First, many troubled kids can be identified at a very young age, even before 4 years old. These kids have trouble coping with the obstacles of life and are on a path to becoming outcasts. They are growing up faster, and are experiencing earlier adolescence. Frustration, depression, rage and anti-social behaviors begin to be seen, even at a very early age. These kids are not resilient and develop disturbing emotional responses, to people and animals.
Next, the school shooting phenomenon is relatively new. Twenty years ago, these incidents were barely on our radar. The social dynamics of family, peer groups, society, and schools have changed in ways that many of us still are having a hard time grasping. One of the common factors is a troubled family, and missed clues which would predict that a child is going to violently explode.
Lastly, it looks to me, these children are disconnected from healthy real world stimuli. Without prosocial purpose and motivation, they find an antisocial purpose and motivation. They are often secretively buried in their own electronic media. It is common for these kids to be consuming and ruminating on violent and seriously inappropriate content, without proper supervision or care, especially from their parents. They are also detached from school, given insufficient input and responses to their difficulties, and not identified and treated as having serious difficulties including having issues regarding harassment and bullying. And schools have not applied sufficient multidisciplinary resources to having a system in place to identify and treat these students long before they develop into violent offenders.
What can be done about all of this?
I believe in this mechanized world we are creating, kids are losing touch with the real world. They are lost souls, looking for answers and a purpose. Instead of finding those answers in all the healthy places where they should be found, they immerse themselves in a fantasy world of anger, revenge and perversions, and they find their final mission in life is to eventually violently tear it all down.
I also believe that you have to intercept these children very early on. If we want to address these horrific outcomes, we have to identify and lead these children towards a different future at a very young age.
In the short run, as we have seen, government will try to do this with rules and legislation, buildings and police and metal detectors. We see schools being redesigned and rebuilt and hardened to confine these murderers on the day of the attack. We see politicians pushing for innocent citizens to give up their civil rights and freedoms. But what we are not seeing is much in the way of getting to the children before they go down this destructive path. Buildings and rules, gun bans and metal detectors and speech codes aren’t going to stop future incidents. New technologies will allow future school murderers to circumvent all of these efforts, and they will still find ways to commit mass murder (I won’t mention what things might be done, but anyone with any sense can figure out what is probably going to be the next generation of violent methods to accomplish these evil deeds).
In the long run, however, we need to get to these kids upstream, and I’m saying at kindergarten age on up. I think the real battleground is in the grade schools. We might not be able to fix what is going on in their families, or outside the schools, but we can influence what is happening to these kids in school. We can do a better job of identifying and intercepting these troubled kids. We can implement systems to track kids that are socially failing. And we can interject healthy stimuli in their lives to help them find ways to not escape into the dark underworld.
A properly designed and implemented school therapy dog program could play an essential role. Dogs are real and have positive real world impacts on children; cell phones and computers and such are just not adequate substitutes. We all know 100 years ago, when kids were raised with intact families, good friends, fresh air, nature and animals, these violent incidents didn’t happen.
I was a co-founder of a therapy dog program for the Chandler School District in Arizona. I implemented a scale-able program to assist teachers, counselors and administrators in finding and working with grade school children. Dog teams were used in all aspects of the curriculum, from the very first moments children arrived on campus the first day of the school year, to motivating classroom behavior and academics, to counseling with students thaving difficulties in life, especially in the school environment, using properly managed and trained therapy dog teams. We are currently seeking to pilot such a program with a local school district.
Should you wish therapy dog consulting, please contact me.
