The above is a "potato" view of the studied factors that developmental psychologists and criminologists believe influence an individual's risk of juvenile delinquency. For this post, talk about which of the above you think are the most changeable/controllable: the factors that you think we should focus our attention, time and resources. Lastly, identify one or more factors that you think we should not focus on, not because they are unimportant, but because we may not be able to change them. Sunday, December 1, 2013
Prompt for 12/2
The above is a "potato" view of the studied factors that developmental psychologists and criminologists believe influence an individual's risk of juvenile delinquency. For this post, talk about which of the above you think are the most changeable/controllable: the factors that you think we should focus our attention, time and resources. Lastly, identify one or more factors that you think we should not focus on, not because they are unimportant, but because we may not be able to change them. 
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In my opinion, it seems that the most controllable factors related to juvenile delinquency are some of the parent/family factors, such as poor monitoring, inappropriate or inconsistent discipline, and physical abuse. These may be very difficult to control or have any significant effect on, but through better education, I think that these can be changed for the positive. Education and appropriate experience is the best way to change someones way of thinking and thus hopefully lead to better family care. For example, take this developmental psych class. I realize that providing appropriate education for low SES groups may be difficult to do under the current system of wage slavery that we are chained to. Changing parent and family behavior is very tough, but it seems like the most appropriate controllable factor amongst the groups. Also, environmental factors, such as group norms are always something that can try to be changed; through critical thinking and a challenging of the current beliefs or actions of a certain group, hopefully the norms of a group can become positive.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, it seems reasonable that the individual factors are ones that we should not focus on controlling or changing because they are inherent within each individual and things such as low self control or lack of sustained attention can only be controlled through drugs. This actually seems to be quite popular right now, as drugs for ADHD are prescribed more and more. However, I think there has to be better ways to deal with hyper-active kids than to feed them drugs to control them and make them conform even more into slaves.
John,
ReplyDeleteI also think that these are of the more controllable factors that play into the potato. The individual factors are perhaps less controllable because why just socially medicate people who aren't willing to change and do better for themselves when help is offered to begin with.
Drugs being prescribed for ADHD is sky rocketing out of control right now. It seems to be if your child is in a good mood and has a hyper attitude for an hour out of the day a stranger may see them as having ADHD. This is so hard to actually diagnose that this is one major reason that I too, believe individual factors would be hard to change.