What are we doing wrong?

Another sad story of a kid snapping:

A 13-year-old pitcher was accused of clubbing a teenage friend to death with a baseball bat, moments after the friend apparently teased him at a concession stand following his baseball team's first loss of the season.

Now Drudge's headline for this was "Teen Accused of Killing Friend With Bat After Game Loss..." which immediately prompted me to think "Oh here we go, they were playing Tekken 5 and some gamer kid freaked out and people are going to scream and cry about video game regulation again." I was very shocked to learn that the game loss was baseball. This is sad and tragic, but brings home this point: It's not all about school shootings. When there's a school shooting, everyone is quick to blame guns, the gun industry, and the legality of guns as the problem. If only there were no guns, there would be no school shootings. Sure, a baseball bat is "single shot," as opposed to a handgun with a 10 round magazine, but I bet if someone was really determined he could whack as many as five heads with a baseball bat before anyone realized what was going on. So, where will the public outcry be against baseball bats? How about hockey sticks? Or cars? Kids kill with cars all the time.

Anyway, that's not why I wanted to write this post. This article got me to wondering a number of things. Here's an excerpt:

The boys had no history of fighting, said Tony Trevino, coach of the Dodgers, which had just defeated the suspect's team, the Angels, when the clubbing took place.

"That's what's so shocking and so appalling," he said. "What happened? What did we miss as a community? What did we miss as parents?"

What, indeed. My kids are very small, and they have yet to endure the social torture that comes with the teenage years in this society, but I wonder what we are teaching them, or not teaching them. Are we teaching our children how to handle stress? Are we teaching them how to handle anger, or any extreme emotion? Coping skills are not innate, they need to be taught and, more importantly, modelled for the child. I try to with my little ones, but I have a long way to go. Note: I am NOT SAYING that the accused's parents did not do so, these are just questions I'm asking about today's families in general.

Ryan Gosporra, 15, said the incident began when Rourke cut in front of the suspect in the snack bar line. Neither he nor Trevino saw the attack that occurred after the last game of the night with about 40 people at the field.

But Trevino, 50, said witnesses told him the two boys teased each other before the suspect pulled a bat from his bag and hit Rourke in the knees, then the head.

What else was going on in this poor boy's life that he could not handle some teasing? Is he always being teased? Bullied? If so, did anyone know or help him out? Was this a response to a pattern of abuse and non-response by adults?

How about his overall stress level? Personally, I can't believe the amount of stress kids are under these days. Participating in three, four, even five sports, plus extracurriculars, plus tutoring, heightened academic pressures, social interconnectedness 24/7 via cell phones and IM, media saturation via video games, TV, iPod and Internet -- when do our children have time to talk about what else is going on in their lives? And all these activities take a lot out of a kid. I'm getting tired just listing it all. When do their brains stop? I would be exhausted if I had to keep up with an average 13 year old's academic and social calendar, and from a full-time working mom of two toddlers who averages about 5 hours of sleep a night, I think that's saying something.

After the attack, Trevino saw the suspect standing against a fence with his parents. "He looked scared. He was in shock," the coach said.

Unlike the animals in this story, which would be a whole different post about morals, values, and the lack thereof, I really feel bad for this kid. I get the sense that even he has no idea what happened and why he did it.

At the playing field Wednesday night, a family friend read a statement from Rourke's parents, who urged people not to demonize their son's attacker.

He "is not a monster. He's a good boy who made a bad mistake. This is a mistake that will haunt both families for the rest of our lives," the statement said.

This is amazing and gracious of the victim's family, and seems to show an understanding of the accused's situation.

I don't have any answers. I have dozens more questions. And there's one overall feeling I carry away from this story; sadness that somehow, we as parents and as a society contribute to the stress that drives kids to do this sort of thing. And we're not doing a damn thing about it.