The shocking manner in which a 13-year-old stabbed his classmate to death in Kanpur on July 31 deserves condemnation. 

According to a Hindustan Times report (quoting the police) the accused student had warned his classmate repeatedly, but he continued to abuse him and even threatened to kill him. This led to a feeling of vengeance in the accused following which he planned to murder his classmate and teach him a lesson.

The accused then started watching online videos using the mobile phones of his relatives and also purchased a knife which he hid in his schoolbag. On that fateful day, during lunch break, he committed the heinous act which was reportedly captured by CCTVs installed in the classroom.  

The injured boy was rushed to the nearby hospital but he couldn’t survive. The police have since arrested the accused and seized the digital video recorder. While the ongoing investigations can unravel further details there are no easy answers as to what actually prompted him to take such an extreme step of killing someone he knew. 

Let’s for a moment rewind. In a similar incident that was reported in Chennai a decade back, a 15-year-old class IX student had meticulously planned to kill his class teacher. 

He carried a knife for at least three days to school, waited for an opportunity and slashed the unsuspecting teacher’s throat. According to circumstantial evidence, the accused attacked the victim because time and again she had sent adverse remarks on his performance to his parents. 

Uncovering some of the biological traits that may be the cause of troubled behaviour, research has shown that about 10 per cent of children are born with a mix of ‘challenging traits’. Such children are very sensitive and get easily frustrated. They can get emotionally intense, have difficulty coping with change and usually portray a pattern of behaviours that express their growing frustration, like clenching their fists, jiggling their leg, or making sounds of exasperation.

Globally, anti-social behaviour among teens, that include rule-breaking, lying, stealing, destruction of property and aggression towards others is on the rise. 

The most common and classical anti-social disorder in childhood is known as  “conduct disorder” which is a complex mix of behavioural and emotional problems. Such children, who have been found to be typically cruel both to animals and human beings, are equally destructive, deceitful and often uncontrollable. 

While in some children, such bad behaviour can taper off as they grow older, there are those who grow up to become violent individuals and such childhood conduct disorder after the age of 18 is reclassified as antisocial personality disorder, which is common to those charged with violent crimes. 

Is poor parenting responsible for such problems? 

Psychiatrists warn that part of the problem stems from the inability of parents to understand their child's temperament and to work with, rather than against, a child's strong emotions. It is important to find out why children get involved in violent acts before judging them. More so because, the way children behave is usually influenced by the local environment -- particularly what they observe from elders, what they hear and learn from peers, parents, relatives and society. 

In many nuclear families, where both parents work, due to compulsions they spend less time with their children at home. Some of the remarks made by teachers during ‘parent-teacher meetings’ about their wards are rather unpalatable. 

A working couple was shocked to hear during an interaction with the class teacher that their ‘child’ who was in the sixth class had been bringing a mobile phone to school which they were unaware of.   

Nowadays, the ubiquitous Internet dominates how a youngster thinks and acts. When they can’t use the Internet, it often triggers anger. And uncontrolled anger has an adverse impact on everyone in the family. 

Growing up in an abusive or chaotic family is equally dangerous for children. 

Let’s take two real-life scenarios. I know a family where the parents (both working) and their two children (son and daughter) have an excellent relationship (bonding). The rules of the house are clear to everyone and the parents’ lead by example. Internet as well as the social media is used in moderation and everyone benefits. 

In the second case, the hardworking father, lone earning member, is quite strict. Because he has been brought up that way by his father, he feels, by placing all types of restrictions on his teenage boys, including Internet usage, he can control them. His typical behaviour over the years seems to have ruptured the father-children relationship. The mother, who is voiceless, is caught between her husband and children. 

The conflict at home spills over to his work and the father says he keeps thinking about the Internet misuse at home by his children while at work. Unable to concentrate on his job, he is taken to task frequently at the workplace by his superiors. 

A recent study that explored the relationship between parenting behaviours and children’s excessive Internet use has found that when the parent-child attachment was strong, parental control, monitoring and rationalisation were effective strategies for reducing the child’s problematic Internet use. 

However, when the child had a negative view of parent-child attachment, parental control, monitoring, unstructured time and rationalisation could not reduce and sometimes even worsened the habit. Notably, regardless of the parent-child attachment quality, dissuasion did not have much of an influence.   

The Kanpur incident ought to be viewed as a wakeup call that calls for serious introspection by all concerned. More so because, every child deserves to attend school in a safe, supportive environment where they can learn, thrive and grow. 

Those children who witnessed the unsavoury incident need to be referred for professional counselling as emotional wounds arising out of the event can leave long lasting scars among some children. 

A 10-year-old boy of a family friend who witnessed the gold chain of his mother being snatched by goons at a traffic intersection was so terrified that he started bedwetting. Psychiatric counselling did its bit but it took about 8 years for the boy to stop the practice.   

It is time that all educational institutions put in place violence prevention programmes along with a zero-tolerance policy with regard to carrying of any firearms, knives etc., by anyone inside the premises. 

Considering that students face several challenges in the academic environment, as per government guidelines, all schools mandatorily need to have qualified counsellors.  

There is an imperative need to provide children an opportunity to help themselves. 

Most importantly such interventions can help children with violent behaviour. 

That many children seem to be spending more time online than ever before underscores the need for better regulation-cum-monitoring of their Internet use at home.   

Parenting in the age of Internet is challenging but there can be no room for any complacency.