By CAROL MATROO Sunday, November 8 2009

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Erica Williams Connell...

Where have all the parents gone?

This was the question posed by Erica Williams Connell, the daughter of Trinidad and Tobago’s first Prime Minister Eric Williams, while speaking at the Sheraton Suites, Ft Lauderdale in Florida last Sunday where she was invited to speak at an Education, Child Welfare seminar organised by the TT Diaspora, INC., in Miami.

She said while schools were trying to instil values in our children, parents were moving away from that responsibility.

Williams Connell said the school system in the United States, which was already teaching children about sexual responsibility and training them against drug use, was making it easier for parents to abdicate their responsibility.

Williams Connell said based on news reports of unbridled school violence and gang rapes among what she labelled as the “robot generation” in the US, it was a clear indication that parents had strayed so far from common sense and sensitivity in child rearing that they must now rely on brain scans and police statistics to remind them that children needed discipline, attention, stability and love to thrive.

She blamed in part the media, including television shows, movies and music, for encouraging children to do something “dramatic, daring and wild.”

She said a CNN report noted that 37 million thongs were sold in the US in 1999.

“Do we really need to know this information? This millennium’s news – and that includes many newspapers’ headlines – is every bit a part of the entertainment industry that it reports on. These news reports are normalising, even glorifying, events that should appall us...What teenager doesn’t love the idea of doing something dramatic and daring?” she asked.

Quoting from a speech her father gave in 1966, Williams Connell said, “There is no educational content whatsoever in radio and television as they have developed in TT, so that the librarian, the person trying to spread the familiarity with books and with reading, comes up against that basic weakness in society.”

She said between 1960-1990 in the US, in just 30 years, there has been a 560 percent increase in violent crime; more than 400 percent increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling of divorces; a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; and more than a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate.

She questioned why, when money kept flowing into TT, that more significant effective resources were not being channeled into the education process.

Williams Connell queried if education was literally the future, why were there now street children in TT? Or why weren’t there co-ordinated intervention programmes utilising the school system, the police and parents, that could identify dropouts and hopefully turn them around before they were seduced into a life of crime?

She said if one accepted current child development thinking, no child was unintelligent and our country’s educational system must recognise and compensate for this.

Recalling her late father’s Eric Williams’ Independence exhortation to the youth 47 years ago, Williams Connell quoted: “You, the children, yours is the great responsibility to educate your parents, teach them to live in harmony...To your tender and loving hands the future of the nation is entrusted.

“On your scholastic development, the salvation of the nation is dependent...you carry the future of TT in your school bags.”