Parental Alert!
Most parents are concerned about their children's welfare. This is a parent's duty, after all. To raise children, to gift them with values, with the awareness that they are valued themselves. To enable them through the instructions of care and love to be decent, caring human beings.
Parents can do so much; instill in their children the ethics and morals with which they are able to build a life for themselves within the society they are an integral part of. Parents never quite stop worrying. At each stage and each age of development there are emotional and practical hurdles to be faced and successfully dealt with.
And when, ultimately, those infants and young children become young adults there is a time when parents must step back, give their children some independence, trust their abilities to control situations into which they are thrust by chance or design. And through this process, watch as their children develop into responsible adults.
This happens, with the parents always aware of a nagging worry that something can go awry. But the somethings that go awry are invariably fleeting and solvable and no harm done. There are, however, those rare occasions when destiny has somehow designed an immoderate fate for one's child, and with that comes the ultimate sorrow of losing a child.
How much more alert can parents be than those who just happen to be a part of the criminal justice system? They are aware of all facets of human life, from the most degrading to the more elevated incidents that occur on their watch. They are fine-tuned instruments of society's care for the community, knowledgeable and careful in their knowledge.
Some of this care they pass to their children. Not wishing to instill a sense of foreboding, but to make certain their children are aware of certain pitfalls. Above all, in the company they keep. But then, how to control events which conspire against the best laid plans of defence?
When a young girl of seventeen, feeling herself insulted, enlists the help of a boyfriend the same age, in her intention to destroy the life of a younger girl whom she claims has defamed her, one shrugs such an event off as teen-age angst.
Not, however, when the threats become very immediate and very real. And at that point parental concern comes to the fore, and the parent, a police officer married to another police officer, approaches the two young people who threaten harm to her daughter, eliciting from them disturbing responses, yet not disturbing enough to alert the mother to her daughter's imminent danger.
And then on New Year's day in 2008, to arrive home in the wake of an urgent telephone call from their 12-year-old son that 'someone' has been stabbed near their home. It was her 14-year-old daughter, the stabbing victim, dead, outside her east Toronto home. Murdered by a young man who found himself unable to resist the insistence of his girlfriend.
What kind of children do we raise? These young people who, under Canada's Youth Justice Act cannot be named because of their ages, have marked themselves for life. Their conspiracy to take the life of Stefanie Rengel marks them as more instances of society's failure to raise competent, caring human beings.
Parents can do so much; instill in their children the ethics and morals with which they are able to build a life for themselves within the society they are an integral part of. Parents never quite stop worrying. At each stage and each age of development there are emotional and practical hurdles to be faced and successfully dealt with.
And when, ultimately, those infants and young children become young adults there is a time when parents must step back, give their children some independence, trust their abilities to control situations into which they are thrust by chance or design. And through this process, watch as their children develop into responsible adults.
This happens, with the parents always aware of a nagging worry that something can go awry. But the somethings that go awry are invariably fleeting and solvable and no harm done. There are, however, those rare occasions when destiny has somehow designed an immoderate fate for one's child, and with that comes the ultimate sorrow of losing a child.
How much more alert can parents be than those who just happen to be a part of the criminal justice system? They are aware of all facets of human life, from the most degrading to the more elevated incidents that occur on their watch. They are fine-tuned instruments of society's care for the community, knowledgeable and careful in their knowledge.
Some of this care they pass to their children. Not wishing to instill a sense of foreboding, but to make certain their children are aware of certain pitfalls. Above all, in the company they keep. But then, how to control events which conspire against the best laid plans of defence?
When a young girl of seventeen, feeling herself insulted, enlists the help of a boyfriend the same age, in her intention to destroy the life of a younger girl whom she claims has defamed her, one shrugs such an event off as teen-age angst.
Not, however, when the threats become very immediate and very real. And at that point parental concern comes to the fore, and the parent, a police officer married to another police officer, approaches the two young people who threaten harm to her daughter, eliciting from them disturbing responses, yet not disturbing enough to alert the mother to her daughter's imminent danger.
And then on New Year's day in 2008, to arrive home in the wake of an urgent telephone call from their 12-year-old son that 'someone' has been stabbed near their home. It was her 14-year-old daughter, the stabbing victim, dead, outside her east Toronto home. Murdered by a young man who found himself unable to resist the insistence of his girlfriend.
What kind of children do we raise? These young people who, under Canada's Youth Justice Act cannot be named because of their ages, have marked themselves for life. Their conspiracy to take the life of Stefanie Rengel marks them as more instances of society's failure to raise competent, caring human beings.
Labels: Human Relations, societal failures
posted by Pieface @ 6:28 PM
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