Ann Wason Moore speaks with former top cop Terry Goldsworthy on the role parents have in youth crime

A Gold Coast bootcamp for troubled teens is holding a special retreat for parents to help turn the tide against the youth crime wave. Read why

Where are the parents?

Mention youth crime and it’s one of the first questions asked.

Despite being their own humans with individual personalities and issues, it’s all too easy to make troubled teens a purely parental problem.

And for children growing up in homes where there is family violence or substance abuse, it seems a simple line from frightened child to an adolescent acting out.

But are we oversimplifying it? Because that line is not always straightforward.

Yes, parents must be accountable and hold responsibility for their children, but we also need to acknowledge that the landscape of parenting has completely changed.

The cost of living these days means non-working parents are a rarity, and most families are time-poor.

The advent of personal technology and especially social media means it’s so easy to escape into our iPhone, rather than gather around the dinner table.

I’m not judging. Lord knows I’ve just described many a night in our own happy household.

Some days you just have no energy left to fight the good fight. So few of us have extended families nearby for support either, meaning we’re doing this on our own.

It’s tough enough in a two-parent family … for those single parents out there, my heart goes out to you.

Taskforce Guardian involves dedicated Queensland Police detectives and expert Youth Justice (YJ) workers being deployed to key locations to assist local police efforts in disrupting youth crime offending.

Even in my own now long-ago pregnancies, it always seemed absurd that so much time was spent talking about labour and childbirth.

Did I really need weekly classes to figure out that this baby was going to make an exit sometime around week 40? My birth plan was simple: give birth. Preferably with painkillers.

What I would have loved were some lessons about being a parent. Not just about changing nappies (although with a firstborn son I would have appreciated advice on how to protect from surprise showers), but just how to deal emotionally with the chaos you can’t control.

Despite my best efforts, I soon learned you cannot reason with a sleepless newborn.

Yet as the saying goes, the days are long but the years are fast … and suddenly you have a teen on your hands.

This is where every parental shortcut you were forced to take and every mistake you ever made come back to haunt you.

Touch wood, my children are glorious. Absolutely no bias.

But both my husband and I won the lottery when we were born into healthy and happy families with strong marriages and parents from whom we could learn.

To wheel out another saying: you can’t be what you can’t see.

Not only did many of our modern parents never receive these lessons, their lives are further complicated but the aforementioned lack of time, money and, of course, the addition of distracting technology.

As much as we focus on youth crime and how to punish these offenders, we owe it to our society to look at where we’re going wrong and try to address the root causes.

That’s something that Bond University criminologist Dr Terry Goldsworthy agrees with.

“There has been a breakdown in the social structures that would assist and prevent (young people) from going into offending cycles and we need to give them support,” he told Sky News.

“We don’t train people to be good parents … and many people fail.”

While there are now a crop of troubled teen ‘boot camps’ springing up across Queensland, there is now a retreat designed especially for their parents.

Criminologist Dr Terry Goldsworthy speaking about youth criminal gangs. Picture: NIGEL HALLETT

Veteran Mentors director and Gold Coast resident Troy Methorst said the group was holding a three-day parent retreat on Mount Tamborine in June to help the guardians of these at-risk teens reconnect and to give the confidence to persevere.

“We’ve been working with at-risk kids for seven years and the more we’ve been working with them the more we’ve seen that their parents need support too, both mums and dads,” said Mr Methorst.

“All parents need support but especially when they’re really being challenged at home. Parents are losing their own sense of self, they’re doing everything for their kids and losing energy and self-identity.

“When parents are exhausted, that leads to more chaos and trauma.

“We want to fill their cup, bring them back to life and remind them who they are. Things fall into place once they are looking after themselves.

“It’s learning to be vulnerable with kids, too, we don’t always have to be strong and tough. It’s okay for our kids to see us cry and to understand that we all have struggles … but we can move on.”

So where are the parents? They’re here, they just need help.

And once the parents are all right, perhaps the kids will be too.