Kids' Stuff

A Broward, FL child has been expelled and is facing possible legal action for allegedly mugging a fellow first-grader in the school bathroom with a butter knife. While it is unlikely that the child will be charged with a crime, due to the fact that he's only seven years old, he will probably be remanded to a facility for troubled children and receive mandatory counseling for the foreseeable future.

It's hard to not wonder if there might be something in the water in Broward. In the past few weeks, a high school student there has shot a classmate and another first-grader brought a handgun to school for show-and-tell.

And you thought it was bad when they brought pets.

Young children do not think about situations the same way older children or adults do. Much of their behavior is based on mimicry of actions they've seen in their surroundings. The fact that the boy with the knife used a butter knife, as opposed to, say, a meat cleaver, lends this argument credence.

With this in mind, any debate about this child's legal repercussions should probably end right now. Not only is he way too young to be tried as an adult, he probably had very little in the way of a realistic understanding of the repercussions of his actions.

Instead, this child should be dealt with as an example of unhealthy socialization. The odds are good that somewhere he has been exposed to situations either in media or in reality that have warped his sense of right and wrong. A child who plays house is mimicking behavior that they have observed in adults. What has a child who plays mugger observed?

To be sure, modern children are exposed to more instances of violent behavior in media than any other group of children in history. Children do mimic behavior they see in media. This is proven. Therefore, why do we not see a nation of burgeoning child-soldiers, vacant-eyed and deadly-minded?

In the end, it all comes back to parenting. Parents remain the most powerful influence on their children's minds, in spite of the best efforts of the idiot box. The average parent instills an appropriate sense of right and wrong in their children, to the point where these children know what to mimic from media and what to leave for adults. This child did not, and now he will suffer for it. One can only hope that the scrutiny on his parents will force a change, or else this kid will grow up to mug people for real.