What's wrong with our youth? Is it a psychosocial disorder? Is it the parents?

[fantASTic]

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

o.k. I did a little research on this topic. Here's what I found.

I was right. It has gotten worse. What you guys said about this not being new material was correct, but the problem has gotten worse. There's a book on psychosocial disorders in young people. There's a child psychiatrist and a criminologist that both said there has been a steady rise in youth crime following the 2nd World War averaging a fivefold increase from 1950 to 1990. They weren't just talking about the U.S though. They were talking about developed countries including the U.S.

There was also a psychiatrist that said there are two distinct types of teen criminals. She said that one very common type takes up petty crime in adolescence, based on peer pressure. The other is what I was talking about earlier. She said the other was more problematic, and they start showing signs of antisocial behavior in kindergarten. She said that these kids have biological predispositions to behavior problems. That was pretty much my point. I want to add something to what she was saying. I think this paired with an environment of bad parenting, poverty or abuse puts these kids at high risk of committing violent crimes and spending their lives in and out of the prison system. I don't think it's all genetics.

I also looked at more data from other material, and I found that in both boys and girls who went on to become criminals were likely to have shown some kind of early onset neurological impairment or difficult temperament early in life as young as age 3. The graph that I was looking at also showed an increase.

So how am I wrong. I'm not saying you guys are wrong, because you've made some valid points, but I'm not wrong on the whole issue either.

I really don't believe that kids today are more violent than before. I think there's a lot more exposure of it, though.

You can't really take those statistics as fact, cheerfulgreek. For example...as a scientific reviewer, I would instantly ask you this question: "The standard of what counts as violent crime has been greatly lowered since WWII. Did reviewers take that into account?" It's also worth finding out how much research was actually done on violent crime after WWII...I would definitely believe that a lot more crime went unreported in those days.

Statistics != science.