I hope I'm not breaking any rules here, but I'd love to see how the folks here would chew over this topic. I also realize that to a certain extent, every generation thinks the young folks are crazy bad. LOL

Here's the link to their discussion.

http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jsp...=20051128184354

Debate questions:

Do you feel children today are more out of control, rude, or badly behaved than in past years?

Do you think children have less respect for parents and authority figures?

If so, what factors do you think have contributed to change in the behavior of children?

Debate questions:



I don't believe so. In working with youth, they run the gamut from straight "A" honor society, to average moderately involved, to downright ready for prison. Most kids that I deal with are very curteous and thoughtful of others-then again, perhaps I live in Mayberry RFD? I would say that the negative poll numbers have to do with an age gap and the youth being misunderstood....just like their baby boomer predecessors.



No, not every kid, just the ones who grow up in households were respect isn't demanded and where insults are traded at will. Kids only reflect the behavior they've learned at home, which in many cases, is their parents attitude towards authority and society in general.

Do you feel children today are more out of control, rude, or badly behaved than in past years?

Which past years are we looking at? The last ten years? Twenty? fifty? two thousand?

If I look at my own childhood and compare it to what I see around me today, I see a lot more drunken behaviour and sexual promiscuity in modern youth but far less violence. I see drugs in schools which was practically unheard of when I was a kid, but I don't see the near cerebral racism that pervaded my days in primary and high school in the UK.


Do you think children have less respect for parents and authority figures?

As compared to thirty years ago... Yes. I think so... or am I just confusing respect with fear?

According to my Father ...and Josef Stalin ...these are one and the same thing...


If so, what factors do you think have contributed to change in the behavior of children?

There are two main factors in my view. The first is the saturation of media in childrens lives. When I was a boy my number one occupation was lego, or possibily toy soldiers and model aeroplanes. In my teens it was role playing games and hiking. TV was there, but it was rationed, both by my parents and by the limited number of things I cared to watch.

Children today have a dizzying array of TV shows catering to their desires. There are entire channels that show nothing but childrens programmes and unscrupulous toy adverts all day long. As if this wasn't bad enough, children today are given interactive concole and computer games, they have the internet and they have cell phones.

By themselves these things (kind of like chocolate) are not bad for the children, but they become so when consumed in vast quantities. The greatest asset of childhood is imagination but todays children (in the industrial nations) are being spoon fed that which their own minds can, and should be providing for themselves.

As my GF points out, when she was a small child, she could entertain herself for hours with a few pebbles and sticks or an adventure in the garden. She grew up outside and for the most part and so did I.
If today's children go outside, it must be an event of monumental stress and precaution. Mom has to drive the kids to football or to ride a pony, because just imagine if something happened and Mom wasn't there!


The other main factor why kids are growing up so differently now than in my generation, is the matter of punishment.

How do you punish an errant child today? I see so many parents who are litarelly being held in check because they can't counter their child's natural ability to manipulate its surroundings. Once upon a time if a child misbehaved you could administer a punishment but today this is regarded as bad parenting.

I think its a shame, and no favour to our children, that we (in the industrial world) have cultivated attitudes towards parenting that stops parents from using the tools nature provided. Instead of allowing parents to decide for themselves how best to raise their children, we have created a society where TV shows belittle parents who do not have the psychological edge over their children.

In the thousand generations before mine, children had a place in society that was under the authority of the parents. Today, children are considered sacrosanct, almost to the point of ridicule. Parents have become servants to their children by laws created by social demands that leave many powerless against the primitive desires of their own offspring. Children, who have learned next to nothing of morality will gladly kick, punch and attack their parents if allowed to, and as we can see about us, many do and often for the most trivial of reasons.

Social conventions have taken away the authority of parents towards their own children, but at the same time it has also made parents even more responsible for their children.

Today, if my child hits me, then I am a bad parent. If my child breaks a windown then I am responsible.

...but if I punish my child, then I am still considered a bad parent and I may very well be charged by the police if that punishment goes against the moral code of any one watching who decides to call the police.


I see a combination of these two factors as being the biggest problem with regards to raising children today. Society as a whole is dominated by certain popular memes that now influence us though a wide range of media and which are crippling our societies in various ways.

For example, the notion that war is bad is making it ever more difficult to wage war.

With regards to child raising, we are all being subjected to a popular concept of what constitutes a good parent, but one which doesn't give us the tools to replace those it removes. At the same time, our social model has us working ever longer hours and places ever heavier burdens upon us in order to make ends meet and whilst we work our fingers to the bone, our children are being raised in institutions and so seldom see us and in our absence are subjected to the same corrupting influences that we all are (by which I mean advirtising, internet porn, TV violence and stuff like that)

Children are a bit like art. They reflect the society in which they are created. Drug use and sexual indifference has spread through western industrial society with ease, and our children are simply following in our footsteps.

Do you feel children today are more out of control, rude, or badly behaved than in past years?

Yes and no. My generation of kids was definitely rude and unruly, but my recollection is that it was more sporadic and/or judicious. There were still authority figures of whom we were afraid, so we'd ration our naughtiness for the times when we were unsupervised.

Possibly as a result of that, I'd say that the extent of the naughtiness went much further than the general level of unruliness that modern children constantly dsiplay, particularly (in my own experience) in the area of "psychological bullying" or, in straightforward language, making fun of other kids.

I don't have much time for physical punishment of kids, either institutionalised school beatings, routine parental beatings, or the occassional stressed out parental smack. The last of these may be understandable, even forgiveable (if the parent realises that it's more evidence of their own failure in self-discipline than their child's), but I don't think any of them should be indulged.

But I think some of the current paranoia (in British schools at least) about "bullying" is more in the psychological line. I'm conscious that I might sound like an old-fashioned public school colonel of the shires who gets his kicks from being beaten, but I was psychologically bullied and it never did me any harm. (How do I know? Did I duplicate myself and live one life the way I have and another with no bullying then compare myself in the two parallel universes to have a control? Er, no.)

Fatuous though the statement may be, I think most of the panic about our poor litle lambs being picked on by every else's little monsters might be over-egged. What happened to a stoical "sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me"?

And as for standing up to give seats on public transport and that kind of public politeness, today's kids don't really do it, but then they rarely seem to use public transport under supervision, of which mroe later...

Do you think children have less respect for parents and authority figures?
If so, what factors do you think have contributed to change in the behavior of children?
I'll take these two together, after trying to do it separately and finding it hard to maintain my flow.

In answering this question, the point has to be made that children are not somehow inferior these days to some halcyon time inthe past. In any nature/nurture balance, nature hasn't changed very dramatically, if at all, and children do not nurture themselves. If the behaviour or children has changed (which it undoubtedly has), and if that change is for the worse (which remains to be seen), then the causal changes have been in the adult world - parents, teachers, wider society, commerce - and not in the nature of children themselves.

Less respect for parents? Yes, I think so, but we have a generation of parents now who don't want to be authority figures, but want to be friends with their kids. I have seen this as particularly true among young fathers, many of whom seem to have no idea that their kids need them to not be their best friend all the time.

The 'friendly father' syndrome might be a reaction to earlier generations being the archetypal stern and distant father. Like any other reaction, it sometimes goes too far in the other direction. Divorced father with limited access time are naturally gogin to want their time with their kids to be non-fractious and fun, which mitigates against them being stern authority figures, even when that's required of them.

The general lack of authority from parents might also be caused by increased stress and time pressure in the modern workplace making parents demand of themselves that the time they spend with their kids be 'quality time'. They will be less willing to lay down the law, causing tantrums and arguments (with tots & teens respectively), to keep the "quality time" enjoyable for themselves.

This in turn feeds back into a type of selfishness that underlies many modern decisions to have kids - we want to have them for our own selfish reasons. This has always been true to an extent, but these days, parents seem to want the whole experience to be enjoyable for them and for their kids the whole time.

Parents used to fit their kids into adult life. Routinely, if parents wanted to go out to a pub or restaurant and couldn't find a baby-sitter, they'd go anyway, taking the kids and leaving them in the (locked) car. I was an only child, and they'd never do this to me if I was on my own, but if they were gogin out for a meal with other parents, their kids and I would play with toys in our car, and the parents would bring out a coke or orange juice & some potato crisps (chips), break up the usual fights and arguments, etc. It was quite good fun, as it goes. These days, many would throw their hands up in horror at the very idea - treating children like dogs!

Instead, today's parents find themselves limited to going to "family restaurants" which seem to have some unwritten law that they must have play equipment and a ball pool. Parent's social lives now seem to revolve around their children, and the children don't seem to be expected to sit and eat quietly in adult company any more - they have to be off running around. (Given the lack of exercise they get the rest of the time, this may not be such a bad thing.)

Modern child discipline in the home makes good use of ideas like 'the naughty step'. (If you've not come across it, a misbehaving child is put on the bottom step of the staricase and left alone for a few minutes until they calm down. It seems to work well when used correctly, though I'm not sure if it doesn't qualify as a kind of 'psychological bullying'.) An obvious question I have is what do you do when your child misbehaves somewhere else - say, at the supermarket? Where is the 'naughty step' there? I'm sure child behaviourists, and good parents, have another way to do it that works just as well, but maybe someone ought to tell the stressed out parents I see shouting and slapping their (small) kids in supermarkets.

And again, other adults feel unable to intervene, since in today's world, child-rearing is the exclusive domain of parents. NOBODY is allowed to tell them they should do it differently. Parents are (increasingly) told that education is their responsibility too. They have to choose the school, and take an active part in running it. If they don't, they are somehow failures as parents, even if they are barely educated themselves.

(This is especially acute in the US, I think, where the pathological universal distrust of the state makes everyone think parents are supposed to be in charge even when someone else, e.g. a teacher, is. Suddenly, as parents, their lack of education is nobody's fault but their own, when as 'students' it was nobody's fault but their parents, especially when it comes to the lack of sex education that likely turned them from ill-educated teenager into ill-educated parents in the first place. Anyone else smell something fishy here?)

For teachers? Definitely. I have several teacher friends, and they all tell me that the paradigm has shifted in the past 30 years or so. When I grew up, and for many generations before me, ALL adults were authority figures of some kind. If parents were told by their school that thier child had misbehaved, the automatic response was to believe the school and punish the child.

If strange children misbehaved in public - talking in a cinema, or mucking about on public transport, for example - any adult nearby felt entitled to tell off the kids, who would normally (with ill grace) comply. Strange children who looked lost, upset, or who grazed themselves while playing were an adult's duty to look after or simply comfort if the parents were not nearby.

I vividly recall one summer day as a student in the coastal town of Brighton, where my then girlfriend and I found two kids playing alone on the beach. They happily kept themselves to themselves until the little boy hit the little girl with his plastic spade. We intervened to break it up, and, on talking to them, found out they had sneaked away when their mother wasn't looking. 'She will be very worried', we thought, 'and there are some weirdos around, so we had better look after them until we can get hold of thier mother' . After some cajoling, we managed to get the boy (aged about 7) to tell us his phone number. We called the mother, who was indeed worried sick, and we looked after the kids until she could make her way to the beach.

These days, this has flipped. Adults seeing children in distress now think, instead of "I'd better help, in case some weirdo takes advantage", "I'd better not help, in case I get accused of being a weirdo". Adults seeing children misbehaving as laughed at or even attacked (by older kids) if they dare to intervene with shouts of "you can't tell us what to do, you paedo!".

And teachers are completely hamstrung. Mostly by a build-up of many individual decisons, all of them reasonable on their own. Institutionalised beating is not acceptable. Some teachers were (and probaly still are) abusers, and so any "inappropriate physical contact" should be discouraged. But, in today's litigious times, the easiest way of avoiding inappropriate physical contact is to avoid ALL physical contact. Shouting is deemed too aggressive, and we want to teach the little darlings that aggression shouldn't be used.

It doesn't help, of course, that in the past two generations, teaching has changed from being a majority male profession to a majority female profession. Simple physical size makes exertion and projection of authority more difficult (though clearly not impossible) for women teachers, especially of teenaged boys, who are often much larger.

And, just as majority maleness elevated confrontation, naked agression, untramelled competition, total focus on one-off exams, and other generally masculine traits to levels often beyond usefulness in the education system, majority femaleness has now elevated avoidance of confrontation & competiton, and focused on cooperation, coursework rather than exams, and other generally feminiine traits often beyond usefulness. Where the old, male-driven system usually failed girls, the new female-driven system usually fails boys (boys trail girls in educational attainment in every developed nation, though the size of the gap varies).

Another symptom is the shift from the word 'pupil' for a minor in full time education to the term 'student'. In my mind, one is only a student when the bulk of the time spent studying it carried out by the student themselves in libaries or study rooms i.e. outside the classroom. If the bulk of study time is in the classrom, one is not 'studying', one is 'being taught'. Most of the effort is coming from the teacher, not the student.

Again, the initial impetus towards 'student' was for laudable motives - to reward older pupils who were being asked to behave in more adult fashion with a more adult title. But to hear about 8-year-old student is just silly - about the only subject any 8 year old studies is music, and that's because even at that age, they are expected to practice in their own time for more hours than they have music lessons. GRR!. 'Pupil' carries negative connotations, silent children quietly writing, or paying attention when the teacher (or, the old matching terminology, the 'master') talks, afraid to speak on pain of beatings. But I'd bet most modern teachers would give their right arms for the first two parts.

The whole paradigm shift I referred to earlier to risk aversion is not borne out by the facts - the abductions of children by strangers have remained at more or less constant levels for many decades (in the UK, about seven children die each year from such things, which has been the case since at least the early 60s). Child abductions by strangers are so shocking BECAUSE they are so rare.

But now, the presumption is that all adults (except the parents themselves, which again flies in the face of the facts since most child abusers have, since time immemorial, been parents. Usually fathers.) are potential abductors. So kids must be kept indoors as much as possible.

They cannot be left to go unsupervised to school on public transport (so the kids never learn how to do it politely). Instead they must be individually ferried to school by a parent. Strapped into all kinds of protective seating equipment. And if the vehicle used is an unnecessarily large vehicle that provides an additional illusion of safety for concerned parents, so much the better. Who cares if the road system grinds to a halt at 8.30 am and 3.30 pm each day in all major towns and cities?

They cannot be allowed to play outdoors unsupervised. And when they are, they have to be wrapped in cotton wool. Special rubberised surfaces have to be used in public parks, in case someone falls off a swing or slide and their parents sue the owners. (The results? Fewer serious hed injuries in young children, which is a good thing. Higher local taxes for everyone, with or without children, which is less good. I'd be interested to see the cost beenfit equation, though.) Trees have to be cut down or fenced off in case anyone should try to climb them, fall out, and sue the owners.

Our kids are now safer than they have ever been during childhood. But their diets and lack of exercise may mean they will have shorter lifespans than their parents for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.

I'm not a parent (yet - I still hold out some hope for myself ), bu I can't help thinking the pendulum has swung too far towards the interests of children in every area of society to be entirely healthy for anyone, including children themselves.

[/rant]

You really shouldn't categorize a generation because it truly varies by each family.
Besides, who are you to judge someone's parenting style?

Do you think children have less respect for parents and authority figures?
Sure.

If so, what factors do you think have contributed to change in the behavior of children?

The lack of outward respect from kids correlates to the lack of beatings IMO. Of course there are other(immeasurably better) ways to have children who behave, but when all else fails - a good beating could always be counted on to restore order in the home. Not so today in most households. We view the spanking as barbaric so that when the children inevitably outwit, outplay, and generally outlast us, we just give in. Face it. They have more energy, more time, and more irrational stubbornness on average. So you have three options;
1) refuse to lose - stand firm and talk it out for as long as it takes,
2) give in to their demands, or
3) stop the nonsense cold with a good whack upside the head.

The first option is the best, but the last option is better than the second IMO.

Do you feel children today are more out of control, rude, or badly behaved than in past years?

Quite hard to express a point of view on this without painting with a broad brush, so here it goes...
On the average, I've got to reply to the affirmative. This is coming from someone with parenting experience X2 and "mentor" responsibility for teens in a Junior Firefighter program, so it's not "inexperienced". As one would expect in a normal distribution there are demeanors across the whole spectrum, but I think the mean has declined.

Do you think children have less respect for parents and authority figures?

Sadly, again on the average I have to say yes again. Especially in the Junior program it's taking longer to get the point across about command authorities in the fire service and also making them realize (and behave accordingly) that they are a example of our department in public, good or bad, so long as they are associated with the Department. If parents (substitute bosses or any authority figure) try too hard to be "a friend", it blurs the lines, leading to confusion.

If so, what factors do you think have contributed to change in the behavior of children?

Now I'm really going out on a limb here, but I think that an "active parenting deficit" is the most encompassing answer. There are several reasons that I have observed:

1. Single parent households. (My apologies because I know some great single parents ). In many single parent households to sole provider ends up having to spend too much time working on the job and around the house, with not enough time available for "quality time" with the kids. Even being a "two parent" household, I sometimes look back and wish I had spent even more precious time with them.

2. Parents too involved in themselves to have enough time for the kids. In some cases this is viewed as a "necessity", e.g. long work hours. My experience has shown me that the more you make, the more you spend. People working for me in times of plentiful overtime get accustomed to the extra money, only to get cars repossessed when things slow down. The kids should be our priority, get by on a few less bucks and enjoy them. Another part of the equation is what I'm going to blame on our own generation, that being that some parents are more concerned about themselves that their kids. They just don't want to put them selves out. Dictionary aside, one has to consciously put "us" and "you" ahead of "me" to be successful.

3. (And this goes along with #2) The prevalence of psychoactive cocktails prescribed. The majority of kids I've worked with both on & off their meds leads me to believe this is little more than a parent crutch. Some quality time and just letting them know where "the line" is usually works. To find out where the line is, it has to be tested. If people don't let them know where the line is consistently, the kids are never sure what to expect. If you change the game on the fly how can you expect them to follow the rules?

My experience is all suburban/rural. It is always rewarding, while challenging. I can only imagine how the urban setting might be....

Do you feel children today are more out of control, rude, or badly behaved than in past years?

Yeah. We need a spanking....

Do you think children have less respect for parents and authority figures?

Yep. As I said, we need to be spanked somemore!

If so, what factors do you think have contributed to change in the behavior of children?

Did I mention we could use more spanking? (Its a three liner! Haha!)

Beatings? I really hope you're joking. Not that I have a problem with spanking, but having worked for a juvenile court in the past and seen cases involving parents who didn't know when a spanking escalated into a beating, and who whipped their kids with extension cords and sent them to the ER ... well, I really hope you're joking.

Also, a "whack upside the head" is not something to joke about. Head injuries can kill.



I get the idea.

Yes, I'm joking. Sort of. By beating I don't mean maim the children. That's just my quaint way of saying the use of physical force. Sorry to offend. I do think force is sometimes a method of last resort that is better than giving in to your child's demands though, and that the societal pressures to avoid this manner of discipline at all costs is a contributing factor in insolent behavior in children.

No. Every generation laments how corrupt their youth are getting.

No. Every generation laments how corrupt their youth are getting.


There, that’s 2 Lines; albeit the same: To satisfy the younger generation who are aghast at their elders giving short succinct answers to questions, instead of long winded responses that serve no purpose other than to waste bandwidth with redundancy.

Wisdom entails keeping it short, sweet and to the point; something some will learn are they get older and start bitching about how unruly the youth of today (tomorrow) are.

1.) Sure. Children no longer have a mother who is with them full-time. Some mothers choose to have careers, not that it is their fault, but children no longer have the attention that would be given by one or more parent and the exclusive disipline after school and on the weekends that at least one parent would bring if they do not work.

2.) Obviously. It comes from little expectations at home and of course, at home is where you learn your basic morals. So, at schools, kids have no respect for teachers who are expecting things out of them that would not be expected at home. Then it all snowballs down from there.

3.) See above.