ADVERTISEMENT

From what I can tell by my mail on last week's sexless marriage column, we have to find a way to re-romanticize family life. When I was growing up, it seemed pretty romantic to me, fun too, not this cheerless tromp through social and professional duties, leavened with competitive ecstatic shopping. In fact, a little too romantic, my brothers and I used to think on Saturday nights, late, when they'd all arrive back from a dance, tipsy, roll up the carpets and put on Sinatra. We'd drag ourselves out of bed, and sit at the top of the stairs wrapped in blankets alternately dozing and trying to figure out what was making them laugh so much, dammit.

My brothers were given a BB gun one summer, and proceeded to shoot out the street lights in the village, then put one neat hole through each of the expensive plate glass windows in a new house. The hell that ensued was impressive, what with the investigation, the actual uniformed sheriff at the door, the brutally hard work it took for 14-year-olds to pay for each lamp and window, the yelling, shouting, and absolutely no interest in what demon possessed them and whether it needed shrinking, "love" or medication. It was more like, would they ever be able to have any fun at all again, ever. Delinquency instantly became a most unattractive option.

Contrast this with the youth gangs currently mobbing American tourists in the B.C. towns of Squamish, Kelowna and Whistler. "They're in packs when I get off work at 12 o'clock at night, with skateboards, ripping out trees and destroying everything," complained one Squamish resident. Bit more serious on the American hockey fan, skier and climber, who were beaten up pretty badly, one hovered near death before he recovered. Not so much reported in the Canadian press as on Seattle TV, where, the mayors of said towns (those who would peep around the barricades in their offices) said: "Oh no, it's not because they hate Americans, it's because they have nothing to do." Town meeting convened, feelings vented, "communication" recommended.

Nothing to do. I sought out one parent who has managed to get up off the couch on this, a 32-year-old Greyhound bus driver from Squamish. James Miller started a Web site a couple of years ago called youthandviolence.com, on which he gets 120,000 hits a month from all over the world. Miller is raising four sons on his own, his wife having flown off to Vancouver with "anxiety and panic disorder, though she remains involved." He points out a few of the things that his popular Web site suggests. This is an area not short on programs and "creative" ideas, and some of these are working in piecemeal fashion, both in the States and Canada. Most require a parent, community volunteer or pastor to actually spend time with the kids. "Nothing to do" comes up again.

It seems to me, I said, that there's a lot more to do than when I was 15. But teenagers need someone to either force them to do it, do it with them, or closely supervise it, right? Otherwise they'll lie around or get into trouble. "Communication," says Miller, using one of the now almost meaningless code words in this area, "is key." You mean they need an adult present? "Pretty much," he said. And the adults, because of broken families, and single moms and so on, are at work? "That's definitely a major aspect," he said. Had they caught the Squamish kids? "No, we know who they are, but they are still assembling evidence." What will happen to them if they are caught and convicted? "The Young Offenders Act is pretty lenient," he says. "Not much."

As Roger Scruton has pointed out, the teenage gang is a comprehensible response to a world in which the rites of passage into adulthood are no longer offered or respected. "After all, on both sides of the Atlantic, the tendency has increasingly been to allow adolescents to define their own social order, their own history, their own loyalties, and their own sense of who they are. This is, indeed, the logical outcome of the 'child-centred' approach to education recommended by Dewey, enthusiastically adopted by a generation of radical teachers."

And where the re-romanticization of family life must come in. "Youth culture is an attempt to make the best of it -- to make oneself at home in a world that is not, in any real sense, a home, since it has ceased to dedicate itself, as a home must dedicate itself, to the task of social reproduction, to the transmission of tradition and responsibility. Home, after all, is the place where parents are. The world displayed in the culture of youth is a world from which the parents have absconded -- as these days, they generally have."

The parents are at work because they have to be. But consider that if we had the same tax structure we had in the '50s, before the crashing failure that is the State writ large, the average family would pay no income tax. Each child would be worth a $12,000 per head annual deduction. That would make the choice of what a parent did with his or her time a lot more real, and fair. Adults, it is possible to argue, are just as infantilised as their teenagers. Worked to exhaustion in order to pay for a hideously expensive apparatus that can't even find and punish a gang of 15-year-olds who beat up innocent American tourists, they can't find the energy to love their children or each other.