After opening the White House strategy session on youth violence on Monday, President Bill Clinton called on Cornell University's James Garbarino to provide an introductory overview of the issue to the 60 invited participants.

Garbarino, co-director of Cornell's Family Life Development Center (FLDC) and author of the new book Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, spoke about the importance of recognizing that children are raised in increasingly toxic social environments and highlighted the need for increased child mental health services. The number of children needing such services, he said, has doubled in the past 25 years.

Garbarino said he told the gathering of the need for smaller high schools (500 and under) to help adolescents regain a sense of belonging and personal safety, and to promote more positive behavior through programs such as character education. He also stressed the need to find ways to deal with the spiritual emptiness so many kids express. In addition, he addressed the need to deny access to guns, the violence training of video games and the desensitizing and role modeling feature of violent media.

Also attending the conference was Cornell's Claire Bedard, coordinator of the Making Sense of "Senseless" Youth Violence Project at FLDC.

Garbarino was one of three experts invited from the mental health-child development community for the White House Strategy Session on Children, Violence and Responsibility, which also included representatives from the elevision and film industry and from video game and gun manufacturing. Coming out of the three-hour session will be a new national organization committed to promoting grassroots strategies to prevent youth violence, Garbarino said.

Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President Al Gore, commented to Garbarino that they had read Lost Boys and found it useful in their thinking about youth violence issues, Garbarino said. "I was affected by it," the First Lady said of his new book, and Attorney General Janet Reno voiced similarly positive comments, according to Garbarino. The Cornell psychologist said he expects to have a role, as yet unspecified, in giving some direction to the soon-to-be formed organization.