Reclaiming the lives of young people.

• Author: Woodson, Robert L., Sr.

As America's future lies in the balance, there should be no greater priority than the need to reach and guide its young people. By the age of 18, many of today's youths confront more moral decisions than most individuals in their parents' generation faced throughout their entire lives. The good news is that men and women who can offer desperately needed guidance and direction are at work throughout the country, touching the lives of thousands of young people, inspiring hope and vision that can secure their destinies. The importance and unique quality of the work of these dedicated community leaders can be appreciated most against a backdrop of the scope of the problems experienced by today's youngsters and the dismal track record of many conventional, professionally designed programs for at-risk youth.

Crimes committed by juveniles, often with disturbing indifference and seeming amorality, have created a public perception that there is a part of the upcoming generation that is lost and beyond help. Furthermore, reports and statistical studies reveal that the epidemic of spiritual malaise and violence has affected families at every income level. The youth issue is not exclusively an inner-city one.

Examples fill news reports. For instance, armed youths in Washington, D.C., fatally shot an honors student waiting for a school bus as they attempted to take the jacket of another youth. In a small rural Texas town, 10 boys bragged, without remorse, that they had tortured a horse to death. Two teenaged girls -- one from an inner-city neighborhood of Los Angeles, the other from an affluent suburb in northern Virginia -- were killed after secretly slipping away from their homes. The first was caught in a gang crossfire just after she had phoned her mother saying she wanted to return home; the second was crushed to death by a car she was rolling down the driveway for a midnight rendezvous with friends. The mothers of those girls were united in shared agony. Differences in income level and social status faded in the face of crisis.

Throughout the nation, youths from suburban neighborhoods and rural communities, like their inner-city counterparts, are in danger of wasting, losing, and taking their lives. According to statistics provided by the National Network of Runaways and Youth Services, 5,000 children die each year in the U.S. as a result of assaults, illness, or suicide. It is projected that one in seven youths between the ages of 10 and 18 will run away from home. Each year, 1,500,000 young people are living on the streets. Many of them turn to the drug trade or prostitution as a source of money.

Trends in behavioral choices among youngsters revealed in a report by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development indicate that the crisis will grow worse if effective intervention and support are not provided. One-third of eighth-graders surveyed in the study admitted that they used illicit drugs, including inhalants. Fifteen percent said they had drunk more than five alcoholic beverages in a row during the preceding two weeks. The report noted that the greatest increase in births to adolescents was to girls younger than 15; the firearm homicide rate among 10- through 14-year-olds more than doubled over a seven-year period; and suicide rates for that age group increased by 120% in 12 years.

Understandably, most resources and efforts to rescue children have been targeted to inner-city populations. Youths in low-income neighborhoods are the most vulnerable since their communities lack the cushion provided by the economic stability of middle- and upper-income areas. Yet, the millions of dollars that have been invested in public and private programs for at-risk youth have had little effect.

In Washington, D.C., a teenager who had murdered a taxi driver in his neighborhood was sent to a non-secured psychiatric treatment center in a resort town of upstate New York. After months of therapy, he walked away from the facility, returned to the District, and committed a second murder at a convenience store just blocks away from his first homicide.

The failures of a number of professional programs that have been launched for at-risk youths show not that things are hopeless, but a need for a fundamental change in approaches to the situation. There are at least four reasons why many efforts have not been effective:

* Many conventional programs have been designed on a mistaken premise that the source of the problems faced by young people is external and that the root causes of the current youth crisis are economic and financial. It is assumed that, if...