Currie also examines the fact that in modern America medication also frequently replaces guidance, even as "tough love" replaces any sense of engagement or communication. He contends that modern culture has an old competitive edge to it, in that many parents seem to feel that it isn't enough to be "good;" their children have to be the best. He feels that there is a strain of American culture that is "remarkably intolerant" of what he calls "normal deviance" - i.e., routine mistakes of judgment and minor moral lapses.

Again and again, troubled adolescents describe their parents as both quick to find things wrong and quick to inflict punishment when they do. But not just any kind of punishment. What is remarkable about the discipline they impose is that it so often involves systematic exclusion and the withholding of assistance. These parents respond to their children's problems not by making extra efforts to pull them more closely into the orbit of the family but by pushing them out of it - and simultaneously denying them emotional and practical support, sometimes even the most basic kinds. At the extreme, they are essentially read out of the family altogether.

Currie acknowledges that on occasion, this "extreme" is the result of sheer desperation in the face of a truly troublesome child. However, he also says:

But for many parents, something more is involved. Their response reflects a deep ideological current in which exclusion and withdrawal of support are regarded as not only acceptable but laudable ways of dealing with those who fail or who break the rules. That moral outlook influences much more than the way parents deal with troublesome teenagers: it shapes how we characteristically deal, as a society, with people whom we find problematic. . . . Repeatedly, the chief response - indeed sometimes virtually the only response - of parents, school authorities, and others in the adult world to their mistakes and "bad choices" was to send them away, always figuratively and often literally. But this strategy exacerbates the problems it is ostensibly designed to correct, in mutually reinforcing ways.

This rather neatly sums up my reaction to most zero tolerance policies, which I contend are actually designed to avoid adult responsibility. The school administrators don't really want to investigate or guide the child; they don't want to decipher what is really going on and come to a reasoned conclusion. It is easier - and avoids the prospect of future liability - if kids are just expelled. Take for example the numerous instances of kids expelled (to national attention, in most cases) for writing a story in which a teacher is killed, or drawing a picture of students shooting a teacher, or some similar reference to school violence. School officials are perhaps overly sensitive to such things, but their concern is for the most part understandable: they don't want another Columbine. But note what happens: rather than investigate the particular incident on a case-by-case basis, school officials have adopted an easy out: zero tolerance policies that boot the kid out of school. How, one might ask, does that help the kid? It doesn't. But it creates the illusion that school officials are doing "something" about school violence, and lets them wipe their hands of a prospective headache.