The Disproportionate Overrepresentation of Minority Youth in ...

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getting the support from the parents that it needs.” Parents should work together with
their children and take more responsibility for how well or poorly they do. Parents are
seen as spending more time away from home and to be less involved in the lives of their
children. Accordingly, youth look for love and attention in other places, such as gangs.
Decision makers also mentioned a lack of emphasis placed on education.
Personnel believed that the lack of socialization toward educational goals might lead to a
perpetuation of the cycle of uneducated and unemployed people.
Most of the parents are so unsocialized themselves that they have no idea
how to help their child fill out a job application, how to present themselves
for an employment interview, how to socially interact with their peers.
They didn’t know and they can’t pass that along to their children and it is
just a never ending cycle.
Juvenile court decision makers also saw a need for parenting training either in
schools or included somehow in prenatal classes. This was believed to be essential for the
prevention of child abuse.
I think that we need to put more of our efforts into child abuse prevention,
early information to young parents or people of child bearing age on how
they go about raising children and the kinds of things parents do. It seems
like there are a lot of people who don’t understand any of those. I think
that there need to be more classes in the schools but unfortunately a lot of
those kids who need the classes are the ones who have dropped out. So, I
think we are going to have to rely on our clinics and our hospitals to step
up on the prenatal classes and we need to find a way to get all these people
in for prenatal care so we can get them into prenatal classes.