What would your solution be to stopping children committing crime?

"Bad Parenting" is a bit simplistic for me. Someone already brought it up on the thread but I see they subsequently withdrew the post. What do we even mean by "Bad Parenting"?

When I look at the group of kids I mentioned above and how awful they were (loitering, graffiti, drink, drugs, intimidation, physically accosting, calling out foulness at people, littering, smashing glass and more) - it would have been easy to join everyone else claiming "bad parenting" and that they were "irredeemable". The two things I heard most.

When I look at the massive change I helped instill in them with some moderate effort I realized that all but one of them did not have "Bad Parenting". The one exception had truly awful parents though who not only did absolutely nothing positive for the kid but took personal pride exception to me taking any effort in that direction either. Lacking all self awareness or interest in their son. It was a personal slight to them that anyone would try to better their own child. Everything from screaming to physical (failed) assault on me to try to get me to back off.

The others though did not have "bad parents". They had parents who were doing their best but failing in one or two areas. They were doing everything they could as parents and hitting a wall on their limits of time, resources, energy and money based on their situation. And while the basic and core requirements of their kids were being met (food, home and so forth) some other things were falling by the wayside.

I did not perform any magical miracles or feats of heroics with those kids. I simply augmented what their parents were already doing with an imaginative and inventive side project and it met the needs those kids were missing. Their parents were not "bad". They were just ill equipped or pushed to their personal contextual limits.

And the turn around in the kids was awesome to behold. The self same little old ladies they were previously accosting, intimidating and even physically jostling - they would later be doing their shopping, weeding their gardens, listening to them talk about their old days while eating the freshly baked cookies and more. It was a complete turn around by supposedly "irredeemable reprobates".

I do not know the answer to the OPs question. The "Jedi Acadamy" thing I formed was effort and not scalable really. But I'd say the first step in any solution is - like my own - not to simply throw our hands up and give up and call people "irredeemable" and wave it away with simplifications like "its just bad parenting". If we give up on them first and foremost then the OP will never really get a good answer to his query.

That is why "Bad Parenting" is simply too simplistic for me. It's clearly subjective and means something to you that it does not to me. If a parent is doing everything they can but is falling short because they have hit a point they simply can not do any more then for me that is not "Bad Parenting". For you clearly it is because you have a rigid list of "Shoulds" that if a parent does not reach them all they are "bad parenting". We have two differing subjective definitions therefore.

And that is before you point out that "providing consequences" does not always work. The parents in question might be providing numerous consequences. The child might be acting out / acting poorly anyway regardless. So seeing a child consistently doing "the wrong thing" does not at all support assuming the parent is not "providing consequences". Sometimes consequences are just ineffectual. Not just with parenting and children. In everything. Our justice and prison system for example - people know the consequences and might have even suffered them numerous times - many still re-offend. Worse sometimes consequences PROMOTE the bad behavior because children are so desperate for attention that often "negative attention" is better than no attention at all. So the consequences might reinforce the behavior rather than prevent it because despite it being uncomfortable or horrible it is still serving a need in the child that they need/crave.

I am absolutely with you on the idea of more facilities and spaces too. The issue is that often those facilities go unused. And I do not think like you do that this is just because "acting the scumbag is more fun". Rather it is that a lot of those facilities are "do it yourself" hands off affairs.

An analogy. At Christmas I have seen many parents buy stacks of gifts for their kids. Often maxing out credit cards to achieve it. They bring the kids down on Christmas morning - let them at the gifts - and then think "Right now I can have my sherry and cake and enjoy time with the other adults and these kids have all they could want". It rarely turns out that way. The kids act out the parents think they are selfish because they are acting out despite this pile of expensive gifts.

Other parents I have seen buy little or no gifts. They get nothing or something quite small like a single new board game. They spend Christmas WITH their children. Learning and playing that new game. Doing XMAS things together and so forth. And those children act perfectly fine.

Why? Well like the facilities you suggest - a kid on Christmas morning wants something more than piles of gifts. They want the adults time, and attention. You could live in Clontarf for example where there is not one but MULTIPLE football pitches and play ground and excercise machines and table tennis and the like. Beaches. Sea Fronts. But we expect the kids to just use them and if they do not use them it must be because "they have more fun being scumbags"???

I do not think so. And my experience with the kids I mentioned was that I invested some of my time in them. I got their attention. I started to train them Juijitsu. I got other adults to invest a bit of time teaching them other things. I created a "Jedi Acadamy" where we each spend a little time teaching them pretty much exactly all the things Jedi would learn. And it was that little bit of adult attention, time and guidance that was the trigger for them un-scumbagging. Not the "facilities" or "spaces".

I think very often it is the "there is your toys/facilities now run along and play and leave us grown ups in peace" mentality that is the trigger for the boredom and scumbaggery. Not the quantity and quality of the facilities in and of themselves. But as I said that's not exactly scalable. Im just fortunate I had time and resources and skills to invest - and some mates who had the same - so we could form the academy at all.

Its not that i have a rigid list, its the fact that many parents dont do all they can as its too much hassle. Consequences for wrongdoing are required for a functional society. Yes preventing trouble with better options is wonderful but its also fair to point out the fact that many youths grow up with feck all options and dont commit crime

Well for the sake of the victims we have to do something. Parenting is a very difficult job and part of that is the fact that a parent is responsible for how their teenager turns out.

The vast majority of children in the criminal justice system have very chaotic parents, more often than not with serious substance abuse issues.