake of Tuesday’s horrific massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Mayor Eric Adams had some hard truth for parents: Stopping all the gun madness is partly their job, too.

    “If kids are getting involved in guns, we need to intervene and get help right away,” he said Thursday. “Parents are not only parents; they are lifeguards . . . they are here to help their children protect themselves and from others”.

    That means being diligent in talking to their kids and potentially searching their backpacks and rooms — because, if they’re finding guns or ammunition, “something is wrong”. So far this year there’s been a lot of wrong: more than 4,700 weapons recovered in city schools since the return to in-person classes in the fall; over half were pepper spray and knives.

Well yes, of course — but there’s a much harder truth that parents need to hear, one that’s even more important that searching their kids’ backpacks for guns or knives. It’s that both parents need to be bringing up their children together.

Of all the factors that contribute to a child suffering a psychological disorder bad enough to make him commit murder or other crime, it’s the absence of his or her father.

Mass fatherlessness (it’s usually the father who is missing, since the mother either generally gains custody of the children after divorce or chooses to do without her child’s father altogether, having been told by feminist theory that men are a waste of space) is the scourge of a culture which has elevated the exercise of personal “autonomy” and individual gratification above all other principles. As a result, marriage has been devalued in favour of everyone having the sexual relationships they want, when they want and with whomever they want.

Mass fatherlessness has generally had an appalling effect on children overall.

Children from fractured families do worse in virtually every single area of life. Often forced to witness serial partners passing through their mother’s life, they are themselves frequently prematurely sexualised. Many if not most replicate their dysfunctional background by either having children while they themselves are still teenagers, or never managing to form a lifelong sexual relationship. Girls tend to internalise the pain and become depressed; boys with no decent male role models tend to act out their misery and lash out by becoming delinquent.

Such children’s feelings of identity and sense of personal worth are potentially shattered by the willed absence of their parent (bereavement has an entirely different effect).  Very often the child will entirely groundlessly blame him or herself if the parents have split up; if the father has never been part of the child’s life or is totally unknown, the child typically feels that something inside him or herself is missing.

As a child psychiatrist told me more than three decades ago, the willed absence of a parent from a child’s life has a shattering effect because if “one of the people who made me” has chosen not to stick around, the constituent elements of “me” may fragment. Putting it simply, these children’s hearts are broken.

Other factors also contribute to childhood crime and dysfunctionality, with the de-sensitising effects of violent video games or pornography and the prevalence of drug-taking surely playing a considerable role. 

As I wrote in my 1996 book All Must Have Prizes about educational and moral decline:

    The causes of disorder are highly complex and difficult to disentangle from each other. But it appears clear that the roots of crime lie in a breakdown of the moral sense which occurs in certain circumstances, leading to a collapse of both formal and informal social controls. Individuals internalise a moral sense as they develop through childhood and adolescence. It is acquired through a secure attachment to their families and to the surrounding culture, through which they learn the elementary codes of human behaviour and the relation between acts and their consequences. But in recent years there has been a comprehensive breakdown of such attachments. Family life has become conditional and contingent; employment is either insecure or non-existent; religious belief has been eroded; schools, both in what they teach and the way they teach it, increasingly abandon children to their own devices.

    Instead of authority, firm rules and fixed boundaries which define the world as something intelligible to which the child can become attached, there is now merely an endlessly shifting landscape of subjectivity and ambiguity. The child has become an autonomous and solitary individual, left alone to construct his or her own meaning from the world. Who then can be surprised to see more and more children breaking rules that the adult world tells them over and over again have no absolute validity? Who can be amazed when such children appear to have no connection at all to the social structure?

Of course, these are general trends and there are always exceptions. Some intact families are wildly dysfunctional. Many lone parents do their best for their children; some succeed in mitigating the worst consequences of fractured family life. People at the bottom of the social heap have fewer financial or emotional resources with which to combat these ill-effects.

But anyone who doesn’t believe that fractured family life is the principal cause should just take look at those cultures and ethnicities whose children tend to be most successful and lead settled, productive and law-abiding lives. These are cultures in which children are generally brought up by both their parents. In cultures whose children disproportionately go off the rails, this is generally not the case.

This is not rocket science. It’s been staring us in the face for decades. Now, as we watch the increasingly horrific consequences, it’s still the great unsayable.