It’s clear there’s a leadership crisis when leaders talk about social and political issues affecting groups like young people but rarely focus on real, lasting, evidence-based solutions. Instead of blaming others or appealing to instincts for punishment, leaders should address deeper structural, behavioural, or environmental problems.
Instead, leaders spend too much time complaining and shifting responsibility to others, forgetting that real solutions require teamwork across different parts of the government. It’s like throwing a boomerang at someone else, not realising it can come back and cause even more trouble for themselves.
This was especially clear in recent discussions among Caribbean Prime Ministers about school violence. Instead of looking into the real causes and creating better policies, they suggested suspending students and sending them home for their parents to handle. One Prime Minister even said:
“Don’t stress out yourselves trying to help persons who don’t want to be helped, if students refuse to behave properly and parents are ignoring your concerns, send them straight home and let them and their parents battle it out in their house.”
When the public pushed back against this intellectually lazy approach to youth deviance, the Prime Minister stood by her stance. According to news reports, she suggested that anyone who disagreed should “volunteer to take them into their own homes, with their families and deal with them”, treating children as if they were pieces of trash to be moved around.
While comments like these may give some relief to overworked and frustrated teachers tired of constant misbehaviour, they don’t actually solve the problem. We should ask: when was the last time leaders shared real policies or plans for children, parents, and teachers – showing a true investment in education and a belief in its power to help young people succeed?
It may appear to be soothing, but it only kicks the proverbial can to others, who, logically, if they were able to deal with the indiscipline of their children, would have possibly already solved it. But any leadership determined to destroy discipline in children to reach their fullest potential as productive citizens would not engage in such knee-jerk actions, masquerading as well-thought-out policies. Instead, they would first understand that the suspension of children, to be sent to “empty” houses, without parents within them, in an ecosystem of dying communities of yesteryear that would not permit children to be looked after, only creates a vacuum for gangs and criminal enterprises. Even if not as fatal as the latter, it provides an opportunity for the proverbial “idle hands of the devil” to not be engaged in instruction to improve their life chances, but instead to be more susceptible to crime and violence.
To put it simply, what do educators or policymakers hope to achieve by suspending a child? Do they expect the child to reflect on their actions and change, or that parents can just take time off work to handle the situation, even if it means earning less? Or is it really a silent call for corporal punishment, based on the old belief that physical discipline kills nobody and will fix the problem?
Honestly, which of these is the real goal of the mass suspension policy suggested by Prime Ministers, and how does it actually help reduce deviance and crime among children?
The only logical conclusion from this policy measure is that children would be left unsupervised and become victims of nefarious elements and characters within society, causing further deviance on a much larger scale.
In the end, these children may end up in trouble with the law. The same kids we pushed aside and gave up on are now being supported by taxpayers in prison. Instead of investing in their potential, leaders choose the easier path of paying for the consequences of failure. The CARICOM Report on Youth Development even shows that retributive policies cost states more than investing in children’s potential. As Dr Ralph Gonsalves, former Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, often says, leadership is not just about inspiring people, but about helping them discover and use their own strengths for national growth.
As such, a more learned, conscious and intellectually focused approach would also recognise that it is reasonable to ask, admonish, request and also, more importantly, assist parents in taking a greater role in their children’s lives, recognising that the home is where the children learn values, mores, et cetera.
There must equally be a serious investment in parents. If the home is, as sociologists have long recognised, a primary agent of socialisation, then governments should help parents acquire the tools needed to navigate the increasingly complicated task of raising children. Parenting programmes, community-based support, accessible counselling and practical guidance on adolescent development, discipline, conflict resolution, digital influences and communication should not be treated as an admission of parental failure, but as an investment in the family.
Indeed, the question should not merely be, “Why are these parents not parenting properly?” but also, “What practical support are we providing to enable parents to parent effectively in the circumstances in which they actually live?”
But it is also important to understand realpolitik that shows children are not cocooned within the family, and that they are influenced by digital media, friends, the school environment and community, among other influences. As such, these influences also need to be assessed for their contribution to student deviance to chart appropriate solutions to reduce their influence. This is therefore not solely the role of parents as a restraining and influencing agent, but also of the state machinery, which has the power and authority to determine policy that can impact choices, avenues of support and what children are influenced by within society.
This requires government to understand that indiscipline is not necessarily produced by one factor and therefore cannot always be addressed by one institution. Schools should have access, where necessary, to multidisciplinary teams comprising counsellors, psychologists, social workers, special education professionals and other appropriate specialists, who can determine whether a child’s behaviour is rooted in trauma, neglect, family circumstances, learning difficulties, peer pressure, gang recruitment, substance use or other social and psychological factors. For the relatively small number of children whose conduct repeatedly places others at risk, governments could develop properly resourced alternative education and behavioural-support centres, where education continues alongside counselling, anger management, restorative justice, vocational exposure and other forms of behavioural support. The objective should be rehabilitation and eventual reintegration, rather than creating a parallel system in which children are simply discarded from the educational system.
Therefore, the Prime Ministers pedalling this false binary of parent versus educational institutions, as if it is a competition over who should be responsible for ensuring discipline within schools, should use their energy to develop appropriate solutions to this malaise.
The alternative, however, cannot simply be to complain about parents, chastise teachers, or lament the behaviour of children. A government genuinely interested in reducing deviance must build an intervention system that recognises the child exists within an ecosystem of influences, and that the state has both the authority and responsibility to shape that ecosystem. This means moving beyond suspension as the default response and developing a graduated system of behavioural intervention, in which counselling, restorative conversations, parental engagement and behavioural assessments precede, where appropriate, more serious disciplinary measures. Where a child has to be removed from the classroom because of serious or persistent violence, it should not mean removal from education, supervision and support. No suspension should occur without an intervention plan.
The state must also recognise that schools cannot be expected to function as islands. If children are spending their afternoons in communities where gangs, violence and other destructive influences compete for their attention, governments must provide credible alternatives through structured after-school programmes involving sport, music, the arts, homework assistance, vocational training, mentorship and community engagement. A child should have institutions competing positively for their time, identity, belonging and aspirations.
Similarly, universities, particularly our regional universities, such as the UWI, should have the resources to undertake sustained research into youth deviance, school violence, absenteeism, family circumstances, gang involvement, substance use and other contributing factors, so policy is developed from evidence rather than anecdote. We must deliberately bring the intellectual capacity within our universities into the policymaking process, rather than treating universities as places where research is published and then promptly forgotten by the very governments that could use it.
A big part of the solution is for Ministries of Education and others to invest in understanding why misbehaviour happens in schools and society, especially when it leads to violence among young children. We should call for nationwide efforts to find real solutions and move away from harsh, punitive policies. Instead of using social media to shame children, we need to involve everyone in a real conversation about reducing deviance.
Another missing piece is how schools can use more resources and creativity to redesign teaching methods so they can better support students who struggle with behaviour. Simply sending kids home isn’t real punishment, and it doesn’t help them change. Educators and policymakers should create an environment that keeps students in school, not pushes them out. Removing students from school shouldn’t be the answer to bad behaviour, because it’s in school that they can get the support and guidance they need.
Moreover, what government programming exists to improve support and training for parents within society, so they have the requisite tools and skill set to impart proper values and mores to their children? Of course, the knee-jerk reaction is to ask whether the state sent people to make children, and they themselves were children and a bunch of gibberish that does not address the extant reality, or to understand that the implications are more dire than the bitter commentary about who is to blame for “bad parenting”. In fact, without a workable parenting manual that some people have followed, some intervention is needed to make parents’ lives easier and more bearable so they can spend time helping and improving their children’s lives.
But in doing so, we must not ignore that our style of retribution as a response to every public policy issue has not, and has never, yielded the results we hoped for. Instead, we learn to masterfully lie with statistics, masking the failures of retribution, especially when we try it as our first magic trick.
Instead, policymakers could encourage schools to devise their own thoughtful solutions for reducing student misbehaviour, rather than just sending kids home. Sometimes, the best answers come from within the school community.
Finally, governments must become willing to measure whether their interventions actually work. The question cannot simply be how many children were suspended, expelled or otherwise removed from the classroom. It must be whether violence declined, behaviour improved, children returned successfully to education, absenteeism decreased, and fewer entered the criminal justice system.
This means we need to move from reacting to problems to focusing on prevention, rehabilitation and accountability. We should step in early, before a child gets too far off track, instead of waiting until prison is the only option. In the end, the state must choose: invest now in helping a struggling child, or pay later to lock up an adult whose potential was ignored.
