Thoughts about adolescents at risk

Each year increasingly more adolescents are engaging in drug abuse, delinquency, teenage pregnancies, and school dropouts. We are gripped in an age that believes in instant gratification regardless of the consequences. Everybody wants to feel good now. We want to experience everything whether good or bad now. We don’t want to wait for tomorrow.

And we adults are losing the battle in preventing our children from engaging in these activities. We are becoming increasingly frustrated despite the huge sums of money we spend on preventive programs. What are we to do? Is there an alternative approach? What haven’t we tried yet?

We must face up to the alarming fact that over one-fourth of our youth will never become productive citizens unless they receive immediate attention. They are growing up without hope of enjoying the benefits that come with adulthood. They cannot become responsible parents because they have will have had limited experience in family life and will lack the resources to raise their own children. It is these deprived that we must focus our attention on. These are the new class “untouchables” or better known as high-risk youth.

There are four major problems that today’s youth face which can cause an impact on their chances of growing up into healthy functioning adults. They are delinquency, substance abuse, early parenting, and school failure. At one time or another a teenager flirts with one or more of the categories. Most will emerge unscathed and go on to lead a normal life. But about 25% of all children or one in four will descend deeper and become ensnared thereby ruining their lives.

In actual numbers this means that if there are currently about 12,000 children in the CNMI, we can expect at least 3,000 potential adolescents to be at risk. They are in dire need of assistance because they are at high risk of engaging in multiple unprotected intercourse, delinquency, substance abuse, and dropouts of school.

Yearly millions of dollars are spent by the Federal and local governments on hundreds of programs to help these adolescents at risk. And many theories are offered as remedies. Yet the number of adolescents at risk keeps increasing yearly. There must be a reason why the programs are not helping the youths for which they are intended. Therefore we must approach from a different angle and search for the main source that causes innocent children to become troubled children.

After much research, all the professionals in child behavior and social work agree on one major point: children who act out through drugs, delinquency, early unprotected intercourse, and school truancy generally lack parental support and guidance. Therefore any program for prevention should focus on making up for that lack of parental support. Therefore we must create a strategy for making parents responsible for the actions of their children. This will help stem the rising number of adolescents at risk.

Joy G. Dryfoos in her book Adolescents at Risk examined over 100 different programs aimed at curbing delinquency, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and educational remediation. She found that many theories abound in curbing the four areas of problems. She accounts also how an increasing amount of money is being spend to curb the rise of youth at risk. Yet, she continues, despite all these worthy efforts the number of problem children keeps rising.

One of the reasons Ms. Dryfoos found is that the various agencies helping the troubled youth do not share information and do not work too closely together. Each seeks more funding and more recognition for its work at the expense of each other. As a result efforts are often duplicated and money unwisely spent. (continued)

Strictly a personal view. Anthony Pellegrino writes every Monday and Tuesday. Mr. Pellegrino can be reached at tonypell@saipan.com