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By Lorrayne Anthony
TORONTO (CP) - If today's youth seem incorrigible, it's because there are more problem children now than 50 years ago, a study released Tuesday by the Vanier Institute for the Family suggests.
The finger of blame points at everyone: parents, schools, neighbourhoods and the media, said the author of the study, Anne-Marie Ambert, a professor of sociology who recently retired from York University in Toronto. "In the past, parents used to receive the support of their neighbours," she said.
But now, she observed, people are often afraid to intervene if they see children or teens misbehaving in the neighbourhood or at the mall.
Juvenile delinquency rates increased "spectacularly from the 1960s and have peaked in the mid-1990s," the study said.
"Although they have subsequently declined, these rates, as well as those for most problematic behaviours, have remained high among boys and have continued to rise among girls."
Problem behaviours include acts that hurt others, such as being disruptive, aggressive or delinquent.
The behaviours range from lying and running away, to fighting and bullying, theft and vandalism.
The paper is a review of hundreds of studies, mostly from Canada and the United States, that looked at various causes for the rise in children's behavioural problems.
The studies looked at poverty, peers, parenting, schooling, media, personality, genetics and communities.
"The conclusion you reach (after looking at all the research) is that we have a global environment which favours all of this," said Ambert, adding that children and teens are being raised in an "enabling environment."
Forensic psychologist Marta Weber helped develop personality profiling in the United States. She has seen parental influence on children evolve over the years.
"Because parents are spending less and less time with their kids because both parents are working for economic reasons and because the hold parents have on kids is less and less, it's a struggle to be the people who determine the identity of your child," she said from her home in New Mexico.
"What happens in school and in the mall and on the street becomes more and more important. So the variables are more, and the relative impact of parents is smaller. Which is ... you know, that's a hell of a comment."
"That's what Hillary Clinton was talking about when she said it takes a village. Because it is a village - for good or ill - that makes a kid, right?" she said, referring to a book the New York senator wrote in 1996.
The other disturbing trend in North America, Weber noted, is that kids who are headed for trouble appear to do so earlier.
The Vanier Institute study blames parents for being less available to their kids, schools and neighbourhoods offering weak community and social controls, less emphasis on religion, a rise in single-parent families and more access to visual media.
But Ambert stressed that most children are resilient and turn out to be good citizens.
"Obviously a lot of parents are still doing a good job and a lot of children are very well grounded... There are still lots of good schools out there and still lots of good neighbourhoods. There's still a lot of positives that society offers so that the majority of children don't fall into this (problem) category."
"But unfortunately a greater and greater proportion are being affected."
The paper even takes aim at something many women feel is a positive for children: feminism.
Ambert said the only surprise she found when looking at the literature was that more girls are engaging in physically aggressive behaviour than in the past.
"In feminism we have emphasized changing girls much more than we emphasized changing guys. So nurturing sort of has gone out of the way as a role model for females. So that means if you are less nurturing you are more likely to be more aggressive, as males are," she said.
"But on the other hand, we just cannot say it is feminism strictly because this would not have occurred in a context that did not have a violent media and the consumerism media that we have."
But Ambert was quick to point out that it is almost impossible to research the influence of visual media as scientists would have to compare children who have had no exposure to these technologies living in the same environment with children who have been exposed. And no matter how vigilant parent think they are when it comes to their kids' screen time, most children today have had exposure.
Copyright © 2007 Canadian Press
) and that damn women down the road would tell my Mom!!! Were were not perfect and we did lots of terrible things but we had a respect for Authority since Authority came with consequences, soemthing unheard of now. 
