Different tone, Same Foreign Policy

It will be interest to see if President Obama rational and constructive tone and theme in engaging the world, results into a new foreign policy premised on mutual respect for each nation’s sovereign right to pursue their own political economy. Any talk of a new world order without such a guiding principle will make it more difficult and unlikely to achieve anything substantially different from what the foreign policy establishment has given us for the past sixty years-war, imperialism, exploitation, and cultural homogenization. We give President Obama good marks on the engagement process. This is the perquisite for any change in policy. We will continue to grade and watch his progress or regress.

First 100 days of Barack Obama's Presidency: What Would Martin Luther King Say?

April 29, 2009 marked the first 100 days of Barack Obama's presidency, which from the start inherited enormous domestic and foreign challenges from his predecessor. Obama has signed a total of 19 executive orders and 12 laws, many of them reversing decisions by the Bush Administration. While Obama deserves credit for the scale and scope of the agenda he has laid out and for confronting the challenges head-on, we must ask the question, by what standard are we evaluating the first 100 days. We choose to judge Obama by the philosophical statements and moral standards of Martin Luther King, Jr. From the outset we acknowledge that King did not have to deal with stem cell research or equal pay for women. We note too that king spoken in gender specific terms (man) rather than gender neutral (humans).

On Morality
Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing. The ultimate measure of man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

On the Moral Economy
Our economy must become more person-centered than property-centered and profit-centered. Let us, therefore, not think of our movement as one that seeks to integrate the [black] into all the exiting values of American society, but as one that would alter those values.

On Peace
We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process. Ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means (war), because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

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How to Respond to Your Child Drug Use

Parents drug use is present and prevalent in the lives of your teens. Your teens, and in some instances, your elementary school age children, are exposed to drugs and alcohol use via music videos, music, movies, and peer discussion on school campuses. One of the first things that you need to know is that adolescence is a time when teens will engage in experimental and risky behavior. What the research tells us is that their experimentation and thrill-seeking behavior is done almost exclusively when they are with other youths or friends.

Parents, equally important, you should know that the causes and correlates of delinquency and drug use are the same. So that when you address your child’s drug use, you are addressing any delinquent behavior he or she may be involved in. Research finding show that drug use, like delinquency, is caused by your child’s:

• Association with drug-using friends (which is a powerful predictor of antisocial and drug-using behavior).
• Poor family relations predict drug-using behavior directly or directly by predicting association with drug-using friends.
• School difficulties predict association with drug-using friends.
• Neighborhood factors indirectly predict drug-using behavior.

Therefore, in order to prevent or intervene in your child’s use of drugs, you must start with strict monitoring of his or her friends. Youth drug use is done with or through friends. Next, you must keep your child away from his or her drug-using and anti-social friends, and get them involved with pro-social friends. You may accomplish this by involving them in adult-monitored wholesome, youth related activities.

Third, parents you will need to ensure that your child’s school behavior and whereabouts is monitored and that he or she is not associating with drug-using or other anti-social students. This will require working closely with the school and having the school enroll your child in lunch-time adult- monitored activities. Similarly, an effective prevention or intervention approach will also involve monitoring your child’s whereabouts in your neighborhood, and meeting his or her friends’ parents.

All of this will not be easy and will require planning and support. Yet, research studies have shown that this is an effective approach. The key to breaking your child’s cycle of drug use is to monitor consistently and extensively his or her behavior and reestablish family and school attachment. In our next briefing paper, we will provide you with strategies for bring about family bonding and reinforcing positive behavior.

Preventing Your Child From Becoming A Delinquent

Parents juvenile delinquency is both complex and straight forward. What makes juvenile crime more complex today than in the past is the complicating factors which now accompany delinquent behavior: mental health disorders, substance abuse problems, maltreatment and neglect, and gang behavior and involvement. These complicating factors have made juvenile delinquency more difficult to treat and reduce.

Yet, having said this, research now tell us that juvenile delinquency is multi-determined and linked with characteristics of the individual youth and his or her family, peer group, school, and community contexts. Put differently, the findings on the causes of juvenile crime are:

• Association with delinquent friends is a powerful predictor of antisocial and criminal behavior.
• Family relations predict antisocial and criminal behavior directly or directly by predicting association with delinquent friends.
• School difficulties predict association with delinquent friends
• Neighborhood factors indirectly predict delinquent behavior.

In brief, what the research tells us is that the systems that are closer to the child have more relative power and influence over your child’s behavior. For example, the family has the influence over the child 24 hours per day, 7 days a week; and family influence extends well into the child’s adult life.

Though not as influential as the family, the child also has daily access to peers and other social systems. Peer influence increases as the child ages and, as noted earlier, association with delinquent friends is a powerful predictor of antisocial and criminal behavior in adolescents. The school’s system influence also can be strong, but the school is not in session during the weekend, in the evenings, on holidays, or during summer vacation. Likewise, although neighborhood is an important predictor of the behavior of children, that influence is diffused among the multiple people that live within the neighborhood and by the general characteristics of the neighborhood.

The implications of all of this seem relatively straightforward. If the primary goal of you as a parent is to optimize the probability of decreasing rates of antisocial behavior with your child, then your approach must reduce the multiple known determinants of antisocial behavior (i.e., risk factors), while enhancing protective factors. That is, an effective parental intervention must have the capacity to intervene comprehensively, at individual, family, peer, school, and possibly even neighborhood levels. This is the first step toward preventing delinquency in your family.