Family Matters: Why Kids Steal
Faigel, Harris C.
FAMILY MATTERS WHEN KIDS STEAL HARRIS FAK3EL In 1948, Harry Truman unexpectedly defeated Tom Dewey, colleges and universities were inundated by ex-GI's, Israel became an independent state, and...
...The parents must know that teenagers who break rules must pay the consequences, immediately...
...Failing the test doesn't mean failing the course...
...Some of the explanations are obvious: teenagers steal, in part, because everyone else does...
...And, of course, there are those who steal because of peer pressures or neighborhood mores...
...Half a million bracelets later, adolescent thievery had arrived, and the hood ornament was changed...
...He ended up giving his loot to his friends...
...A parent who says, for example, "She's a good girl and would never do that if it were not for her friends," provides the girl with a perfect excuse...
...Parental vanities must be separated from children's needs...
...He has been for the past month, ever since he was caught with a stolen car...
...Now, John is finally getting attention...
...Especially in adolescence, the familiar boundaries of behavior often dissolve, and teenagers begin to search for new limits...
...Parents are often seen to be cheating, reports of ordinary people and political leaders with their hands in the largest tills they can find crowd the newspapers and news broadcasts...
...everyone is on the take, on the make...
...otherwise, he would have John arrested...
...Not just other teens, everyone...
...The youngster then has no reason to feel guilt or to pay any real or emotional price for her behavior...
...A week later, a grocery store manager called his mother about the six-pack of beer he was trying to steal...
...He is looking for attention, not sympathy...
...Adults must pay attention, and must continue to pay attention for many months to come...
...they need to find out if they are as smart or as clever as they think they are...
...He became unruly in school, and the conclusion of several family conferences with the school guidance counselor was that he was seeking attention...
...Either he was very deft or the clerks were all blind, because he remembers taking two or three a week, and sometimes each day, for two full years—more, in fact, than he chose to consume...
...But that, after all, is the trend in almost every area of life...
...In 1948, we used to say that delinquent boys steal cars, and delinquent girls get pregnant...
...Again and again, the problem in cases of teenage stealing is a family problem, and a teenager's problem, and it does no one any service for the parents to respond chiefly in terms of protecting themselves...
...Jack Armstrong was a con...
...Or is the stealing really an imitation of parental cheating—an unkind flattery of sorts...
...But not so much as we might like to think...
...But no child—nor any adult, for that matter—is perfect, and a parent who insists on seeing his child as if he were merely insures that the child will be still farther from the goal than the parents secretly fear...
...His mother promised to punish him...
...So, too, must the parents check their desire to be viewed as the child's protectors and defenders...
...Today, the girls are still getting pregnant—but we don't call it delinquency any more—and the boys and girls are both stealing cars, clothing, just about anything that is not chained into place...
...Maybe...
...His "career" began when he was 10, in what seems to be the typical fashion—taking candy bars and chewing gum from the drugstores in his neighborhood...
...in fact, she never told his father about it...
...FAMILY MATTERS WHEN KIDS STEAL HARRIS FAK3EL In 1948, Harry Truman unexpectedly defeated Tom Dewey, colleges and universities were inundated by ex-GI's, Israel became an independent state, and General Motors produced a car with a ring-shaped hood ornament you could break off and give to your girlfriend as a bangle bracelet...
...But likely the most common reason adolescents steal is to see what it is like...
...I have one young patient—we'll call him John—who is 14 now...
...They need to understand whether stealing is done because the rules against it in the family are so weak, and the family bonds so tenuous, that neither the rules nor the bonds could balance the desire...
...The shopkeepers call it "shrinkage," the parents are likely to call it a part of growing up, but, by whatever name it is called, the trend is clearly that more children are doing more of the kinds of things we once called delinquent at younger ages than ever before...
...Or is it that the parental rules and controls are so overpowering that stealing is one form of rebellion against them...
...Part of the attention that is required should be directed at trying to find out why the child steals...
...Stealing, though, is an especially difficult problem...
...It is almost impossible for a parent confronted for the first time by an episode of stealing to know whether it is a symptom of a real problem, or merely a passing and genuinely trivial event...
...they are, perhaps temporarily, part of a culture of theft...
...They need to know if the system is as smart or effective as they have been told it is...
...and Bat Mitzvah have stayed in place, but the kids are physically more mature a full year earlier than their parents were, schools now teach advanced materials much earlier than they once did, drinking ages and voting ages have been lowered, the general expectation is that people—including kids—will be more so-phiscated much earlier than in the good old days, when we were young—very young...
...Other teenagers are, to be sure, fascinated by the challenge of "getting away with it...
...And, at the same time, parents should know that most kids do develop a strong and serviceable conscience—and that one step in that development may-be a test, to see whether it is happening...
...Extreme...
...television shows imply that everyone, including the neighborhood cop, is crooked...
...The first time he was caught was at age 11, while trying to lift a record album...
...As part of the very normal testing of rules that all adolescents do, some need to experience the reality of stealing to understand it, and to understand their own feelings about it...
...They need to experience their guilt so their own conscience can come to act as a brake later in life...
...She didn't keep her promise...
...others, out of touch with themselves and feeling a loss of self-control that is quite common during the years of adolescence, are looking for limits outside themselves...
...We all want our children to be perfect, to deserve every compliment every doting grandparent has ever bestowed...
...If a child steals in order to get attention, and if, in an effort to make light of the episode, or in the hope that it is meaningless, the parents ignore the behavior, it is virtually certain that the child will raise the ante and do something more serious...
...The storekeeper warned him sternly to stay out of the store...
...Privileges should be revoked, to be restored according to a preannounced timetable only as behavior warrants...
...Nor can the attention be merely the inevitable confrontation that follows the episode itself...
...Bar Harris C. Faigel, Director of University Health Services at Brandeis, is a specialist in adolescent health care...
...By 1977, a six year study of teenage behavior in Illinois showed that one in three teenagers commits some delinquent act...
...Yet without guilt, and without learning that there is a price to be paid, there is no reason for the child to avoid such behavior in the future...
...Didn't most of us fail a test now and again—and don't we still...
...But it is also important that the youngster be held personally responsible...
...Too many parents are inclined to find an alibi for their child...
...If a shopkeeper who finds a teenager stealing does what he ought to do—notifies the parents immediately, and demands that the teenager put things right—the parents should cooperate, and view the shopkeeper's action as a favor rather than a punishment...
...Some merely want reassurance that the old limits are still there...
...the idols have clay feet and sticky hands...
...Above all, parents need to examine their own roles...
...They come closer, in a way, than the others do to stealing for "normal" reasons...
...The old morality, in which there were good guys and bad guys, is clearly dead...
...When he was 12, John graduated to clothing, and his grades began to slide...
...John's parents promised to give him more attention, but they somehow managed to miss his steady supply of new clothes...
...in its place, the question becomes who can get away with it...
Vol. 2 • February 1977 • No. 5
