The nation is afflicted with an epidemic of mal-parenting. How do we know? The persistence of shocking levels of juvenile delinquency and crime. The posterchild case is Ethan Crumbley, guilty of murdering four students at Oxford High School in southeastern Michigan in 2021 and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

You do not need to be a criminologist to understand the nexus between parental mal-parenting and crime. It is as obvious as the force of gravity. If there is a father in the household to impart discipline and provide a role model of righteous behavior, and a mother to provide tender loving care in times of child adversity, the probability of juvenile waywardness approaches zero. The greatest influence on children is parents. Second is not even within shouting distance.

Parents should spend hours daily with their children reading and discussing books that impart moral lessons like parables. Here is a partial list: Aesop’s fables, “Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology,” Charles and Mary Lamb’s “Tales from Shakespeare,” Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Men” and “Little Women,” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. If you don’t want to make the effort and sacrifice, then don’t be a parent. It is a status freely chosen.

Parents should also regularly take their children to museums. For starters, the National Museum of African American History and Culture; the National Museum of the American Indian; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; the Smithsonian National Museum of American History; and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Parents should take their children on outings to Lexington Battle Green, Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, Yorktown, the Gettysburg Battlefield, Ford’s Theatre, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the Alamo, Tuskegee University and the Wounded Knee Battlefield. They should take them to performances of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

If parents do all these things, children will be so excited by learning and inspired to righteousness that crime or delinquency will never enter their minds. And the out-of-pocket costs for parents are de minimis.

Every bride and groom should be required to master these lessons before marriage. They should be preached in the pulpit and taught in the home. Federal, state and local governments should issue Parents of the Year awards superior to the kudos showered on beauty queens or football heroes. Hollywood should glamorize irreproachable parents, making them de rigueur. It’s well worth the investment. As Frederick Douglass admonished, “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

Mountains of criminological literature tell us the root causes of crime are poverty, discrimination, failing schools, lack of jobs, or the vestiges of centuries-old oppression. But crime trended down during the Great Depression and spiraled during the boom years of the 1960s. It all comes back to the family.

It’s easy to blame kids rather than parents. Kids have no votes. Parents do. Kids have no financial resources. Parents do. Kids are inaudible. The voices of parents are heard. It requires maturity and intellectual honesty to acknowledge we have a parent problem, not a delinquency problem.

I understand that excellent parenting is arduous, demanding and time-consuming. It requires forgoing a tempting menu of hormonal gratifications. It is not for everyone. In his first public address as vice president, JD Vance declared, “I want more babies in the United States of America.” The declaration is unobjectionable as far as it goes. But more babies without more enlightened, selfless parents are a problem. The chief victims of mal-parenting are the children whose lives are stunted and ruined.

Parents everywhere, the ball is in your court.

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