What Has Happened to the Parents?

Not only is juvenile delinquency increasing, said the Plainfield, New Jersey, police chief (Plainfield Courier-News, January 22), it is becoming more vicious. He added in words worthy of attention everywhere: “People in Plainfield must be made to realize that juvenile delinquency is a Plainfield problem. It’s not something that happens only in Elizabeth, or Newark or Brooklyn [larger neighboring cities]. It is going on right here in Plainfield. And not just in the poorer sections. The problem exists in all sections of the city, even the best.” In Plainfield, as elsewhere, however, indignant parents say—not here, not our children. He retorted: “Parents don’t know what their children do. They have turned over to social agencies the job they should be doing as parents. . . . Social agencies are expected to do the job parents don’t have time for.”

Several boys had broken into one of the city’s schools, relieved themselves in corridors and smeared filth over the blackboards and walls. Five boys aged 11 and 12 smashed bottles and blanketed a 100-foot stretch of one of the city’s avenues with glass before the police interrupted their efforts to “have some fun”. Four high-school-aged girls, none from poor families, went on a three-month shoplifting spree to get clothes and spending money. They told their parents they borrowed the new clothes, and the parents never questioned their stories. The Courier-News says these are not isolated complaints, just samples of the stream that comes into police headquarters.

Homer Wieder, chairman of the Plainfield Municipal Youth Guidance Council, has also been a teacher, supervisor and administrator in elementary and secondary schools, organized the Parent Child Assistant Committee of Plainfield and has been connected with the Union County Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court. Drawing on this experience, he got to the root of the matter when he said, “We must re-educate our children to respect authority.” He said children have no more respect for authority, either at home or in public. “About 20 years ago a change came over our social thinking,” he said. “We became too sympathetic with our children, we tried to protect them too much, we stopped being realistic. . . . When we were children, we knew what would happen if we got home too late, no one had to tell us. We just knew. We also knew what would happen if we did something wrong in school. Today, children know nothing will happen.”

Social Agencies as Delinquency’s Foes

● “It is difficult to think of children as burglars, gangsters, drug addicts or murderers. Such has become the reality, however,” said an Associated Press report, January 3, that told of a million children getting into trouble with the police every year. A letter to the New York Times, January 13, commented that this is despite the efforts of the social work agencies, and gave the following illustration of this delinquency: “I live in what was formerly New York’s famous ‘dead end’ neighborhood. One warm evening late in the past summer I was an interested eavesdropper, via my living room window, on a meeting between two gangs of teen-agers who were planning a gang fight for the following night. After all the details of the projected mayhem were ironed out one of the older boys (about 18 years of age) asked that both gangs provide volunteer 11-year-olds so that in the event of police interference the gangs could have on hand expendable members for any arrests. Then came the punch line. In the words of the gang leader—‘All they gotta tell the social worker in court is that they hate their mothers and they’ll be out in a coupla hours.’” The agencies have not succeeded in taking over the job in which the parents failed when they did not exercise the authority that the Book inspired by the Maker of man says they should. It is the rejection of that Book’s instruction that has caused both groups to fail.