Johnny the weasel..!
Robert Clements
Friday, May 28, 2010 - Previous column was about the cry of a working-woman, but today I’d like to talk about households where the emphasis is so much on working and making money that children are neglected and often feel rejected.
Let me tell you the story of a young lad called, ‘Johnny the weasel!’ Johnny is fifteen years old, the second youngest in a family of three. He grew up in a large urban area. Johnny is one of those kids who has a room for himself, and most of the things money can buy, because there’s money enough to buy all he wants. But at fourteen he was into house breaking.
As he was small and able to squeeze into small spaces the gang to which he belonged called him, ‘the Weasel!’ Next it was into drinking and then into the joy-riding in stolen cars and soon he was well known to the juvenile court and was sent to the reformatory for six months.
His mother and father took time off from their busy schedules to attend the court hearings and pictures in the local papers showed them shocked and angry, “We gave him everything money could buy!” they exclaimed, “We’ve been working our backsides off so that he and his siblings have everything! Why did he do this?” A block away a new centre was opened by the authorities, it was designed for youngsters who were becoming hardened with crime, here there was not one but a team of professionals who started studying Johnny, there was a nurse, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a welfare officer, a house father, a house mother and so on.
They spend forty thousand pounds to keep him there. A lot of money, you’ll agree, and what they found was that if the father and mother had shared a little of the time they had for their jobs with Johnny, if they had been able to give him the love he was looking for, he wouldn’t have grown up with the feeling of rejection, trying to get acceptance from the gang of wrong company he’d walked into.I see this happening more and more in our developing nation and in households where money is plentiful.
Sometimes it’s not that both the parents are working, it could be time spent at kitty parties during the day instead of with your children, or time spent wining and dining rather than with your kids, putting them to sleep with bedtime stories.
And then the children are compensated with fast cars and faster motorbikes and one night when they kill somebody while driving drunk, the parents ask in disbelief, “How could they do this to us?” Ask instead, “How could you have done thus to them?”
—Email: bobsbanter@gmail.com
Let me tell you the story of a young lad called, ‘Johnny the weasel!’ Johnny is fifteen years old, the second youngest in a family of three. He grew up in a large urban area. Johnny is one of those kids who has a room for himself, and most of the things money can buy, because there’s money enough to buy all he wants. But at fourteen he was into house breaking.
As he was small and able to squeeze into small spaces the gang to which he belonged called him, ‘the Weasel!’ Next it was into drinking and then into the joy-riding in stolen cars and soon he was well known to the juvenile court and was sent to the reformatory for six months.
His mother and father took time off from their busy schedules to attend the court hearings and pictures in the local papers showed them shocked and angry, “We gave him everything money could buy!” they exclaimed, “We’ve been working our backsides off so that he and his siblings have everything! Why did he do this?” A block away a new centre was opened by the authorities, it was designed for youngsters who were becoming hardened with crime, here there was not one but a team of professionals who started studying Johnny, there was a nurse, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a welfare officer, a house father, a house mother and so on.
They spend forty thousand pounds to keep him there. A lot of money, you’ll agree, and what they found was that if the father and mother had shared a little of the time they had for their jobs with Johnny, if they had been able to give him the love he was looking for, he wouldn’t have grown up with the feeling of rejection, trying to get acceptance from the gang of wrong company he’d walked into.I see this happening more and more in our developing nation and in households where money is plentiful.
Sometimes it’s not that both the parents are working, it could be time spent at kitty parties during the day instead of with your children, or time spent wining and dining rather than with your kids, putting them to sleep with bedtime stories.
And then the children are compensated with fast cars and faster motorbikes and one night when they kill somebody while driving drunk, the parents ask in disbelief, “How could they do this to us?” Ask instead, “How could you have done thus to them?”
—Email: bobsbanter@gmail.com
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