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Kids today are really stressed. Its hard to believe it. I remember High School and yea there was stress, but most kids had moms and dads and compared to now it was the age of Ozzie and Harriet rather than Ozzie Osborne.

Kids today face a life where families are unreliable, where having a fight in the parking lot will land you in jail, where balling your fist up in the hallway can get you suspended. Where every character on TV is jumping from bed to bed, and the extremes of behavior of the other kids is unbelievable.

We had clicks when I was young but they weren't proto gangs. The "preps" were the nerds when that term meant "College Prep" rather than mean self-involved rich kid.

I grew up in a world where one girl in my graduating class got pregnant before we graduated, not 10% of the 15 year olds having had their first child. Where oral sex was still defined as sex, and smoking and drugs were the things you fought against peer pressure. This is a world where 25 year old Mexicans make sport of trying to collect as many babies as possible from 13 and 14 year olds.

The number of openly gay kids male and female is exploding, and these kids live lives rich in turmoil and drag all that know them into the vortex.

This is a time when most kids know a kid with a gun, know a kid who has been jailed, and know a kid who has been killed. The guns I grew up with were owned by adults.

Schools are full of "drama" and if you look deeper into it, the question is often about abandonment. The toll on kids of broken home, broken marriages and fragmented and disconnected lives is just hard to explain.

It used to be that coming from a broken home was how one could explain someone turning criminal or acting out horrendously. Well, you take and make 60% of the families broken and you don't solve this. The kids who suffer from loss of their parents don't do this because they feel "different" the have trouble because of the chaos and heartbreak attending to the loss of a parent and the often continuous fighting for control and resources that come with fragmented families.

Not to put to fine a point on this, but this is the result of a very very failed experiment started in the 70's called Feminism. The idea was that the nuclear family "was the problem."

This is not all a time of gloom and doom. Many folks are getting a clue. The Feminist claptrap about men being the enemy, that careers are the only source of self worth, that so much more are being exposed as being a problem for most women, not a cure. Kids are missing both their Mothers and their Fathers right now. Moms and Dads are gone alot and stressed out too. Still, if you look at the statistics, things are getting better. Why? Because things like faith, values, morals are being held up as being important. People are fighting for this, pushing back the foolishness of permissiveness and political correctness. But it took 35 years to get into this fix and it will probably take another generation to see our way out if folks keep up the pressure. If they don't give in to despair. This is why it is so important not to lose our focus and keep our eyes on the prize of remaking the Courts, reinforcing marriage, supporting programs that emphasize personal choice and accountability.

Most of the kids doing this cutting are girls. Church and youth programs provided by your church are really important. Kids struggling with this are very rarely religious. Its funny, one of the most effective programs to help these girls in High School is JROTC. It provides an alternate source of values to the TV and the street. Something to consider if this is a problem in your community.

I hear ya, relate to your childhood and don't for a moment disagree that the traditional family is more the exception than the rule as it used to be. It's so sad.

It is the root symptoms that you have identified that need to be fixed. Just getting them to stop self mutilation will only have them seek other self destructive ways to vent their hurt and frustration. They're crying out for help and attention while they HATE themselves. They have little if any love in their love - not exactly a self esteem booster.

I admit, it is a struggle out there for adults to work out marital problems, not let them fester or end a marriage. It takes work. Time. Love. It's like a garden. Initially it looks beautiful when first planted. In time weeds come. If you don't unroot each weed, the garden will be taken over by weeds and you might as well dig it up and start again - divorce.

Kids have so much thrown at them at a fast pace. They have very little childhood. It's all in the open and they are encouraged to KNOW IT ALL - especially about sex. I really hate that - just the other day our daughter went to the playground after school ... on the way home she's asking me to correlate the proper names for genitalia with silly names shes given those parts because kids at the playground were discussing it while playing together. She just turned 7 years OLD!

She doesn't want to know about the act but she wanted to understand what they were talking about - these are others of her age or YOUNGER. I was watching them. Nothing was going on but I didn't hear what they were saying. They just looked like they were having a good time talking and laughing. It pisses me off to have to get into some of that at such a tender age. One question leads to another. Mind you she just turned 7 years old! I now have to stay within ear shot to HEAR what they're saying. Geesh!

It's fast, uncaring and me oriented out there. Sex is all over the place. It's a struggle for good parents, and we are good parents, to let her have a childhood while not having her turn into a sex crazed 40 year old hooker over night. A lot of kids walk around like that - and don't know what they are doing ... then there's mom setting the example - not enough attention at home and on and on it goes.

"I grew up in a world where one girl in my graduating class got pregnant before we graduated, not 10% of the 15 year olds having had their first child. Where oral sex was still defined as sex, and smoking and drugs were the things you fought against peer pressure. This is a world where 25 year old Mexicans make sport of trying to collect as many babies as possible from 13 and 14 year olds."

While I lived in a lily white neighborhood, our high school graduating class of 1200 PLUS had only ONE pregnancy. We lived in the burbs where drugs were plentiful but still most parents didn't both work. Then again abortion was still ILLEGAL.

We did have "special auditoriums" so that dogs could come in and sniff lockers - always unannounced. Still it's mild compared to today and TV was tame. Again, it's crazy out there and without TWO OPPOSITE sex parents really involved with their kids - disaster will strike and is striking with a vengeance.