What about the parents?

Last week Christine Quinn announced a summit on “strengthening nightlife safety”. Though I applaud her efforts to try and put a stop to minors heading to city clubs to get smashed I did have one problem with her summit.

Reading the press release I was immediately puzzled by the headline “Law enforcement, club owners, and city officials work to coordinate efforts, improve security”. What I want to know is what about the parents?

If parents did their job teenagers wouldn’t be sneaking into clubs or coming home at 3 o clock in the morning. The question that should be raised at this summit is why should business owners have to now play mommy and daddy because the real ones don’t want to. Sure you’re always going to have a coupe of kids who are going to do it no matter how involved the parents are but the snapshots by the NY Post of hundreds of teenagers hammered makes me think the parents are the ones who need to be sat down and scolded. Why are politicians so afraid to attack the parents? Even when it comes to students doing poorly in school, politicians like Quinn love to call for more money but never for parents to do something crazy like make sure their child is doing the work and understands it.

Quinn ends her press release by stating she’s “pleased to welcome…a diverse set of stakeholders” to the summit. It’s to bad that the most important “stakeholder”, the parents, is not the one Quinn is calling out.