The future of society depends on our children's achievement today. But some children do not get the opportunities they need in order to achieve success. The film Boyz in the Hood is filled with disturbing images of children growing up in the inner city surrounded by rubble and filth, dysfunctional families, drug addiction, violence and chaos. It's not difficult to see that children who don't feel safe don't make good students. Hearing about the Pilgrims, for example, doesn't have much meaning when you've just seen a dead body and blood flowing in the street, when ordinary conversation is about guns and violent events, and children with crack-addicted mothers raise themselves as best they can. This kind of disorderly environment is not conducive to good citizenship, good health, or emotional balance.
             Typically, society responds to the problems of youth by constructing some sort of program to meet the individual problem (such as teen pregnancy or gang involvement). Tipps (2006) describes it: "We tend to believe that every possible transgression is best remedied with a program that focuses on the potential pathology" (p. 24). Such programs may have limited value, however, because they simply treat the problem and not the whole person. Society itself doesn't change. Moreover, children "at risk" are more than their problems-they are whole human beings with infinite potential. They need adults to believe in their potential and not treat them as though their problems were all that is important about them. A child like Darrin in the film whose mother hates him for some reason and who has no father to show him how to be a man is not simply vulnerable to gang membership and delinquency. His whole situation-his lovelessness and the ugliness of his environment-needs to be addressed. And even if his mother did love him-as Tre's mother Reva did love Tre-she couldn't &q...