Haimy:
You miss the point completely. Of course the drug using teen has personal responsibility. But the turn to drugs occurred in a context, and it is grossly ignorant to exclude this from any discussion. With all the blame we might heap on the parents, yeshivos, etc., the kid himself/herself is the one that needs to go to treatment/rehab. No one is forgetting that piece.
However, the escapism we are observing is not just a bad kid doing bad things. These kids are not drop outs – they are “throw outs”. Whatever issues they began with, they were subjected to rejection, when we needed to work with them. Whether these issues were emotional, academic, behavioral, or whatever. We have a wealth of resources that can be utilized to help. But we have tended to watch these become cash cows, not helping services. The kid who refuses to dress appropriately is “bad”. NO! He is in pain. Why? I will never know until I connect. And most of us feel we will be somehow ashamed of associating with him, and avoid it to protect ourselves. All the while, the kid in pain suffers more.
The suicides we watched in horror this year are not suicides, but murders. We, as a community, have failed them, and consistently at that. Don’t we wish to present HKB”H with a gift? How about bringing back a lost neshomoh?
The very title of this post is sad. It implies that we throw the full responsibility of a kid going OTD on the kid himself, as if that whitewashes the rest of us. “Not my problem.” “It’s not us yeshivos – it’s the parents and family.” “It’s the yeshivos.” “It’s the bad friends.” This shifting of the responsibility is garden variety “blaming others”. How about if we just grow up a little, and look for ways to include these kids, welcome them, embrace them? How about if we worked hard to modify our presentation of Yiddishkeit so that they will see the beauty of it, not the stern, threatening G-d.
This weeks parsha makes specific reference to Hashem’s strictness with us: כאשר ייסר איש את בנו ה’ אלקיך מיסרך. It is not the punishing G-d that is exacting revenge for violating His mitzvos, but the Loving Father that seeks to bring the child into the fold of shmiras mitzvos. Do we treat our youth as a loving father?
No one is absolving the OTD kids of their responsibility. But we also cannot fault them for running away from us. We cannot simply put the blame on them. We are in denial, and that is healthy for no one.