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Every parent happily takes credit when his or her child does something well or when they turn out well as grownups. When the child misbehaves, though, it's the child's fault.

When the child has trouble at school, it's the school's fault. When the child develops other unpleasant habits, such as shoplifting or taking drugs or even bullying, the parent searches in vain for someone to blame.

When a child's problem develops into a mild form of mental illness, the parent searches desperately and in vain for help from other sources, especially those sponsored by governments. The governments, in turn, blame the parent. Worse, the governments make the parent fully responsible for what the child does and for any possible recovery program.

A parent in the Canadian province where I live has a child with a relatively mild mental illness. She turned to the provincial government's health care programs for help. She was told that the child's illness was too severe for one program, not severe enough for another. The parent quotes one government official as saying that the best hope for the child would be if the child got involved with street drugs so that a different government sponsored program would kick in.

Without encouragement from the parent, the child began taking illegal drugs. [pause here while you think about that]

We all accept that a child does not come into our world knowing exactly what to do to survive and thrive. Yet we blame the child when it misbehaves. I ask you to think about this: have you ever known a child who made it plain to anyone that he or she wanted to be bad, to misbehave, to upset everyone around him or her? Have you ever known a child to aspire to grow up to be a drug addict, a criminal, a spouse abuser or someone who become chronically dependent on medical prescriptions?

Something is wrong. We're doing nothing about it. Except one thing: we build more medical and penal facilities to house broken people and chronic social offenders.

We all know how a child is conceived. Yet many people want to keep that information away from young people in order to keep them "innocent." No child can be kept innocent for long, unless he is imprisoned. A child can be badly informed or misinformed, in which case we find them growing into naive or antisocial adults.

Even when a young couple conceives and become parents, we have no programs in place to teach them what they need to know as parents. If you are a parent, what did you know about the intellectual or physical development of your child? More importantly--far more importantly--what did you know about the social or emotional development of your child?

Why more importantly? Almost every person in prison today is either underdeveloped or maldeveloped socially or emotionally. About 85 percent of people with mental illnesses might have avoided the problem entirely if they had been able to develop properly socially and emotionally (psychologically). Ask any professional who deals with these people for evidence.

As if that isn't bad enough, every severe problem you have faced in your life (and may yet experience) was much worse than necessary--cost you a higher emotional price--because you did not have the coping skills necessary to deal with them. Coping skills are part of emotional development. We learn to cope with life better as we develop emotionally. That's how people become stronger as they survive more life problems.

The expertise we need is available in our communities, but our governments don't listen because not enough people tell them to care. For politicians, building prisons and mental health facilities and enlarging police forces is easier than making the necessary changes to school curriculum to assist every child with social and emotional development.

Is this hard, this curriculum change? No. We have teachers and classes in place. We can easily teach kids how to make a friend, how to keep a friend, what the responsibilities and necessary obligations of a friend are and what kinds of people should be avoided as friends, for example. It would cost almost nothing.

Teaching about friendship is one of the most important things we can do for a child. Every child needs to learn these and many other lessons.We have nothing in place to teach kids these lessons. We have no programs in place to teach new parents or young people who will one day become parents these lessons to teach their children.

Parenting, the most important function in the life of any person, is the only job we expect every person to be an expert in for which we provide no training. We do not become expert parents just because we were once children ourselves. Remember, most of us did not grow up in a perfect home environment.

Turning It Around (TIA) wants to change that. The book has the lessons for parents and teachers. It even has full explanations to explain every part of what will be needed and how we got where we are today.

We want you to encourage other adults in your community to join together to get your school board to make the necessary changes. At present everyone agrees, but everyone is waiting for others to take the initiative. School boards do nothing because they don't want to be the first to do something new without the support of parents in their communities.

Please speak up. Spread the word.


Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems tells what kids need--what they inherently know they need, even if they can't express their needs in words--not what adults believe that kids should be taught to prepare them for the workplace. Until we address the needs that children have for themselves, personal problems and the resulting social problems will continue to get worse, deeper and more abundant.

Find our group's home page at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/turningitaround 

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"Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought."
- Albert Szent-Gyvrgyi, Nobel Prize for Medicine 1937  

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Bonus: Get the free ebook  "50 Gifts for Life" for joining the TIA support group. This "words of wisdom" book gives parents of teens topics that even the most reluctant of them will want to discuss.
It has loads of good advice for everyone. And the price is so right! Zero.
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Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems