Should Public Shools Concern Themselves with "Relational Aggression" in Girls?   

May 31, 2002

Children and teens are drowning in a sea of divorce, drugs, abortion, alcohol, sex, pornography, and violence. Do what do we do as society? Join hands with parents in finding the most practical spiritual, emotional and biblical help possible? Of course not. That would make sense.

Besides, why come up with a solution for this growing culture of violence in kids when we can dream up a new disorder like “relational aggression” in young girls who seek to torment others. Liberal psychologists encourage aggressive contemporary women to reject biblical tradition in search of female empowerment by writing numerous books on the subject. They sell books such as Sharon Lamb’s “The Secret Lives of Little Girls,” or Kenneth Rubin’s “The Friendship Factor” to a public who buys their radical thinking.

I believe the disintegration of the family is the root cause of nearly every social problem confronting our culture. The high rate of divorce in every survey taken shows children left emotionally debilitated. In their despair they become angry. Any society that neglects that anger neglects it at great peril.

Public schools have no choice but to concern themselves with the fury that girls direct toward one another. But they don’t have the answer to “relational aggression” in girls any more than they had an answer to the Columbine High School tragedy. Actually, the public schools are part of the problem. In a powerful alliance with teachers’ unions, they contradict every value parents hold dear.

I know principals and teachers in public schools who are diamonds in the rough. But I am convinced, in light of the drastic anti-family measures the National Education Association (NEA) has taken, that if parents want to protect the minds and hearts of their children, they will have to remove them from the state school system.

Anger, now renamed “relational aggression” in young girls, is anxiety and frustration raised to a higher level. And as the survivors of Littleton and West Paducah discovered, it was the promises from God that brought peace to troubled children.

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has removed prayer, Bible readings and the Ten Commandments from public schools , the fundamental principles used to build this nation, we will one day see that our homes and our children cannot be healed apart from God.