KELLY

With Child Month starting tomorrow, we're bound to see a bunch of rhetoric advice on how to appreciate and love your children properly.

But spare a thought for the parents, please. This is to defend the good parents; the ones who live to feed and educate their children and grow them 'the right way'. I'm not talking about the deadbeat fathers, the uncaring mothers who have a baby every year or the couples who traffic off their children for a few dollars.

It is the best efforts of the parents, guardians and teachers that force me to conclude that some of these children are just blooming bad! How else do you explain a single parent working two jobs to make sure that the child even gets an education and yet has to be heading to school every two months because that child is in trouble - again! There's not much else some of these parents can do.

'Schizophrenic' children

Then there are the 'schizophrenic' children. That means the ones who are angels at home but absolute terrors when they get to school. Many parents have arrived at meetings with the principal or dean of discipline, ready to defend their 'saints', only to have it proven that their children are indeed demons of the highest order. I'm sure many school officials have doled out acres of tissue to parents who just burst into tears as they realise their 'little ones' aren't the pristine ladies and gentlemen they thought. When teary-eyed parents enquire of the child why they committed these sins, no answer comes forth. Maybe they feel no remorse, so they play shy.

I've heard adults say the devil has gone loose in the schools. They might have a point. Add to that the violence in society, access to the Internet which can distribute some 'disturbing' images and the fact that parents are getting younger and we have a powder keg.

To be fair, sometimes the school boards don't help. Expel certain students for certain actions. However, sometimes the officials complain bitterly about student rights and loudly advocate giving them second chances. I'm all for second chances, but not at the same school in which the child committed the offence. What the board members fail to realise is that by doing that, it sends the wrong message to the youth that they were right all along and that the teachers are just draconian, sadistic beings determined to make their lives as close to hell as possible. Once students begin to think they are untouchable, then there's no bringing them back.

So this Child Month, let's give the parents and officials who are trying a little more support. It can't hurt.

daviot.kelly @gleanerjm.com