Reclaiming Youth at Risk

Destructive Relationships

"Consider these children to have fallen among thieves, the thieves of ignorance and sin and ill fate and loss. Their birthrights were stolen. They have no belongings" [Karl Menninger] (1)

When caretakers fail to meet a child's most basic needs, the child learns that they are unpredictable or unreliable. Some children reach beyond their families in search of substitute attachments with other adults or peers.(2)

Contemporary society is creating a growing number of children at risk for relationship impairments. Today, the typical child is reared by a single parent or by parents who both work outside the home. The decline of extended families and intimate neighborhoods leaves an isolated nuclear family. Public policy has not kept pace with the reality that one or two unsupporte adults are often unequipped to succesfully rear their young. (3)

The school is the only institution providing ongoing, long-term relationships with all of our young. Some children spend only minutes a day in conversations with parents, but all are requiered by law to be in extended contact wiht the adults who staff our school. Educators have not yet risen to such challenge.(4)

Research shows that at each progressive level of the education system, relationships increasingly lack meaning and personl satisfaction. Not surprisingly, students at greatest risk of dropping out the school are those who have never been friends with any teacher.(5)

Children are looking after somebody to look up, looking after something to hold, the need of belonging has increased in the world of the children, leading them to look after models to copy, or after relationships that might fulfill the need they present. If we see that relationships are the answer of these need, we may find that gangs, drugs groups, or bands, are fulfiling the need of belonging, if we see the world of the gangs, we see that they provide to the child: propiety [places that the own by fighting for them], name [ nicknames that they get when they join the gang group] and recognitions [ in the case of commit a crime the might get a price or a different position in the gang staff]; this relationship is fulfiling the need of belonging, but in the time it become destructive, it leads the child to commit crimes, crimes leads to the police, the police to jail, jail to new destructive relationships and so on the circucle keep going.
In the same case, school should be the place where children should find the complete oposite side of the relationship, we still seen the same paternts: propiety, name and recognitions, but wiht a complete different focus, oriented to the grown of the children, but educators have not understand this yet, the modern world moves every day more towars consumerism, toward individualism, and toward "I THINK IN ME, YOU THINK IN YOU".

Parents are too stessed, schools are too impersonal, community is too disorganized to fulfill the most basic need of children to Belong.(6)

(1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6) Bentro, Larry; Brokenleg, Martin; & Van Bocken, Steve. Reclaiming youth at risk: Our hope for the future. Bloomington, IN: National Education Service, 1990.