Ban Lucifer

[robvalue]

I have to agree. The general behaviour of children has gotten worse. On the whole, I blame the parents. I taught in several high schools at the end of my teaching career of several years, for about 3 weeks, before I had a breakdown. These kids are just unbelievable. We had some "bad kids" in our day, but they were nothing compared to this.

One big problem is that parents now often do not support the schools. You need parental permission for a detention, and instead they will call the school staff liars. They won't help deal with the problem, they'll just say "My Johnny wouldn't do that."

So I think we're dealing with a very spoiled generation of children, due to absent parenting. It would be my guess that the prevalence of attention grabbing technology has made it the "easy option". Why spend all that time talking to your kid, making sure they are OK and doing activities with them when you can just sit them in front of an Xbox? The result is kids with fucked up social skills, who are used to getting what they want. When I witness parenting on the street, it tends to be either letting them run riot, or else coming down on them way too hard by screaming at them, without explaining why the behaviour is wrong. Also, when kids want something, they get it. Parents would often rather keep the kid "happy" in the short term, rather than address their behavioural problems in the long term.

In both schools and parenting, corporal punishment has gone (that is a good thing) but not much has taken its place.