A Kind and Just Parent

"If This Were My Child ... "I think of our own three boys -- Zayd, Malik, Chesa. Each is precious; Frank [a teacher at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center] would say each is sacred. I remember my anxiety and occasionally my anger when I saw them treated as things: a learning disability, a threatening teenager, a behavior problem. Pinned to the board like a butterfly. I imagine them here -- lined up, controlled, pushed around, and mostly not allowed their little-boyness.

Of course, I remind myself, our three are not charged with crimes; they experience a relatively safe passage; they are unlikely to ever set foot in this place. But I can't help thinking: What if? And, perhaps because I know these kids through Frank, or because I know them beyond their criminal records, I can't entirely resist the obvious and powerful similarities between them and ours: the adolescent bravado, the sense of invulnerability, the natural narcissism, the precariousness, the frightening lapses in judgment.

They are kids, after all, and nothing they did can possibly change them into adults. The fourteen-year-old who pulled a gun is a kid with a gun; the sixteen-year-old in the gang war is a kid in a gang. And I want to will the Court -- and then all of us -- to set the highest possible standard when determining judgments: "If this were my child ... ." Nothing in that standard frees kids of consequences, nothing in it predetermines outcomes. It does, however, set a tone that is at once caring and complex.

-- from A Kind and Just Parent ($22), by William Ayers. Available from Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108-2892, (800) 726-0600