Sarah B.’s COTD on the ethics quiz regarding the ethical amount of sympathy due a 15-year-old girl who probably crippled herself for life by trying “car surfing” is , as her commentary usually is, clear and in need of no introduction from me. So here it is….

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I don’t necessarily like blaming this on social media. I think that is putting the blame in the wrong place.

When I was in high school, a kid I had been in school with since first grade made a dumb choice. He killed two women by driving recklessly. At sixteen, he was tried as an adult and went to prison for two counts of vehicular manslaughter. I’m calling him Sam.

While no one can truly understand another’s reasoning, for those of us who knew him his whole life, the reasons for doing what he did were fairly obvious. Sam was one of two fatherless boys raised by their mom and grandma. The grandma, especially, did an okay job trying to raise him, putting him in the Catholic school, and holding to the old time values of respecting your teacher, ladies, etc. However, he never really managed to fit in with the other boys. In order to gain attention and acceptance, he willingly enacted whatever crazy idea the other boys conceived. Maybe it was bullying a girl. Maybe it was doing some silly prank. I was the target of a serious prank that was traced back to him when I was in fifth grade. He was in deep trouble and only avoided expulsion because Sister knew that this would never have come only from him. So when there was a rumor running around that if you drove down X road at Y mph, you could jump the main highway 3 miles east of town, it was logical that Sam would be pushed into trying it out. And try it out he did, with some of his fellows in the car. During third period, he T-boned two old ladies at the junction of X road and the highway at over 100 miles an hour.

Not a bit of this excuses what he did, nor did the judge show the slightest bit of sympathy for his circumstances, but I think this reveals to us a missing piece of the puzzle, a crucial piece that is necessary to understand the entire picture.

More and more kids are growing up in single parent households. Parents are addicted to technology. Kids are missing out on appropriate interaction with their parents. Our current society also has kids in more and more activities, meaning with less and less time in situations with only a few kids per adults, and lots of time with many other kids, who are not the best source of good healthy ideas.

A healthy childhood requires a kid to learn about responsibilities, not just license, that actions have consequences and other items necessary for adult decision making. Teens seem to be primed to think they are invincible by biology, and now society is not working to teach them the skills they need to combat that, but instead focuses on lengthening the time a person can act with license and without responsibility.

Now that we have a whole segment of the population that is like Sam, and the balance of probability states that Ava would fall into that segment, only now can the idea of adding social media in be considered.

Social media allows all kinds of trends to occur at light-speed, so that a parent who is trying to be good doesn’t even have time to warn against the dangers of the last three trends before needing to know about the current one. So if car surfing is now the thing that cool kids do, and if Ava wants to be a cool kid, she has to try it out and show it off to everyone. Or it could be that one of the cool kids wants to try car surfing, but isn’t sure if it is safe, but “Ava’d do it first.” Either way, social media was only the trigger, but the whole gun was primed anyway. If Sam could kill two ladies with a car over a rumor before anyone spent much time online during the days of dial-up, Ava could have done as much with a movie.

So rather than saying that we need to worry about social media, we need to figure out ways to teach our kids to think through their actions. We need to return to teaching kids responsibility and consequences. That requires parents to be present to their children, engage with them, give them tasks that build their esteem in their own eyes, and provide the affirmation that they will otherwise look for in all the wrong places. That’s how we get away from these tragedies.

Do I feel compassion for Ava? Of course I do. She and her family will live with this choice of hers forever. A kid makes dumb choices and the family lives with them, carrying the grief of that dumb choice for the rest of their live.

This has played out many times in my life before now, with all of us paying in odd ways for a dumb choice. However, I want to change this for my kids, if I can, so I must give them the tools they need to succeed.