Friday CJ Funnies: The Path to Delinquency Has Begun!

The other night the girls were sitting at the dining room table while I was making dinner. Maya was in her booster seat drooling happily, while Anna was kneeling on the dining room chair coloring a picture. Suddenly, Anna accidentally knocked a crayon off of the table, sending it flying to the ground where it promptly broke in half. Dismayed, Anna looked down at the broken crayon, sighed deeply, and exclaimed, "Oh, damn it!"

I was filled with a strange mixture of amusement, shock, and horror. Granted, as curses go, "damn it" is pretty benign -- a far cry from the F-dash-dash-dash word, to be sure. Still, even as I fought the powerful urge to laugh, my stomach clenched with shame -- I'm nearly certain that she heard it from me.

I'm sure that hearing your child's first swear word is something of a parenting rite of passage*, and I know that I'm certainly not the only parent whose kid has uttered a naughty word or phrase. (Hey, at least we weren't in public, right?) But that doesn't make me feel much better. After all, first step swearing -- next step delinquency!

*In the spirit of full disclosure, I actually remember my own first curse word. I was about 4 -- roughly as old as Anna is now -- and was searching for the perfect name to give the stuffed dog I had just received to go with my Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. Every name I came up with lacked that certain je ne sais quoi I was searching for....and then, suddenly, the perfect name came to me: Raggedy Shit. (I swear I am not making this up.) I remember running into the laundry room where my mother was sorting clothes and announcing, "Mommy! I named my dog 'Raggedy Shit'!" Of course, she wore an expression probably identical to the one I wore the other night. Although I don't recall the ensuing conversation, I imagine it was a lot like the one I had with Anna....and I distinctly remember being forced to select a new name for my dog.

"Huh?!?" CJ Story of the Day

It is not often that I hear a cable news anchor offer an astute criminological analysis (or, really, an astute analysis of any type). And yet, I couldn't agree more with CNN's Mike Galanos about the absurdity -- and potentially devastating consequences -- of this decision:

"A man is jailed because his daughter failed the GED several times"

Honestly, isn't this the most ridiculous thing you've heard in a long time?

Bias in OJJDP Grants?

I was just emailed this article by the people at Youth Today. Anyone who applies for grants from the feds should read this article--if it's true, it's pretty scary stuff.

Zimbardo

So, Beth and Kristy and I often talk about Phillip Zimbardo and his Stanford Prison experiment...and Justin and I talk about deindividuation and disinhibition when we write about kids doing bad things online.

This is a good article from one of my favorite nerd sites about Zimbardo presenting on his new book.

I don't think it's the situation that conduces to evil behavior by individuals. I also don't think that teaching kids "heroism" will counter situational influences. I think it's the lack of a basic moral compass at the onset (and the boldness to act on it in the face of pressures to take the easy way out), and the increasingly relativistic culture in which we are immersed where conscience is rarely if ever implicated - and if it does surface, is quickly suppressed. Often, conscience is the *only* factor that would choose the right behavior - and if that is eliminated or discarded, self-interest and entropy will reign.

Living (and Fighting) in a YouTube World

This morning CNN.com has a link to this story out of Ohio, describing how a video of two junior high girls fist-fighting in a locker room wound up on YouTube.

Here's what disturbs me about this incident: it's not that two adolescent girls got into a (pretty decent) fight. It's that another girl actually stood by and videotaped it! It makes me wonder: was it their intention to post the video on YouTube from the get go? If the fight had been recorded with a cameraphone, I'd say maybe it was spontaneous...but the footage appears to have been filmed with an actual video camera, suggesting premeditation (of both the video uploading as well as the fight itself).

For the second time in as many weeks I am left to wonder: is this just the way things are in today's instant-information society? Unlike the (long lost) days of my youth in which even pre-arranged fights ("Outside by the bike rack at 3:30!") required little actual planning, do preparations to beat another kid's ass at school nowadays include double-checking the video camera batteries?

I am reminded of celebrities' need to be "camera ready" at all times -- even if they just want to run out in their jammies for coffee on a Sunday morning -- because the paparazzi are a mercilessly relentless and constant presence in their lives. Has that same mentality infiltrated adolescent culture, too? Is there a constant awareness among youth when fights like this happen that the whole thing might be "YouTube-worthy"? Did the girl in Ohio wear her cutest skinny jeans the day of the fight, anticipating that the whole world would see images of her online? Pap & Patch can speculate far more knowledgeably than I can, but I would guess that the answer is yes, especially given that another student was there carefully documenting the entire thing...