How and why are teens allowed to roam the roads freely for hours?

What do you think should be implemented? A 9pm curfew for teenagers?

That's cos you've bought them.up properly. Alot of these parents couldn't care less what the offspring are doing and have lost control.
It's a pity it's not harder to have a child in the first place.

Lockdown had it's uses.
I totally agree. Teens shouldn't be just allowed to roam the streets.
We are learning nothing.
The teens that killed Gary Newlove outside his home in 2007 had been roaming the streets, drinking and looking for trouble.
About time there was a crackdown.

Too much freedom isn't necessarily a good thing.
There is nobody that has the balls to implement anything strict for the good of the country.

I have never seen that.

I don't understand why teens wander about at night. Mine are 17 and 14 and would find that nothing more than boring. The 17 year old loves the gym and golf and my youngest is either rebuilding his computer, playing the piano and guitar or playing D&D. I feel very relieved that neither of them have shown any inclination to just go out randomly wandering and looking for mischief!

This may be what you see user-loadsanumbers but it isn’t what I see.

It's the ones who haven't been taught how to behave in public that cause the problems & they're likely to be the same as adults!

Except they won’t be the same when they are adults,@EmmaEmEmz. When I look at the kids who caused trouble at school, they are now fully functioning adults who aren’t running riot at night or terrorising people. The most problematic kid in our year, known for being a bully and vandalising the town, is now a Squadron Leader in the RAF who won medals and commendations for his leadership in various conflicts. Turns out what he needed as a teen was people who believed in him and encouraged his potential. People call that coddling nowadays, but actually it is exactly what some people need. Kids who cause trouble are just kids who need some direction and guidance. When they get that as adults, they manage just fine in the world.

One of the biggest changes in the last 20 yrs is the coverage that things get either by 24 hour news or instant social media.

Everybody has a dash cam, a ring doorbell ( with the same fucking ring) and people have become amateur security guards and detectives overnight.

Growing up in the 70/80s if something didn't happen directly to you, you'd have to wait til Thursday to read about it in the weekly gazette

i do think we need to look at societal breakdown as a whole, discipline, respect, and we need to teach kids about resilence, knock backs, emotional intelligence, ambition, work ethic etc etc. all of which have been dumbed down in favour of political correctness.
people don’t like to hear it but we also need to look at the absence of me role models in lots of kids lives/ not just dads but teachers, uncles, sports etc…

This is utter nonsense @millymollymoomoo. “Political correctness” is blamed for kids not being allowed to call my daughter a disabled slur. Is that something she just has to be resilient to? Her life means she has resilience in bucket loads. She is facing her exams in a couple of weeks having just discovered her support assistant of 4 years will not be there and she will have to rely on someone she doesn’t know and trust to be there for her during that time. God knows how a 15 year old bounces back from that to do their best.

The teenagers I know are no different from how I was at that age, 35 years ago. This notion that today’s teens are somehow way worse than we were is laughable. The older generations said exactly the same about us and they were wrong too (in fact It’s been going on for centuries). The world evolves so we recognise the problems of the past and correct them. Thank god we don’t raise kids as we used to back then. I was there, I know how rotten it was.

If you have a problem with today’s young generation, it is not down to them. It is down to you, and every other older generation because we made them what they are today. The teens in my life are brilliant, and complex, and funny. They have been through a global pandemic at an age where they couldn’t really understand it but they just got on with it. They are dealing with cuts in education, are heading out to a university system that is on its knees, and a world in economic and political turmoil which they will be paying for their whole lives. We have fucked the world up for them and they will be the ones who have to fix it.

Thankfully, for the most part, they are being raised in a way which means they are absolutely ready to do that. Stop doing them down using tabloid tropes of how terrible they are. It wasn’t clever when previous generations did it and it isn’t clever now.

Anti social behaviour and teens hanging out are two completely different things.

My two young yeenagers go out with their friends. They go to the park to play football and to the skate park, they go to the shop, they go into town and get a McDonald's, they go and sit on the beach. They're back at acceptable times, behave themselves and don't get into trouble - I know this because there's been posts in out local Facebook group about them and their friends complimenting them and saying how nice it is to see kids out enjoying themselves in the sun and behaving well.

I also know roughly where they are at all times- they phone and check in every hour or so, and let me know if they're moving location from say the park to town.

Fortunately around our area we are also lucky to have three separate youth clubs that arrange activities after school and during the holidays for teens for free, also providing drinks snd snacks (pot noodles, biscuits, fruit etc) and the youth bus sits in the local park three times a week for an hour, giving the kids a safe space to head to to get a drink or snack, trusted adults and so on.

Not all children hanging out are trouble makers. The majority aren't, they're teenagers who want to spend time with their friends. It's the ones who haven't been taught how to behave in public that cause the problems & they're likely to be the same as adults!

We're all allowed to roam the roads freely for hours. Are you proposing that one sector of society only be subject to a curfew, purely because of their age?

Dearest @LadyGillingham

With all due respect my lady you are deluded.

Since the end of the Second World War teens have hung around in groups. I grew up in the 70s/80s and all we did was hang around the streets and in parks usually drinking cheap lager and smoking cigarettes. This was a middle class area. My parents knew I was local but had no idea where I was.

Today I see far less teenagers out and about. Most are holed up in their rooms on screens.

And to be fair to the ones who are out and about, there is nothing for them to do! We need to bring back youth clubs etc. Channel their growing brains and need for autonomy and risk taking. In the UK we are crap at prioritising this sort of thing for kids.

The only people in groups you see now at all hours loitering about are young migrant men.

Your boys sound lovely, normal lads and, to be fair, I don't think your boys are the 'kind' of young people the OP was referring to. You are obviously being the kind of parent that we need to see more of.

In my area, it's not unusual to see boys of 12 or 13, on electric scooters, clad in black, delivering drugs (i.e. tiny parcels going to houses, what else could it be?) etc. It's awful and nothing is done.

I think an in between normal school and prison for troubled, anti social behaviour kids like a military style boarding school with fun stuff too to show them what a “good structured life” can be like, and not impacting their future potential like a prison record would, could be a good solution. But obviously there’s no funding and probably no appetite for it.

Held accountable by whom?

Aimlessly hanging about with your mates is actually and important part of teenage and social brain development.

And thats the other problem... parents thinking they know where their teens are because they "track them". You know where their phone is.

The boy who killed Mr Kohli is just a c*nt who has been mollycoddled by society for years over his "anger issues" rather than punished. The girl, unfortunately, is a moron.

I know where mine is and who he is with, I track his phone and he tells me who he is going out with/to meet (his mates earpod things are on my phone too so I can track 2 of them also 😂) - they go play football but sometimes they are walking the streets. I can't afford to give him money every night to go to an actual place to hang out with his mates. They are a good bunch of kids and there is never any bother.

I also control what apps he can go on, what screen time he can have all through my phone. He is 15 and his screen time on his phone goes off at 10 and back on at 6 on a school night, notifications everything off. He has an xboxb which goes off at 10 and he does not have a tablet or anything else with internet access other than his TV.

I can't parent much more other than instill in him a good moral compass, responsibility for his actions, manners and teaching him right from wrong. He also knows his actions have consequences, if he has pushed his luck in the past he has been grounded and phone taken off him, but to be honest it was that long ago I can't even remember what it was for. (actually just come to me, decided to go camping with 2 mates and said he was staying at a friends at 13 - but I tracked him to the middle of a field just after midnight, not infact his friends house, told him home and grounded him for a week and told him why, it was not just the lie but also his safety)

There should be a defence for parents that are trying though and just not being successful. So if people are being offered help by social services (rare I know these days), being offered help by the school etc etc but not engaging and doesn’t give a shit what their child is doing that if different to a parent who is engaging and trying their best but not being successful

Teens and kids(because it started a lot younger) have always had a lot more freedom to roam in the past. In fact, it was almost an expectation.

You’re also ignoring the significant influence of peer pressure on teens and their general poor (scientific) ability to see consequences of actions / poor decision making.

You could be a hands on, decent parent but if you have a 16 year old, 6 foot son who has fallen in with a “bad crowd” how do you actually stop them misbehaving? You can’t physically stop them and you can’t actually lock them in the house so other than moving area to get them away from people, which might not be possible, options might be limited. How will punishing the parents help?

(And I say that as a parent of a very well behaved mid teen DD).

Nonsense. Kids have less freedom than ever before. My parents never knew where we were, yet we managed to behave ourselves. The problem is lack of discipline or consequences for a minority. Most are good kids and independence is essential.

And this is interestingly opposite to the message that adolescence brought about teens being at home, in their rooms alone reading online content.

I know it’s one extreme to another but parenting teens is a minefield is my point and with some very different challenges to even 15-20 years ago.