Discipline alone often backfires
Re: Without church and parents, kids run wild,” April 19
Gregory Kane falls short in his explanation of youthful depravity. Parental supervision, discipline, and religious guidance are of course important. But emotional nurturing, from both mother and father (or their surrogates) matters, too.
Delve into the childhoods of kids like these and you usually find terrible neglect and sometimes abuse. Insecurity and hostility mount and eventually spill out on other people in the form of vice and violence.
Conservatives who think I mean that we should coddle kids have it all wrong. But constant punitiveness and coldness have a way of backfiring. The judicious combination of warmth, tolerance, and discipline is the way to get good outcomes.
Quality psychotherapy for all ages, and family life education and counseling for teens and adults, would make a big difference in reducing the incidence of kids running wild.
Sharon Kass
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Mental stereotypes lead to guilt by association
Re: “Cartoonist crossed line,” from readers, & “Some are not willing to put away race card,” April 19
In reference to both Malcolm Coate’s letter about Catholics and Bill O’Reilly’s column about playing the black race card, I hereby quote a line from one of William Shakespeare’s famous plays said by the orator Marc Anthony at the funeral of Julius Caesar, a trusim which persists in our society until this day:
“The good which men do is oft interred with their bones, while the evil they do lives after them.”
Regardless of which segment of society is under consideration, it seems it is always the worst members of that group, not the best, who grab the greatest public attention. From there, we all form negative mental stereotypes we then impute to all group members based upon guilt by association.
This presumption is grossly unfair to individuals in the group, who want nothing more and nothing less than the chance to speak for themselves.
Lawrence K. Marsh
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Self-insured are not freeloaders
Re: “Most uninsured will be happy to get coverage,” from readers, April 12
Why does George Bogart call people who don’t have health insurance freeloaders? The correct term should be self-payers.
Hospitals and doctors send a bill to someone, either patient or insurer, and they expect and usually do get paid. They should be glad to get business from self-payers which does not add to the paperwork burden of their highly paid staff and therefore is pure profit.
Ellen Rafferty
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