We have raised a generation of young people that have an excuse for every action they take in life. While I do know mental illness is real, I also believe that we are not preparing our children for the world they will walk into once they become adults.
I talk to high school students who tell me that they have to smoke marijuana and take a variety of pills just to stay calm and focus on the activities they will engage in daily.
I hear stories about kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and every other form of mental or emotional illness all the time, and it’s very troubling.
My problem with allowing kids to credit every strife in life with a mental diagnosis is that often society grooms these kids into allowing their illnesses to become crutches that are then snatched away the day they become adults.
I see kids destroying property at home and school when they become frustrated or feel as though they have reached their limit of tolerance and just can’t take anymore. When this happens, as long as they are still juveniles, they are often placed in counseling by people who claim to know best.
However, those same kids reach adulthood and engage in those same methods of dealing with their feelings and emotions when turmoil sets in, and the system suddenly takes a completely different course of action with them.
Just imagine how confusing it must be to be allowed to break things at 16 and receive a trip to a counselor to deal with the emotional tailspin that you are in, when, if you do the exact same thing at 18, you are arrested and transported to jail. That is exactly what is going to happen. I see it happening right here in this small town.
Once you become an adult, the world stops caring about what is causing you to do things, and the focus then turns to what you are doing. We don’t have a system that treats actions the same from childhood through adulthood, and these kids are often not aware of this.
I remember a student that was a handful, to say the least, a few years ago. He was acting out at home, as well as at school. He was cursing and constantly being defiant to every authority figure in his life. He was diagnosed with several mental disorders as a child, and his response to stress was to rebel and act out in a way that was tolerated by the system. After turning 18, he pushed a teacher at school during an argument, which he had done before as a juvenile, but now he was arrested and taken to jail.
I remember seeing his mother bring his medication bag to the courthouse for the deputies to take to the jail for him, and I remember counting about 10 different medications that he was on at the time.
I don’t pretend to have the answers to this issue, but the fact is that what we are doing, currently, is not working. This is not the only place where this problem exists.
One day, out of nowhere, a kid goes from being treated for their mental issues when they do something wrong, to being put in jail if they are 18 years old or older. That’s inconsistent and confusing. Our current system is not communicating this properly to these kids and their families while they are kids.
But hey, that’s my opinion!
We are not preparing our children for the world
