View Comments      Email Article       Printable Version

Published: September 4, 2007

What they need are fathers

But California thinks mental health programs are the answer for kids in the state’s “war zones.”

Do children in high-crime areas in California, like children in Baghdad, suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? If so, why? And what should be done?

An Aug. 26 San Francisco Chronicle story notes that “as many as one-third of children living in our country’s violent urban neighborhoods have PTSD, according to recent research and the country’s top child trauma experts -- nearly twice the rate reported for troops returning from war zones in Iraq.”

Deborah Estell, a San Francisco school health worker, polled 60 or so kindergartners at John Muir Elementary School, finding that 90% knew someone in jail, and more than 75% knew someone who had been shot or killed.

The need to deal with PTSD symptoms “is great,” she said. These symptoms, which include angry outbursts, sleep disturbances, anxiety, and preoccupation with shootings and death, make it impossible for many students to concentrate on learning.

According to the Chronicle’s follow-up reports, state and local school officials have converged on one approach to the problem: traumatic stress counseling in the schools, using $250 million raised through Proposition 63 for mental health programs.

However, few are addressing a prime factor in gang violence and the subsequent trauma: defective family structures, lacking a mother and father who are married to each other, and --- especially for boys -- households deprived of the guidance and authority of fathers.

According to Glenn Sacks, a former Los Angeles elementary and high school teacher writing in the Pasadena Star-News, gangs were responsible for 70% of the shootings last year in Los Angeles, while 73% of the young men in California's massive juvenile prison system share similar experiences of broken families and fatherlessness.

Sacks cites a 20-year old gang member, incarcerated at the California Youth Authority in Stockton for trying to kill a gang rival, who said, “[My father] was never around when I needed him ... [my mom] did OK until I was 10 – she could control me up to then. But then I went to the gangs, like my brothers ... It might have mattered if he was around.”

Sacks argues that “the best way to keep teenagers out of gangs is to help them get the much-needed discipline, care and love that so many fathers are skilled at providing.”

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell told the Chronicle that he will hold a summit to address the impact of PTSD, poverty, and other factors on the educational disparities between low-achieving African-American and Latino students and their much higher-achieving white and Asian peers.

Fatherlessness closely parallels poor school outcomes, with non-Hispanic blacks (69.4% percent of births out-of-wedlock) and Hispanics (40.92%) at a significant disadvantage compared to non-Hispanic whites (21.54%), and Asians/Pacific islanders (15.64 %), reports Robert Rector, a senior research fellow on welfare and family issues at the Heritage Foundation

A discussion of the relationship between traditional family structures and educational achievement, however, does not appear to be on Superintendent O’Connell’s agenda.

Meanwhile, State Sen. Darryl Steinberg, the author of Proposition 63, assured the Chronicle that inner-city schools with lots of students suffering PTSD symptoms are prime candidates for state mental-health cash.

© California Catholic Daily 2007. All Rights Reserved.