One Solution for Our Biggest Problem

"Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought."
- Albert Szent-Györgyi, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1937

I did.

As a teacher I wondered why kids who were such vibrant and interesting little people in grade school a few short years later had so many personal problems, many of which turned into academic, health, psychological and legal problems.

As parent of a teenaged daughter I wondered why my child felt she needed to dress somewhat like a hooker when she reached her mid-teens in order to attract boys.

I wondered why so many adults turned to alcohol, recreational drugs, prescription drugs and many forms of addiction which inevitably ruined their lives and usually the lives of those they loved and who loved them.

I wondered why small crime increased so much that variety stores had to put bars on their windows and gas stations kept their attendants behind bulletproof glass overnight.

I wondered why the courts put so many more people in prison than ever before, but people were more afraid than ever to walk the streets at night, take a subway or bus at night, even to let their children play outside after school.

More police, psychologists, therapists, doctors, prisons and psychiatric facilities obviously wasn't working. A neoconservative broadcaster informed her audience that these social problems were simply the consequence of overwhelming success of western society in the modern world.

Nothing about human behaviour is inevitable. I knew she was preaching crap. Almost everything we do is a result of a series of lessons and circumstances that led us to make the decisions we do. People can be taught to behave differently, as happened when laws regarding seat belt usage for car passengers and drivers was effected.

After a great deal of study of people (we sociologists love to do that), I found the answers. Parents were no only too busy to teach their children the life lessons that parents of the distant past had taught, but many of today's parents had little idea what responsibilities a parent has or how to carry them out.

Parenting, the most important job in any society, was the only one where amateurs were not just admitted, but were encouraged by keeping young adults ignorant of the information they needed to know before they could use it.

We are afraid to teach our children about crime for fear that they will become criminals. Then we cry when they become victims of personal crimes. We are afraid to teach them about sex for fear that they will become sexually active as a result of having information. We are afraid to teach our children about drugs for fear that they will become users. Studies have proven all of these beliefs to be wrong.

We don't have time to teach our children what we have learned about being responsible adults, so we leave it to television, movies and video games to teach our children on our behalf.

... (pause for effect while you think about that)

We don't permit teachers to involve themselves with such matters because we believe they are the responsibility of parents, not schools. But too many parents are not teaching kids what they need to know.

Some parents leave teaching important life lessons to their kids until the kids are old enough to already have formed some twisted and harmful attitudes toward life and have found themselves in trouble. For example, young children should know about illegal drugs because many of them will be offered drugs while they are still in the early years of grade school.

Despite this total disconnect of young people from the information they need and of parents from the knowledge about development streams of children, we continue to believe that both parents and children are better off being kept ignorant.

If we don't believe that, then that is nevertheless the consequence of what we do believe and the way we function as a society.

Ignorance never improved anything. One way or another, we have been misled about the importance of parenthood and how and what children must be taught. So I compiled a huge amount of information and wrote a book designed to inform every parent, no matter whether they are good readers or not. It's an easy read, loaded with valuable information and tips and parenting and about how children develop and what they need to learn.

Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems not only discusses the problems of modern families and communities, but presents a plan to implement change that will form the basis for a reformation of society into one of real knowledge about parenting and child development. It's an easy to understand plan and will be quite straightforward to implement.

Best of all, implementation of the plan is cheap. Any initial investment spent by governments will be recouped within five years as a result of lower costs to service social problems.

Now we need you to read the book and tell others about it. Anyone and everyone with access to a computer can find out a huge amount of information by going to my web site at http://billallin.com

I can only do a limited amount without your help. To assist, all you need to do is to read the book and tell others about it. Give your book to them. Or borrow it from your local library.

Solutions are no good unless people know about them. I did my part. Now it's your turn.

I'm here to help.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to get the word to as many people as possible before it's too late.
Learn more at http://billallin.com