By Hannan Qasim
Habitually, parents are aware of juvenile delinquency’s serious effect, and they are always ready to raise their children properly. However, they may, sometimes, be lax and careless to take tough supervision on their daily youth’s activities. They may fail to provide appropriate trainings and precautionary guidance within ordinary social skills. Hence, they may allow the youth’s behavior to get out of hands and reach to a stage where no one can control them while they are developing antisocial behaviors. At this point, certain parents may angrily overact the youngster’s deviant performance with ineffectual harshness. This is a part of a generally coercive and abrasive study of family interaction. In this situation, intensive healing quality exerts pressure on the orientation of the family rather than the individual by utilizing behavioral techniques.
If we deliberately investigate delinquents who commit minor acts of delinquency, which may mostly start from early childhood stage, we can discover that they are not particularly distinctive in their personal characteristics or family background. Notwithstanding, broken homes frequently establish the kind of delinquency that the youth brought up from their homes of derivation . Domestic conflicts and recurrent quarrelling are more significantly related
to delinquency. Parents who frequently quarrel are often temperamentally not fit to take care of children. The reason is that their psychological tensions and emotional disturbances can influence the child adversely. Thus, the home that was supposed to be a place of protection and care becomes a place of burden.
The child, deprived of care, may develop an inadequate personality and may seek unhealthy contacts in their search for
emotional outlets outside the home. If parents are constantly quarrelling, they do not only suffer from depression, but they also lack an effective supervision provided to them. Moreover, they miss parent-child relationship, necessary feeding, clothing, and joys or socialization with their children . Consequently, the child may have no choice, but to endeavor to cover their basic needs including protection and happiness.
In addition, parents may be very busy with their own problems and business other than care giving their children. Then they may neglect the children. An example of this is when both parents are working either outdoors or indoors. Ordinarily, this causes poor parent-child relationship. It leads to the estrangement of parents from their children. As a result, the children would ignore the value of their parents by relying merely on self -desires.
As a matter of fact, it is the family duty, especially, the duty of the parents to disapprove and shun away small irregular or antisocial acts that may create and trigger off delinquent behavior in the future. As a pre-requisite, parents should feel the responsibility of avoiding any kind of disapproved behavior ahead before it occurs. When shunning away all the possible sources of antisocial behavior, parents should not be pessimistic up to the level where they may show the child or youth irresponsibility. This automatically demonstrates that parents are underestimating their children’s positive qualities and overestimating negativity or overreacting less harmful incidents. This policy of minimal intervention can be applied from different stages in different levels of demonstration according to the youngster’s actions. It would be appropriate to tackle before the appearance of antisocial behavior up to the appearance of the first time offender and minor offenses. If the parent fails to fulfill this duty, they are undoubtedly responsible for any delinquent act committed by their child. The reason is that such delinquency occurred due to their negligence and the result of their weak commitment.
As a causal factor of delinquency, the effect of stress on family members or parental disharmony such as alcoholic parents has a major role in causing and promoting juvenile delinquency. When such an environment coexists with the child’s growth some types of dysfunctional family symptoms or side effects could be adopted by the growing minor. For instance, the younger may decide to behave in some antisocial orders such as; not to talk properly, not to trust others, not to feel and not to envisage. In this circumstance, the young will always keep being alert and self-defensive by seeing everything going on as adversely harmful to him.
Characteristically, adolescents in dysfunctional families may not have the senses to feel. They may be learned from a young age that not feeling is necessary for psychic survival. It is too painful to them to feel the hurt or to experience the fear that comes from feelings of rant and rave, abandonment, moments of terror, and memories of horror. They usually try to repress feelings and not to express any negative emotion. Substantially, those children rarely give attention to the consequence of their acts. They do not care whether they have
been hurt or not and whether their future is bleak or not. They simply insist on saying “I don’t care” by being desensitized.
What has been frequently proven is that teenagers behave according to their early trainings from home or environment. Those who are aggressive at the age of ten years old are mostly those who break the law, and suffer from an absence of well-being-based feelings. In this phenomenon, parents or any other guardians might be able to differentiate among the children who will continue to be aggressive later on. Similarly, parents might be able to identify the youngsters who will continue to steal, or eventually be recognized as chronic delinquents. Meditating about the likelihood of the future may lead us to wish for ways to prevent such outcomes from occurring. Parents can prevent these bad outcomes by enabling to identify those children who are most at risk.
Throughout such constant monitoring and follow up with substantial assessments, parents should maintain regular means of early discussions and negotiations. In this regard, parents are expected to practice fairness, to be consistent, to use calm approaches, to avoid negativity, and to have clear positive expectations. To succeed in the performance of such a behavior, parents must be a good listener, understanding, attentive, oriented, thoughtful, predictor, coordinator, evaluator, appreciator, and fair in speaking and listening. Both in their unification and separation, the two parents must be persistently cooperating towards their children’s progresses regardless of their conflicts and misunderstandings.
Besides that proper training and guidance, parents should play their role in making their teenagers accountable. Teenagers must be given some progressive responsibilities in order to make them reliably responsible and independent individuals. At the age of 15, teenagers must know their role in the world, without waiting for attaining the age of 18. For instance, parents should educate them about marriage responsibility and arrange for or at least encourage them to marry in early age. Allah says: “Test the competence of the orphans until they reach the marriageable age. Then if you feel they are capable of sound judgment, return their wealth to them” (Qur’an: An-Nisa (The Women): 6). In this verse, the term ‘until they reach the marriageable age’ means they can enter a marriage or business contract independently.
When they marry in early age, parents should keep controlling and advising them constantly until they stand on their feet. This would contribute to providing them significant awareness about the means of responsibility, and can make them significant bodies in the community. Eventually, the problem of juvenile delinquency can be actually solved at its early stage of initiation, because the teenager will not have the chance to think about delinquency activities and illicit affairs.
