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On April 20, 1999 students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked, armed, into Columbine High School and opened fire. They killed 12 classmates and one teacher before turning their weapons against themselves. Since the tragedy, many questions have been asked, the main one being: What caused Harris and Klebold to do such a thing? In the many discussions held and many columns written, lax parenting is an often brought-up cause.
Good parenting and bad parenting are terms that can be difficult to define as they involve many things. While good and bad parenting are comprised of a number of factors, in our context, we can broadly look at good parents being those who are loving and involved in their children�s lives, and bad parents simply as those who are not.
People who see poor parenting as the primary cause behind the shootings are making a logical argument. If only parents were more involved in their child�s life, perhaps they wouldn�t have obtained the guns. Perhaps the parents could have in some way intervened. It is rumored that Harris and Klebold were making bombs in their own basements up to a year before the shootings. The logical assumption is that good parents would not allow this to go on. Good parents would be aware of what their children were doing and they would do something to stop it. Therefore, Harris and Klebold must have had bad, or uninvolved, parents.
The question here is whether this is really the case or not. In �Moving Beyond the Blame Game,� a discussion about guns, the media, and youth violence, Jonathan Alter pithily states that �the values that are being propagated by the media, broadly speaking, are so much more powerful that parents can�t compete as easily as they used to� (�Moving Beyond,� 1999, p. 97). This could not be more true, and yet the influencing factors are not isolated in the media. Adolescents� thinking and behavior is also shaped by their friends, classmates, and longing for acceptance amongst peers. For most young children, their parents are often their world. Approval is sought from the parental unit because at this age, the parents are often the only role models the child knows. There comes a time, however (between the pre-teen years throughout adolescence) where the need for parental approval becomes minimal (and for some, nonexistent). Instead, peer approval becomes everything. At this stage, it doesn�t matter to many kids the values the parents are trying to instill�if the information conflicts with what they are being fed by stronger outside forces, anything the parents try to tell or teach the child will in most cases be rejected.
The explanation for why some kids with decent parents turn to a life of crime or self-destruction lies in that different kids look to different groups for their approval�it all depends within which group they are accepted. If a kid is not accepted by the popular groups (which are generally considered the �healthy� groups) they may turn to groups with unhealthy influences (e.g., they may become gangsters, drug-users, or�like Harris and Klebold�kids that hate society, shoot guns, and build bombs for fun). If the group is one built on healthy, positive values, then maybe the parents need not compete. The child ends up feeling at peace inside their own mind; feeling all incoming messages in harmony with one another enables positive behavior to emerge. If, however, the values set forth by the influencing group are poor, then this may be a dangerous situation; if the child is of certain mental disposition, the conflicting values will compete and the negative ones set forth by outer sources (peers, media, etc.) will inevitably win.
Often times, when this occurs, there is very little a parent can do to snap kids out of the unhealthy state of mind they have fallen into. Such situations may require drastic measures which are impractical or impossible to take for financial and/or emotional reasons (such as relocating, boot camp, and various �tough love� tactics). Normal, good parents often try to stick within their means when trying to find solutions for any suspected problems, rarely having any good reason to suspect the problem will result in the deaths of 15 people. Children who are living double-lives are often very secretive as well. No matter how much the parent questions or monitors, they will never fully know exactly what is going on inside their child�s head. In �A Developmental Look at Columbine,� the authors credit �nosier, more intrusive parenting� as �a protective factor against risky, dangerous teen behavior� (Greenfield and Juvonen, 1999, Jul/Aug). Unfortunately, with children who are already angry and rebellious, the interrogation tactics often backfire, and the child becomes even further isolated from the family. With respect to children who have already crossed the line into defiance of authority, these children begin to view their relationship with their parents as a game of Them Against Me. Parents�especially �nosy� ones�are viewed not as the loving, caring protectors they are but as a big, mean bully, an obstacle between the child and their precariously sought-after happiness.
It is very likely that this was the case for Harris and Klebold. Their role models were not their parents; their role models were Hitler, Nietzche, and a music group called KMFDM (which, by the way, stands for Kein Mehrheit F�r Die Mitleid, which in German means, �No Pity For The Majority�). Further, no parent would have sat back and done nothing had they suspected their children had deteriorated in such a manner and to such a deep extent (lest they suffer a fate like that of the Kinkels). If nothing else, their own fear would be a cause to action. Most likely the parents of Harris and Klebold had no way of knowing what their children were up to�not because they weren�t decent parents but because, as normal parents, they perceived what everyone else perceived: their boys were just healthy, normal boys.
In �Mourn for the Killers, Too� Devon Adams describes Dylan Klebold as her �friend.� She says she doesn�t understand why he did it (Adams, 1999, p. 88). The way Adams talks makes Harris and Klebold sound like two normal, everyday teenagers who just made a bad decision. She says one of the victims, Rachel, �would have been a perfect friend for Eric and Dylan� (Adams, 1999, p. 89). This illustrates the way that the let�s-blame-the-parents argument almost contradicts itself. Truly, if Harris and Klebold had been victims of extreme parental neglect or emotional starvation, shouldn�t they have been �weird?� Shouldn�t they have had some kind of visible emotional or social problems? Shouldn�t they at least have been �depressed?� Were the Columbine killers truly the result of bad parenting or were they just �normal� kids? In hindsight, analysts of the Columbine shootings say, all the red flags were there. But if the problem was really so obvious, someone would have been able to spot the flags beforehand. By nature of how so many teenagers are, Harris� and Klebold�s closest friends were the ones in the best position to spot them. Yet they failed to do so purely because Eric and Dylan were so voodooed Normal.
While the argument against the parents is logical, the assumption that �good parenting� results all times in having the kid under your control is wrong. When the child is so deeply deranged, it is unreasonable to expect the parents to be able to change that in any way. This position is strengthened by the many examples of other children with normal, decent upbringings who have gone on to commit savage and unspeakable crimes.
One of the United States� most notorious serial killers is Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey Dahmer killed, dismembered, and ate a dozen individuals. He slept with their corpses. He kept skulls and various other body parts hidden in his freezer and bedroom closet. He took polaroids. This went on for a long time before anybody�police, neighbors, or family members�had a clue. Court TV�s online Crime Library poses the important questions: �Why does a Jeffrey Dahmer happen? How does a man become a serial killer, necrophiliac, cannibal and psychopath?� (Bardsley, 30 Nov. 2003). The Crime Library continues, �Many of the theories would have you believe that the answers can always be found in childhood abuse, bad parenting, head trauma, fetal alcoholism and drug addiction. Perhaps in some cases, these are contributing factors, but not for Jeffrey Dahmer� (Bardsley, 30 Nov. 2003).
As it turns out, �[Jeffrey�s] father, Lionel Dahmer, wrote a very sad and poignant book called A Father's Story which explores the very common phenomenon of a parents [sic] trying desperately to give their child a good upbringing and discovering to their horror that their child has built a high wall around himself from which their influence is progressively shut out� (Bardsley, 30 Nov. 2003).
The astonishing thing here is that Dahmer�s upbringing was indeed not dysfunctional or anything that the typical person would not consider normal, �good parenting.� This happens again and again: Perfectly good parents sometimes churn out bad children. As Wayne LaPierre quotes the FBI�s John Douglas in �Moving Beyond the Blame Game,� one should, ��[N]ever underestimate the fact that there are just some people that are just evil�� (�Moving Beyond,� 1999, p. 97). LaPierre elaborates that this certainly �includes young people. We go searching for solutions,� he says, �and yet some people are just plain bad apples� (�Moving Beyond,� 1999, p. 97). Indeed, people like Harris and Klebold appear to be anomalies. If you stick them into the formula�affluence, suburbia, good times, friends�it just shouldn�t happen this way. But sometimes, sadly, it does. It happens again and again.
Even more relevant to the case of Harris and Klebold is the story of Kipland (�Kip�) Kinkel, who shot and killed his parents before opening fire on his schoolmates at Thurston High in the spring of 1998. Not surprisingly, �Bill and Faith Kinkel were just like any other caring parents of a fifteen year old boy. They were middle-class, high family values type of parents. Bill Kinkel was a member of the tennis club. Faith volunteered with a group that enlist America's privileged youth to help poor children in Brazil� (Witmer, 1998). Even more importantly, when Kip began to show an interest guns and started building home-made bombs, �[t]he Kinkels sought help. They had Kip in anger management counseling, he was on Prozac, and they did not back down with normal restrictions, which,� in author Denise Witmer�s opinion, �is [precisely] what set off this terrible tragedy� (Witmer, 1998).
While the Columbine killers� families have managed to keep the details of Harris� and Klebold�s upbringing fairly private, we have yet to see any substantial evidence pointing to the parents of these two teens being anything other than what society considers normal. People tend to think that if their kids have turned out OK, then it must naturally be a result of their good parenting skills. Many bask in that glory. Yet it takes great courage for someone to decide that Eric Harris� and Dylan Klebold�s parents could have been so rotten in their parenting as to have driven their own children to kill other people. This is, at the very least, gross oversimplification. This type of conclusion�that it must be all the parents� fault�is a result of an ignorance of all the many other factors influencing a child�s thinking and behavior, and a fear that this kind of thing may actually be beyond an average parent�s control.
When tragedies like the Columbine massacre occur, society often feels the need to search for answers. But most of all people seek to find comfort in the assurance that something this awful is never going to happen to them. Blaming the parents for the way that Harris and Klebold turned out is an easy way to accomplish this. People tell themselves not to worry, that as long as they remain involved in their child�s life such a thing can never happen to them. This enables us to go on living our lives feeling safe inside our cocoons, which are self-deceptively crafted out of our own ignorance and out of fear of a different, more powerless, explanation. In fact, we cannot deny that parents are not always to blame simply because some �bad apples� do emerge out of perfectly good families. Parents are too often forced to fight a losing battle against more powerful external sources over the influence of their own children. Perhaps we should start to look elsewhere for a cause.