Dealing with Delinquency not a Child's Play

We follow the dictum “children of today are leaders of tomorrow” and love them and try to provide full facilities for their growth and development accordingly. But paradoxically enough, the more we care for them the more we suffer despondency and despair. Of late there has been an alarming engagement in the sphere of delinquency of children. From minor acts of abuse, fights, theft etc they have now graduated to commit as heinous and serious crimes as Rape, Robbery, and Murder, which suggests there is something radically wrong with our socio-legal dynamics. In this fast changing world where development of science and technology keeps us on the run with rapidly occurring incredible changes that affect our life styles, we can't remain contented or being confined in a strait jacketed idealist frame of laws which have no bearing on the present day situation. We have to be pragmatic and realistic rather than bigoted with a kind of idealism that hardly works now. This paper presents the areas which need to be dealt with for the prevention of delinquency and in particularly highlights the role of family in dealing with delinquency. The need of the hour is to avoid tackling the symptom and look into the cause, the spotlight has to be turned on the family. The challenge to family intervention researchers is to develop and test interventions that effectively address such a broad range of family protective factors which can provide a leeway to our youth.