There has been much discussion revolving around the best measure to tackle the escalating rate of criminal activities among young people and a school of thought suggests that the most effective measure is for parents to learn the skills to be more adept at tackling the menace. Nonetheless, I disagree with the view because such a method is no longer popular and there are better ways to handle juvenile offences.
Firstly, making parents learn better methods of dealing with juvenile crimes appears to be out of fashion and has lost popularity among the citizenry. This is predominantly because such skills as authoritative parenting, assertive discipline, creating positive learning environments and so on only boast theoretical effectiveness in the literature without any practical positive impacts. There are several recorded cases of youth theft, assault, vandalism, burglary, harassment and others where the parents of the offenders religiously practised the so-called more efficient children grooming skills but the outcome remained the same. As a result, the practice lost its reputation and a large proportion of parents have removed them from their armoury.
Secondly, it is untrue that the best solution to criminal activities among youths is teaching parents more appropriate ways to combat them because there are several more promising strategies to curtail the pandemic of juvenile delinquencies. These include self-control and social competency training, school-based programs against substance abuse and alcoholism, mentoring, deterrence-based schemes and so on. These measures have been proven in several surveys to achieve the desired results in helping to mitigate juvenile crimes when compared to human efforts alone, no matter how pragmatic the latter might be.
As such, it can be concluded that there is no truth in the assertion that teaching parents more effective child-rearing approaches is the way to overcome the escalating crime rates among young people. Not only are such parenting styles no longer in vogue, there are also more effective alternatives.