UK PM: Family Only Hope for Broken Society

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | August 15, 2011

The world has watched the riots in Britain with dismay (and solidarity for those of us living in LA during the 1990s). Our most cherished Western values, rejected for decades in wrongheaded social policies, produced behavior we never thought possible in our own streets. UK prime minister David Cameron has spotted the same moral root cause in Britain’s troubles:

Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences.

Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort.

Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control.

Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged – sometimes even incentivised – by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralised.

In particular, Cameron blames social policies that harm the family. Cameron says his government will “fight back” by defending the family–rejecting any government program that hurts the family and funding those that protect and promote it.

The question people asked over and over again last week was ‘where are the parents?

Why aren’t they keeping the rioting kids indoors?’

Tragically that’s been followed in some cases by judges rightly lamenting: “why don’t the parents even turn up when their children are in court?”

Well, join the dots and you have a clear idea about why some of these young people
were behaving so terribly.

Either there was no one at home, they didn’t much care or they’d lost control.

Families matter.

I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home.

Perhaps they come from one of the neighbourhoods where it’s standard for children to have a mum and not a dad…

…where it’s normal for young men to grow up without a male role model, looking to the streets for their father figures, filled up with rage and anger.

So if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start.

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