With parents often having their time more invested in their jobs than their kids, many of today’s youth are forced to raise themselves. I, as a part of this generation, have to say that raising myself at thirteen, fifteen or even eighteen years old was not an easy task. I felt grateful for being able to call myself independent and self-sufficient at an earlier age than a lot of people my age, but I also often feel sad because some life lessons were not meant to be learned on my own. It is also very hard to stay on the right path and still being able to distinguish the right from the wrong. There are so many distractions and temptations in today’s society that it is not difficult to deviate from the right path and lose yourself among the wrong crowd.

The kids whose parents are always busy often deal with resentment and hurt. It is heart-wrenching to hear that a mother or a father do not have time to take a child out to a baseball game or a movie because they have a lot of work to do. After a while, it is easy to stop trying to bond with one’s parents and start finding people or things that are a substitute for parental affection. Many adolescents find their satisfaction in having sex early in their lives, trying to find someone who cares for them outside of their family. It is a dangerous path to go down because it often leaves a young adolescent scarred and traumatized by what should otherwise be a fulfilling experience of having sex. It may also leave him or her distrusting of society in general, and it is so hard to gain back the trust and feel safe and secure again.

Some kids raise themselves because one of their parents is simply dead or absent. In today’s society, where an increasing amount of mothers and fathers are raising their kids by themselves without the help of a spouse, a lot of single parents find themselves simply unable to keep up with their child’s life. Juggling jobs, maintaining a well-kept household, and raising children at the same time is a challenging task and some parents leave it up to their kids to raise themselves, lifting some burden off their own shoulders. it is hard to predict the future of kids who grow up in these situations. On one hand, it is encouraging to see some of them taking on the responsibility of an adult and stepping up to the plate as far as going to school, helping out around the house, and maintaining their level-headedness despite being so young. On the other hand, some kids stray away. Seeing their parent struggle may lead them to wanting to get rich quick, make quick and easy money… the wrong way. If the parent cannot keep up at all with what is going on in their child’s personal life, the child is free to make all the bad decision he or she wants. The parents of these kids are often surprised when the police knock on their door informing them that their son or daughter are under arrest for some miscellaneous crime. However, it might just have been that the parents were unintentionally ignoring all the warning signs of a kid’s life spiraling towards rock bottom.

Some parents and children just don’t get along. There might be something said for all kids and adults not getting along at some points in their lives, but this is slightly different. The situation for this scenario would be if a kid acts out against their parents in a, often, vicious manner and the parents handle this by sending their kid away to live with their relatives, boot camp, boarding school, or simply toss them out on a street. While boot camp and boarding school may be temporary solutions to the bickering and quarrels, they do not solve the underlying problems or kids not being able to effectively communicate with their parents and vice versa. I, as a strong advocate for counseling (marital and parent/child), think that sending the children away is not a good idea since the parent does not really know what kind of supervision their children will be getting or what life lessons they will be learning.