The world is getting worse. Divorce is a common thing so children are becoming affected by this. families are being broken.

Well....my guess is.......the amount of really crappy parents skyrocketed around that "time" also.

From what the teens that I've counseled have told me ... It is like they TALK ; BUT no one listens to what they have to say .... They get acknowledged ; BUT ask what they said and no one knows ..... Parents are BUYING their kids attention with cell Phones, I-pods, Video games etc .. instead of making and spending personal one on one time with them ... Many kids do not eart a single meal with another family member anymore .... so NO family interaction ... .. and the list goes on ....

I think there are many, many factors in that. Any simple answer is going to miss the point. But here are a few things that I think are part of the problem. 1) Consolidated public schools only started appearing in more populous areas in the late twenties. They weren't a nationwide phenomenon until about the late fifties or early sixties. The practice of educating kids within the family, church or a one room schoolhouse produces a close knit, tight community in which older kids mentor younger kids. Older kids need to be needed and younger kids need to be mentored. Same age cohorts eliminate that important dynamic. 2)Kids used to play outdoors in the neighborhood. It was still common in the sixties and seventies, but television was taking over more and more of kids time, with another corresponding drop in community ties and community involvement. 3) Church attendance used to be common in most families. Those churches were also tightly knit and loving communities for the first part. As church attendance has dropped, kids have lost yet another aspect of community and connectedness. 4) Communities used to have blue laws that kept businesses closed on Sundays. Sundays were church time and family time. Sunday afternoons were, for many families, time to spend with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Loss of that time was yet another loss in community. 5) The Kennedy assassination and Watergate, which destroyed the faith of many young people in their government made young people wary of committing their allegiance to the country and from deriving a sense of belonging from it. People need to belong to something. People need to give their loyalty to someone. 6) And you knew I was going to get around to this, but I do think that removal of prayer from school had an effect. I'm not sure if this is a function of prayer belongs in school, or that school should not be so all encompassing that kids don't have time to get it in at home. Truthfully, I feel that public education has become way too Brave New World. The idea that the state knows better how to raise kids than parents is frightening to me. I'm homeschooling. I didn't bear this child so someone else could raise her. I'm going to have to answer to God for how she is raised, and I'll be darned if I'll trust it to someone else and answer for their failure. A hireling does not care the way a parent does. 7) Electronic gadgets are extremely isolating. Television started the trend. Computers, Blackberries, Ipods and the like are only cementing that isolation. 8) Families used to talk to each other. Even when kids were expected to be seen and not heard, they had the undivided attention of their parents at some point during the day. They had the attention of siblings. They often had grandparents and unmarried aunts and uncles in the house to go to. There was always an open lap for a hurting child to climb into. Human beings are not meant to be alone. God saw early on that it was not good for a man to be alone and created woman. Of all the creatures in the world, women were the only ones that the Bible says were created out of man, not out of dust. We are two halves of a whole, not separate creations. As the book I am currently reading points out, Jesus never sent anyone out alone. Even to retrieve a donkey, He sent out two men together. We need companionship. We need belonging. We need community. We need loyalty. We need close friends. We need conversation. We need to lead and be led. We need mentors and we need to mentor. We have isolated children in a sea of technology and we wonder why they are depressed. We need to bring them back into community. We need love them.

So has "illegal" drugs! I'm think'n there's a correlation!

Because the "man" wants you to stay alive. We got to rebel against the man, yo, because then we can get all the hot girls.