Book Excerpt: It Takes a Parent

ByABC News via logo
August 3, 2005, 9:57 AM

August 18, 2005 — -- Betsy Hart, mother of four and nationally syndicated conservative columnist, sees how horribly behaved today's children and blames the culture of "pushover parenting." Parents are creating monsters by catering to their children's every whim and by allowing kids to make important decisions that really fall under parents' jurisdiction. Hart wonders how these "it's all about me" children will ever experience true joy, and worried about their hearts. She also tells you how to get your child back under control.

You can read an excerpt of It Takes a Parent: How the Culture of Pushover Parenting is Hurting Our Kids--and What to Do About It below:

A 2003 Time magazine article asked the question "Does Kindergarten Need Cops?" Apparently, the answer is yes. Time reported that a first-grader in Fort Worth, Texas, was asked to put a toy away. Instead, she began to scream. "Told to calm down, she knocked over her desk and crawled under the teacher's desk, kicking it and dumping out the contents of the drawers. Then things really began to deteriorate. Still shrieking, the child stood up and began hurling books at her terrified classmates, who had to be ushered from the room to safety."

"Just a bad day at school?" Time asked rhetorically. "More like a bad season. The desk-dumping incident followed scores of other outrageous acts by some of the youngest Fort Worth students at schools across the district."

A little one shouting "Shut up, bitch" at a teacher, the biting of another teacher by a kindergartner—so hard it left marks—and a six-year-old who became completely hysterical, took off his clothes, and threw them at the school psychologist are among the highlights.

These are not deeply troubled kids from dysfunctional homes, either. These are normal, healthy kids, many from middle-class, two-parent families, who have not been found to be emotionally disturbed.

Michael Parker is the program director for psychological services at the Fort Worth Independent School District, which serves eighty thousand students. He told Time that he's clearly seeing an increase in aggressive behavior from very young children. "We're talking about serious talking back to teachers, profanity, even biting, kicking, and hitting adults, and we're seeing it in five-year-olds."

Houston, we have a problem.

The word "Columbine," the name of the Littleton, Colorado, high school where two boys from upper-middle-class families went on a shooting spree that resulted in thirteen fatalities and the boys' suicides, sends shivers down our collective spines. What happened to those kids? Well, all we really know is that something went terribly wrong a long time before they hit high school.

In 2004, the Partnership for Children, a local child-advocacy group in Fort Worth, released the results of a survey of local elementary schools, child-care centers, and pediatricians. The findings, according to Time: almost all of the thirty-nine schools responding reported that kindergartners today have more emotional and behavioral problems than were seen just five years ago. More than half of the day-care centers said incidents of rage and anger had increased over the previous three years.

And it isn't just something in the Texas water.

Dr. Ronald Stephens is the director of the National School Safety Center, based in Westlake, California. Although there is no official reporting mechanism for acts of violence committed by very young children, he told me that the anecdotal evidence is mounting—and showing that behavior problems are rising at a staggering rate. Stephens points to the dramatic increase in the number of alternative schools created for disruptive elementary students in just the past ten years. A decade ago, he says, such schools for the very early elementary grades were virtually unknown; today, at least one thousand of the fifteen thousand school districts in America have them. They are "commonplace and growing," he told me.

Stephens's organization conducts seminars and training for teachers across the country, and anecdotal evidence of kids out of control is common in their workshops. One petite teacher was attacked so viciously by a large six-and-a-half-year-old that she left her job for six months. Another woman, a first-grade teacher for twenty-five years, reported that she literally could not handle some of her current charges because their behavior was so extreme.

A study conducted by the National Association of School Resource Officers (primarily school law enforcement and safety personnel) and released in August 2003 found that more than two-thirds of school police officers believed that younger children were acting more and more aggressively. More than 70 percent of the officers reported an increase in aggressive behavior among elementary schoolchildren in the past five years.In June 2000, the journal Pediatrics released a study of pediatricians with twenty-one thousand patients collectively. The Associated Press summarized things this way: "The number of U.S. youngsters with emotional and behavioral problems has soared in the past two decades."

These increases cannot be dismissed as being due to changes in medical training and diagnosis, said Dr. Kelly Kelleher of the University of Pittsburgh and Children's Hospital, the study's lead author. In fact, according to the AP report, the highest problem-identification rates were by doctors who trained three decades ago and more. Instead, the findings suggest that most of the change was due to "an increase in problems and the kinds of patients they're seeing," Kelleher said. The largest changes were in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which increased from 1.4 percent to 9.2 percent, and emotional problems such as anxiety and depression, which increased from negligible to 3.6 percent.

In 2003 alone, more than two million prescriptions were written for antidepressants for children, according to the Washington Post. Of course, the "older generation" has been complaining about "kids gone wild" since the beginning of time. From Socrates to the Puritans—to my own parents, who opposed my girlhood devotion to singer Rod Stewart—we've had laments about how the out-of-control younger generation is always, it seems, worse than ever. But these complaints have traditionally been about the generation coming of age—teenagers and very young adults, not about five- and six-year-olds.

And what about older children and teens? Sadly, we're no longer shocked to hear of such things as an eight-year-old child in the heart of the Midwest—Indianapolis, Indiana—pointing a gun at a classmate because the other child teased him about his ears. Twelve-year-olds in affluent Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., were regularly holding sex parties where oral sex was de rigueur, according to the Washington Post. But was anyone really surprised?

Teen suicide rates are now the third leading cause of death among fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds and the fifth leading cause of death among ten- to fourteen-year-olds, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. In the fifteen to twenty-four age range, suicide rates have tripled for males since 1950, and doubled for females.

There have been widespread rumors about declines in youth violence. But according to a 2001 report from the Surgeon General of the United States, these rumors are not accurate. The report states, "This report has looked beyond arrest and other criminal justice records to several national surveys in which high-school-age youths report in confidence on their violent behavior. These self-reports reveal that the propensity for and actual involvement of youths in serious violence have not declined with arrest rates. Rather, they have remained at the peak rates of 1993."

The report goes on to note that arrest rates for teens committing violent crimes has begun to climb again.

Of course, most of what I'm describing is really the extreme, right? Well, yes. After all, thankfully, most six-year-old kids don't beat up their teachers. So these studies and anecdotes describe an increase in problems on the far side of the ledger. But before we collectively breathe easier, we have to admit the scary part: the entire child behavior spectrum has shifted in the wrong direction.

This comment came from a grandmother in Florida who wrote to me in response to a column I'd written on out-of-control kids:

Today I am very much involved in taking care of the children in the church nursery, and there is a little three-year-old girl who will scream and throw tantrums and throw everything in sight if she is not catered to constantly. The parents of this little girl do cater to her every whim, and they want everyone else to do the same. This little three-year-old is definitely in charge...