A grandfather gathers his grandchildren and offers them a challenge. He can’t find his gun, he says. He only just had it, only just the other day, and now he can’t place it, and he’s thinking he can put all these kids to work to help him look for it. He makes it like a contest, offers a reward to the grandchild who turns it up, drums up enthusiasm for the search in what ways he can.
The children jump at the game, because that’s how the old man sets it out, like a game, an adventure. They’d been bored, rattling around their grandfather’s house on a rainy afternoon with nothing much to do, and here the old man presents them with this scavenger hunt, with the promise of a prize, even. Plus, it’s not just a kid’s game he’s laid out for them; it’s not like they’re looking for a toy or a set of car keys; they’re looking for a gun—a real-live, real-deal gun. They’re off on important business, helping out their grandfather.
The cousins split into groups of two and three to begin their search. There are a half-dozen or so kids, ranging in age from eight or nine to thirteen or fourteen. The grandfather can never keep track, but he’s pleased with himself for coming up with an activity to keep them all occupied—and in the bargain, maybe one of them will turn up his gun after all.
And that’s just how it goes. The nine-year-old and the eleven-year-old come upon the weapon after just a few minutes. The cousins are like brothers—close in age, close in appearance, close in temperament. They do everything together. The older one picks up the gun and checks it out. He’s handled a gun before. He thinks he knows what he’s doing. He takes out the clip and pretends to shoot his younger cousin. It’s all a part of the same game, his grandfather’s game, but it’s also a game he and his cousin have played out a thousand times before in their imaginations, with toy guns, or just pretending.
He’s got no idea there’s a bullet in the chamber….
The most chilling part of this scenario is that it actually happened, and the eleven-year-old turned up in my courtroom charged in the shooting death of his nine-year-old cousin. Can you imagine? It was one of the most heartbreaking cases I ever heard, because it was such a senseless, ridiculous, tragically horrifying set of circumstances—entirely preventable, if you ask me, if the old man had shown even the smallest amount of good judgment or the slightest ability to think ahead. And the fallout would tear this family apart. Really, there’d be no repairing what this grandfather had wrought with his stupid game. Step back and look at it: two adult sisters, one with a child dead at the hands of the child of the other. An eleven-year-old boy who for the rest of his life would have to live with this terrible truth—that he had shot and killed his young cousin, a boy who had been like a brother to him. And a nine-year-old boy, blown away by the horseplay and foolishness that, when you break it down, could not have shaken out in any other way.
Running through it all, there was this grandfather, who was nowhere to be seen in my courtroom. I might have known. His hands were all over this mess, and he’d turned tail. His daughters were there, doing what they could to hold each other up and move forward. His grandson was there, innocently facing the charges against him. There were other family members present, and friends all around, making the old man even more conspicuous by his absence. I still resent the fact that the district attorney didn’t go after this guy on criminal charges. After all, it was his no-account foolishness that had set this whole heartbreak in motion. Sending all those children off to look for his loaded gun? What the hell was he thinking? And my anger and resentment weren’t all at the district attorney. No, some was at myself. I should have hauled the grandfather into my court—at the very least to make sure he understood his culpability. But I didn’t. I should have, but I didn’t, and I regret that I didn’t.
What I was able to do was put the eleven-year-old boy on extended, long-term probation—not because the child needed punishing, or to be placed on any kind of strict monitoring, but because he needed counseling, and the family didn’t have the resources to get the child the kind of treatment I felt was essential. This way I could arrange it so that the boy and his mother and his aunt and the rest of those cousins could get the help they needed, on the state’s dime, talk to the people they needed to talk to, and hopefully get past this traumatic ordeal. In its own way, the system provided for instances such as this, and I worked to make it happen; underneath, I knew these good people could never really get past these dreadful moments, but I felt I had to help them try to cope and move forward.
I set this story out as one of the most alarming red flags I’ve encountered to remind us how important it is to choose our words carefully when we speak to our children, to see situations clearly, from all sides, and to be abundantly and absolutely consistent, in all things, at all times. I’m still incensed at this grandfather after all these years but not because I ever thought he intended for this tragedy to happen. Let’s give him the benefit of that doubt. It’s not even because he was too stupid to recognize that this was how things might have gone. Let’s assume he didn’t have the tools to go out that far in his thinking. But there’s no way I can excuse or even understand this man’s directive, even if all those grandkids had spent the entire day looking for that gun and had never found it. I mean, the Children’s Defense Fund has had some pretty harsh words to say to parents for not taking extra measures to conceal their licensed firearms and keep them out of the reach of children, and I don’t imagine those folks would take a positive view of this man’s sending his grandchildren off in search of his weapon—especially when it came to light that at least one of them knew enough to take out the clip before firing, a ritual the boy most likely learned at his grandfather’s knee.
Clarity and consistency are all-important communication tools, and this is especially so when we talk to our kids. Now my hope here is that you look past the sketchy details of the shattered family above and see something of your own situation. No, I don’t expect that you’re out there putting your children directly into harm’s way, the way this grandfather did, but there have undoubtedly been times when you’ve sent a confusing or conflicting message, when something you’ve said or done left the door open for a negative situation to come calling.
Let me pull back a bit and consider an illustration from my own household. Granted, it’s a whole lot less consequential, but there are consequences to every exchange we have with our children, even the ones that don’t end in tragedy.
Charles was four or five years old, and we were sorting through his old clothes, putting some of the stuff he wasn’t wearing anymore in a box for Goodwill. It was, I thought, an important message for him to take in, even at that young age, that what we have in plenty we must also share, and as we considered each article of clothing, we talked about the little boy who might enjoy it now that Charles had grown out of it. It really was a sweet moment, and I remember thinking to myself how important it was to include Charles in the process. As messages went, I thought, there were none bigger—but then Charles went and flipped the whole scene on me, and in his own way he managed to reveal his mother as something less than clear (and a little two-faced, besides).
We came across a pair of raggedy old jeans that he had worn through at the knees, and as I instinctively moved to place the jeans in the box, Charles pulled me back.
“Mommy,” he said, “we can’t give these pants to a poor child.” He pointed to the holes at the knees and finished his thought: “Just because someone is poor doesn’t mean they have to be embarrassed.”
Now it was I who was embarrassed, because of course he was right. I’d been so caught up in the mechanics of what I’d set out to do—sorting the items by season and size—that I failed to look at the scene from Charles’s perspective. Of course, what he was seeing confused him. Of course, the mixed message of boxing his old clothes for charity didn’t mesh with the sight of a worn-out pair of pants. Of course, Charles’s observation made perfect sense and was far more consistent with the spirit of our giving than my piling the clothes into boxes.
The footnote to this moment was that Charles and I went to the fabric store, bought some patches, and together sewed them in place, and this time when we folded the patched pants and placed them neatly in the box, Charles was well satisfied that we were indeed giving some little boy something he could feel proud to wear.
So let’s be clear: Sometimes it takes a child to bring a little clarity to a parent’s perspective. And sometimes it takes a parent to pause for a bit, catch her breath, consider her child’s view, and start over.
My own parents were endlessly clear and consistent in their dealings with us kids, and I have to think that their care and attention in this area informed the person I became. At least, they kept me striving. My own kids are growing up in a much more permissive, entitled environment, with a whole lot more going on in terms of outside influences and external impulses, so I’ve necessarily had to adapt. I honestly don’t think a rigid approach would work in our home, in our community, at the turn of this particular century. Times have changed. Customs and standards have changed. We have changed. But what hasn’t changed is the need for parents to be firm and focused, to hold out a set of reasonable expectations for their children to meet, and to hold them to it. Curfew is a good example. If you set curfew at eight o’clock and your child comes moseying in at eight-fifteen and you don’t say anything, you’ve set a dangerous precedent. If the next weekend he wanders in at eight-thirty and you still don’t say anything, you’re headed for a clash, because at some point, when your child comes in at ten o’clock, or eleven, or midnight, and you finally snap, he’ll be able to point back to your lax attitude and previous nonenforcement as a source of confusion. The responsibility will be yours as much as his.
I was never confused by my father’s ground rules, and he was never lax about enforcing them. If he gave me a curfew, I was meant to keep it, down to the minute—no questions asked, no excuses heard. With my own kids, there’s been some retooling. Here’s an example: Charles came to me when he was old enough to drive and proposed that he have no curfew at all. I looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, and I said as much, but he pressed his point.
“Mom, it’s not that crazy,” he insisted, “just hear me out.”
So I heard him out, and I hated to admit it but he made sense. He’d always shown good judgment, he was extremely responsible, I trusted him implicitly, and he ran with a good group of kids who for the most part displayed the same characteristics. Then he made some reasonable points: He reminded me that he’d be going off to college in two years (as if I needed reminding!), where he’d be on his own without a curfew, and he suggested we’d all do well to get him used to the concept now, while he was still on my watch. He also pointed out that a lot of times kids with curfews get themselves into trouble when they lose track of time and find themselves running late and maybe driving home a little too fast in order to beat the clock. Indeed, I’d heard a few such cases in my courtroom, so I knew that situations like these did occur, although I must admit those cases were few and far between. Of course, my response was invariably that they should have planned ahead to avoid having to speed home. Nevertheless, I listened respectfully to Charles’s appeal and promised him I’d take it under advisement, which I did.
After careful consideration, I surprised myself by seeing things his way—at least on an interim basis. My father would have cringed if he’d lived long enough to see Charles with his curfew lifted in the summer after tenth grade, but I felt I owed it to Charles to give his proposal a dry run. He’d earned that much at least. And do you know what? We never went back to a curfew situation. For the most part, he’d come home far earlier than any curfew I would have set, that’s how determined he was to prove to me that he was responsible. I only had to reprimand him once in the two years before he left for college, and on that occasion he offered up some sound reasoning. He was at a friend’s house with a bunch of his football teammates until two or three o’clock in the morning, watching old game tapes. I knew where he was. He had called earlier in the evening. I knew what he was doing. I knew who was there with him. It wasn’t as if he was out roaming the streets or bouncing around from one party to the next. His friend’s parents were at home, and the kids kind of lost track of time. Still, he allowed that he should have called again, that he hadn’t meant to worry me, and that it wouldn’t happen again, so we kept to our no-curfew plan.
My younger son, Chris, is a different kind of kid—responsible and self-reliant but more of a free spirit than his brother—and for now we’re sticking to a curfew. He doesn’t want one and points to the lifting of Charles’s curfew as the standard, but I’m not prepared to bend just yet. Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but I suppose the most compelling one is that I don’t think he would have come to me with such a mature proposal if his brother hadn’t set the precedent. Think of it: To take the initiative in an area such as this, to cloak yourself in the kind of constant good judgment such a request requires, is far different from simply wanting to live by the same rules as your older brother. Really, the biggest argument in favor of Charles and his no-curfew appeal was that he had thought to ask and that he had anticipated my concerns and answered them before doing so. The lesson here is that our parenting styles must remain fluid. We must be prepared to adapt to different situations, different kids, different environments, but underneath that willingness to adapt we must keep vigilant and focused and on point. The one piece that’s not up for review in all this is the clarity of the message, the consistency, because without this firm foundation our kids will flounder. They just will.
A footnote: An important piece of this curfew dilemma will be moot in Chris’s case because of a wonderful new law on the books in Georgia. Now drivers under eighteen can’t be on the road after midnight. It’s part of a statewide push to cut down on the rash of teenage drinking and driving fatalities, and I’m all for it. Another great piece to the law is that it limits the number of passengers under-eighteen drivers can carry in their cars to three, which still allows for double-dating and such but cuts down on the crazy pile-in mind-set that causes a lot of the reckless driving. Happily, as more and more states adopt these tougher guidelines on young drivers with more and more success, more and more states will follow suit—and, in many important respects, more and more parents will adjust their own expectations to mirror the changes in the laws.
Indulge me for a few more paragraphs on another Charles story, this one to illustrate how hard it can sometimes be for a parent—namely, me!—to stay on point, especially when your heart tells you to play a situation one way and your head another. Charles was ten years old, with a brand-new bicycle. At the time, we lived in a community near a park where a bicycle was almost a necessity for a small boy. The neighborhood kids were on their bikes all day long, back and forth to the park and to one another’s houses, and Charles was in the bad habit of leaving his new bicycle outside, unwatched and unlocked, whenever he came into the house. Our house happened to be on a cut-through street to the park, there was a lot of traffic passing by our front yard, and it would have been nothing for some thief to eye the bicycle, pull over, and throw it into his car. I kept telling Charles his bicycle would get stolen and I wouldn’t buy him another, but he wouldn’t listen. Or he couldn’t listen. Remember, he was just ten, which I guess is an age when you sometimes have to figure things out the hard way.
Sure enough, his bike was stolen one afternoon when he came in for lunch, and Charles was just despondent. All his friends had their great new bikes, and they were tooling around all day long, all summer long, and Charles had to keep up on foot. My heart plain broke for him, but without saying “I told you so,” I felt it was important to keep the message clear.
“You’ll have to figure it out,” I said to him, reaching for that elusive parental mix of gentle and firm, “but one thing’s for certain. I’m not buying you another one. That’s what I’ve been telling you all along.”
Well, Charles became determined to earn the money to buy another bicycle. He went from crestfallen to focused in no time flat. He made himself available for extra chores around the house, for a negotiated price. He knocked on doors, looking for odd jobs he could do for our neighbors. He told his grandparents and other relatives he didn’t want presents for his birthday or for Christmas but cash instead. He went without a lot of the things he would have normally paid for himself, like an afternoon at the movies with his friends or a neat new video game, and he hoarded his meager allowance. It was difficult for me to stand by and watch him struggle like that. It would have been far easier for me to take him down to the store and drive home with a new bicycle in tow, or even to advance him the money so he could get back on his bicycle straightaway, but I didn’t think that was what the situation called for, so I stuck to the plan.
It took a while, but he scraped together the money eventually, and I still remember the day we went down to the shop to get his new bicycle. Charles had one all picked out—and he had the money all counted out too. He reached into his own little pocket and held the money out to the clerk in the store, and he was all proud and grownup and accomplished about it. He hadn’t figured on the tax, though, so I sprang for the last twenty dollars or so behind his back. I didn’t want to diminish his sense of pride, and at the same time I didn’t want him to have to go home empty-handed, so I slipped the money to the clerk without Charles knowing, and he took that bicycle home feeling as if he’d earned it. And he had.
Throughout those long weeks of his saving, the temptation was to just give Charles the money, or have the bicycle waiting for him in the garage when he woke up one Saturday morning, but I had to be firm on it, and in retrospect I’m glad that I was. Charles too will point to this business with the stolen bicycle as one of the most important lessons of his growing up. It made him appreciate how much things cost. It made him take responsibility for his possessions as well as for his actions. It made him think ahead and think things through. In the end, he got the bike, and as a bonus he got all these important lessons, and he certainly never left his new wheels unattended in our front yard ever again.
It’s really such a simple thing, when you break it down, for parents to keep clear and focused and on point in their directives and deliberations with their children. It’s all about consistency, and setting a good example, and sticking to an overall plan, even when an easier path presents itself. And yet, day after day in my courtroom, I’d see parents who weren’t clear with their children, parents who were visibly or outspokenly upset with their children for not meeting their expectations even though they’d never really articulated what those expectations were, parents who dropped the ball in such a way that their kids couldn’t help but fumble it as well. Did these parents come right out and say, “Don’t take the car without my permission”? No, of course not, but that much should have probably been clear. The miscommunication—or better, the noncommunication—came in the details. The drinking and driving. The staying out late. The hanging with the suspect crowd. The persistent lack of good judgment. The B-minus instead of the B-plus. What would happen, typically, is that the parent would get upset with the child, and eventually that anger would fade, with no clear communication or discussion about expectations. Soon there’d be a new disappointment to take its place, and what the kid would take in over time was that they could get away with this or that behavior. Their parents might rail or kick up some dust, but ultimately they’d let the matter slide. Or they’d let a whole bunch of small matters slide and draw the line on a much bigger deal, but how could they expect the child to pick up on those kinds of mixed signals? The lines have to be clear.
Naturally, if a kid gets away with something a half-dozen times, he’s going to push his luck on the seventh occasion. Kids are designed to test the limits; it’s in their nature. It’s how I was as a kid. (If you’re honest, it’s probably how you were too.) It’s almost like a challenge. You see how much stuff you can get away with, and you keep at it until you get nailed. And some parents are hardwired to look the other way, don’t you think? It’s in our nature to pray for the best. We close our eyes and try not to worry and hope a little thing will take care of itself, but when those little things start piling up, before we know it we’re looking at a whole mountain of mess, and at the bottom of that mountain is our hopeless confusion.
Conflicting messages abound when it comes to our children. Our drug laws, for example, are a mess of inconsistency, most especially at the juvenile court level, and street-smart kids realize that even where the law is clear, it often doesn’t get enforced. Wealthy kids know that if their parents are well connected, or if they can afford a top attorney, they probably won’t face any serious consequences beyond a slap on the wrist. Plus, there’s a kind of curbside justice in a lot of our communities, where if a police officer knows a child’s mother or father he might take the kid home for a talking-to instead of hauling him into juvenile court. There is tremendous inequity in the ways our laws are enforced, and the net effect is that our kids are bewildered, confused by the mixed messages that are ultimately unclear. In Fulton County, for example, a kid who comes in on the misdemeanor of possessing a small amount of marijuana faces no real consequences; our system is so jammed up that there are no resources to process these kinds of cases according to the letter of the law. Yet in some of our smaller counties, where they don’t have the same caseload, that same kid might face a stiff punishment.
I’m all for the zero-tolerance policies school districts have put in place to curb smoking, or fighting, or cheating. If school administrators are clear on it, then the students will be clear on it too, and if the administration sacrifices any of that clarity by letting one student off the hook because he’s able to talk his way out of a situation, or because his parents are powerful or savvy enough to rattle some cages, then everyone loses. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m one of those folks who happens to believe it’s the kid who skates on his justified punishment who loses most of all. After all, over time, the messages that hit home to a kid like this are that rules are made to be broken and punishments set in stone can be washed away with pluck and swagger, and there’s no place to head for from there but trouble.
Parents need to understand that there have got to be some serious consequences at home, regardless of the legal consequences or the consequences at school, whatever the transgression. As a judge, I was much more inclined to release a child to a parent who appeared on top of the situation than to a parent who thought the matter resolved with my disposition. Tell me you’ve already grounded your child, or taken away his car keys, or “volunteered” him for community service work at your church, or enrolled him in summer school. Tell me you understand the seriousness of the situation and you’ve got it under control, and it becomes a lot easier to find a hopeful, positive solution. There are a whole bunch of areas where the court shouldn’t even become involved, and wouldn’t, if parents would just step up and take some responsibility. Truancy matters, for example, are more successfully resolved at home than they ever are in court, because no court-appointed probation officer can be more aware of a school situation than a caring and involved parent. The best initiatives to forestall truancy, including our Truancy Intervention Project, have called for a considerable degree of parental cooperation.
I’ve been at this judge thing a good long time by this point, but I’ve been at this parent thing a lot longer, and the two roles are more connected than a lot of folks think. As a parent, and as a judge, I try to talk in terms children can understand so that my message is abundantly clear. One of my favorite courtroom metaphors for getting kids to take more responsibility for their actions grew out of a conversation I had with my own children.
“Understand football?” I’ll say, and from the teenage boys before my bench I’ll usually get back a “Yes, ma’am,” or some such.
“Understand a quarterback’s role?” I’ll try.
“Yes, ma’am,” I’ll get back again.
“Good,” I’ll say, “cause my rules are slightly different. Here’s how you play my game. You’re the quarterback. You’ve got the ball and you’ve got to move it forward. The only thing is, you can’t pass it. You can’t punt it. You can’t lateral it. You can’t even fumble it. So what is it there’s left for you to do?”
They’ll usually think about this for a bit before answering sheepishly, “I’ve got to run with it, Judge.”
“That’s right,” I’ll say. “You can’t do anything but run with it. Nobody else can handle this ball but you. This is where you are, and that right there, off in the distance, where you want to be, that’s the goal line. The goal line is where your dreams are. And your parents can be there for you on the sidelines, cheering you on. They’re like the coaches. And there are other folks to help you too. The probation officers are going to round out that coaching team and in some cases maybe a caseworker or a social worker. Wherever you look, there will be people cheering you on, but it’s on you. You’ve got the ball, and you’ve got to run with it, and you’ve got to get to the goal line. In my court, those are the rules.”
And I’m here to tell you that they get it. They really do. There’s a way to get that message home to every child, no matter how hard-core, no matter how far gone. I’m not a perfect parent, and I’m not a perfect judge, but if I strive to keep clear and focused with all my children, they’ll get my point and stay with the program.
Over the years I’ve developed a keen sense of radar for when a child is telling it to me straight—what some folks might call a BS detector. Kids have that same ability, only with them it’s innate. They can see an adult giving them a line a mile away; there’s nothing to develop.
In my case, when that radar goes off, I’ll give that child another chance to come clean.
Judge, I’ve been running with the wrong crowd….
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that line served up in court—as a defense, no less! It’s right up there on the all-time-greatest-hits list of unbelievable excuses kids come up with in my courtroom. And each time, I’ve answered back, “Well, if I could just lock up the wrong crowd, I could solve the major crime problems in this city!”
Judge, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time….
That’s another good one, and underneath these knee-jerk excuses for variously bad behavior there is always a set of dangerously mixed messages at home—or worse, no messages at all.
Put it back on the child, though, and together you can see your way clear to resolution. Put that ball back in his hands and get him to run with it. The wrong crowd? I wouldn’t buy it: Are you telling me that you’re stupid enough to be the lookout when your buddies break into someone’s house, just because they told you to? You’ve got to start thinking for yourself. These no-good, jive-ass, trifling folk that got you into trouble? They’re not around to bail you out, are they? They’re not here with you in court today, are they? A true friend will never lead you to no good. A true friend will never lead you into harm’s way. You’ve got the kinds of friends who ask you to hold the money in a drug deal so there won’t be any money on them when the cops come round. You’ve got the kinds of friends who ask you to hold their pinched merchandise on a shoplifting spree at the mall. Look at how quickly they run in the other direction when the security officer turns up and you’re left holding the bag. Or look how quickly they point to you when they get pulled over driving a hot car. Where are your friends now?
You’d be amazed how many kids have never been empowered to take charge of their own circumstances in a positive way. How many kids have never been told, “I believe you can do this.” How many kids have never been told, “I’m pulling for you.” The message must be clear and consistent, whatever it happens to be. Your dreams for your child. Your child’s dreams for himself. Your expectations. Your rules. Set it all down, in clear, simple terms, and hold each other to it—for it is in the holding that we keep true to ourselves and to each other.