Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them

Brought to you by National PTA®

by James Garbarino

The morning after the May 1998 school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, my 16-year-old daughter sat at the breakfast table reading the newspaper. After she finished the detailed account of the attack by 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden on their school mates, in which four people were killed, she looked up and said, "I wonder who it will be in our school?" Her sense of vulnerability is shared by children and youth everywhere, and by parents, teachers, and administrators throughout the country.

For the past 25 years I have been studying the problem of violence in the lives of children, youth, and families, in homes, in schools, in communities, and in war zones around the world. Most recently I have been interviewing boys incarcerated for committing crimes of lethal violence. As a result of my investigations, I have drawn four conclusions about why boys (who commit more than 90 percent of all lethal assaults) turn violent and how we can save them--conclusions that parents can use in their efforts to make schools and communities safer.

1. Violence prevention is everybody's business. No matter how effective, motivated, and attentive any of us are as parents, our children go to school with boys who are lost and who have access to lethal weapons. Knowing how these boys reach this point and what we can do to reclaim them empowers us to reduce the odds that they will commit acts of lethal violence.

2. Education for parents (starting before children are born) and teachers is crucial to giving them the special skills and motivation necessary to create home and classroom environments that prevent violence.

   The problem of lethal youth violence usually starts from a combination of early difficulties in relationships that are linked to a combination of difficult temperament and negative experiences. Every parent who knows children knows that children come equipped with different temperaments. Some are sunny and easy; others are stormy and difficult. Some children are easy to parent; others are very challenging. When it comes to developing patterns of aggression, some of the difficulties lie in children being impulsive; emotionally insensitive; having a high activity level; being of less than average intelligence; and being relatively fearless.

   These temperament problems do not spell doom, however. What matters is how well the parenting and educational experiences of these children meet the challenges posed by their difficult temperaments. Trouble can arise when parents (and teachers) abandon these children by withdrawing from them in the face of their negative behavior. This pattern of response increases the odds that these vulnerable children will become increasingly frustrated and out of sync as they meet the challenges of paying attention in school.

   Once they are "lost" this way, boys tend to form aggressive and anti-social peer groups that build negative momentum throughout childhood and into adolescence. This can be avoided. Research by Sheppard Kellam and his colleagues demonstrates that if a 1st-grade classroom is well organized and provides clear messages about behavior, boys' aggressive behavior is tamed. If the classroom is chaotic, aggressive boys form negative peer groups and their problems with aggression intensify.

   Children whose difficult temperament puts them on track for problems with aggressive behavior need help from parents and teachers to learn to manage their behavior. Research shows that patterns of aggression start to become stable and predictable by the time a child is 8 years old. Unless we do something to intervene, children identified as aggressive at age 8 will tend to be aggressive 30 years later--becoming adults who are violent in their families, get involved in fights in the community, and drive their cars aggressively.

3. Child abuse prevention is the cornerstone of preventing lethal youth violence. The most common pathway to this pattern of aggression at age 8 is for temperamentally vulnerable children to be the victims of abuse and neglect at home. As a result, these children develop a negative pattern of relating to the world in general. This abusive maltreatment can be both physical and psychological.

   The negative pattern that results in these children has four parts:

   • being hypervigilant to the negatives (such as threatening gestures) in the social environment around them
   • being oblivious to the positives (such as smiles)
   • developing a tendency to respond aggressively when frustrated
   • drawing the conclusion that aggression is successful in the world.
   According to research by psychologist Kenneth Dodge and his colleagues, this negative pattern is the most potent link between a child being the victim of maltreatment and developing a pattern of chronic bad behavior and aggression--what will be diagnosed by mental health professionals as "conduct disorder." Being abused produces a seven-fold increase in the odds of children developing conduct disorder. About a third of children with conduct disorder will eventually become violent, delinquent youth. In juvenile prisons, typically about 80 percent will have shown this negative pattern. And about 90 percent of children with conduct disorder demonstrate some serious problem in adulthood.

4. Detoxifying the social environment of children and youth is essential to protecting them from the problem of lethal violence. Lost, troubled boys will be as bad as the social environment around them. I have identified this as the issue of "social toxicity," the presence of social and cultural poisons in the world of children and youth, to which lost boys are especially susceptible. The glorification of violence on television, in the movies, and in video games is part of this social toxicity, and it affects aggressive boys more than others.

   The same is true for the size of high schools. Lost boys are particularly affected in a negative way by being in big schools (more than 500 students in grades 9-12). The availability of drugs and guns is another example. The shallow materialist culture in which we live--a culture that undermines spirituality--is another.

   One way to deal with all these issues is to have schools join with community leaders to develop effective ways to build children's character. This can provide a rallying point for improving the social environment in which our kids grow up, and in which so many of our boys today become lost to aggressive and violent behavior. The cost is too great not to take action.

   James Garbarino, Ph.D., is codirector of the Family Life Development Center and professor of human development at Cornell University. This article appeared in the May 1999 issue of National PTA's Our Children magazine and is adapted from his new book Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them.

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