Parents don’t want to raise children anymore

[radiator2]

As some of you may be aware some children have been arrested in relation to the murder of an 80yr old. The mother of one of the rioters has also jetted off on holiday with no regard for the fact her child was due in court. While these are two quite extreme cases they seem to represent a bigger issue and I feel like nobody can be bothered to parent nowadays. I work around children and I see it daily, parents unbothered with discipline or actually raising their kids. It feels like some parents have no clue what their kids are up to meanwhile kids younger and younger are committing crimes and getting in huge trouble at school. I genuinely fear for the future with some of those in this generation of children and I can’t work out if more kids are just terrible people or if more parents have kids with no interest in raising them. I might be being a little dramatic but these kids don’t seem afraid or anything or to care what damage they cause

Go back 150 years and it wasn't any different to what we are experiencing today - its just that as the population is double what it was in 1880, the risk is now twice as high that parents aren't parenting their children. Not only that but tv, SM newspapers are more abundant and we know that it's happening.

History is going round in circles, pandemic, wars, generations of different peers and their pressures - its all happened before.

https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprobation/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2021/11/Academic-Insights-Gray-et-al.pdf

Yes there are feckless parents but there are a lot bringing their kids up to be decent people

Thing is we only read about the feckless. The 90% that are decent families with good moral values are overlooked for newsworthy stories.

If we constantly hear about badly behaved children or badly behaved OAPs then we being to believe that all of that generation are going to behave in a certain way

Agree with this OP.

A kid in DC’s class was so violent and disruptive we took him out of the school and moved to another. The education of the others was being ruined and there were injuries.

Parents of this kid were hopeless. Gave him a smartphone in early primary with access to older apps. TikTok algorithms cannot help and normalize bullying. Write snarky messages about the teacher on the class WhatsApp.

The kid does have significant SEN and isn’t getting the right support/the school can’t cope. So he is being failed on all sides and causing a lot of damage as a result. My teacher friend says she has experienced similar and with large class sizes it is very difficult. She also says that 20 years ago kids like this would not have been kept in a mainstream school to the detriment of themselves and others (sounds awful to write, but the kid cannot follow the work and is stopping everyone else getting on with it, plus the daily outbursts were likely him trying to communicate his frustration).

This is what was happening to kids , as young as 10, when parents couldn't parent or the system cba. They were given adult doses of largactyl and in a lot of cases sexually abused.
It went on for years, another public secret.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/29707018/survivors-abuse-hospital-compensation/

Well that's funny, I seem to remember studies saying parents these days spend more time both working and with kids than ever before.

Used to be dad down the pub and mum doing the ironing while kids ran riot in the park.

There's less violence than ever before, it just gets reported more.

I feel like nobody can be bothered to parent nowadays

This is clearly bollocks. Most people do parent their kids appropriately and most kids grow up just fine.

I am in my fifties and actually parents parent a damn sight more than they did when I was young. Kids used to just take themselves off and play with kids in the neighbourhood all day when I was young ( which was a good thing imo) whereas nowadays parenting is far more time consuming as parents spend their time ferrying their kids around to activities and arranging organised play dates.

A couple of decades ago I heard and elderly man speak and he said he didn;t understand what people were going on about when they talked about how violent kids or society was now. He said when he was young there was a level of casual violence, and acceptance of this, that just doesn't exist now. I agree with him.

I parent my children. Fuck off with your generalisations.

Honestly, many of us grew up skint, I’ve never been a youth club in my life. I was still brought up to be polite and respectful. Being poor doesn’t make you a criminal. I really dislike this belief that that people just can’t help it. Love and boundaries is not a consequence of money (money definitely makes things easier). it’s a consequence of personal responsibility. We have to stop acting like everything is someone else fault.

Some people are poor because they behave badly, I know it’s not fashionable to say but if you can’t hold down a job because you can’t be arsed to get there on time, or can’t cope with being given instructions or can’t manage your temper etc you are going to be doing badly. The problems are more complex than money and they start young. If you are taught to behave reasonably you can have a fair crack at building a decent life regardless of where you started. That is on parents.

It’s a mixture of things though. When I was a kid my parents often had no idea what I was up to (nothing dodgy to be clear!) so that isn’t necessarily new. I would go for hours without going home or seeing my parents. Kids aren’t scared of authority now though like we were, they know exactly what can and can’t be done. DH is a teacher and he regularly hears colleagues b having to deal with “you can’t do that because I’ve only done X thing” type responses.

On the flip side now you can track phones, we’re the most CCTV’ed country in the world. Everything is recorded, seen, photographed, posted.

The recent event you reference is a tragedy but so was the James Bulger case, in fact that was arguably “worse”. It’s not like there’s been vast numbers of cases of feral kids murdering people in between though.

This is just bollocks. Extrapolating what you’ve ‘noticed’ into a vast litany of Daily Mail type generalisations and barely disguising a longing for a return to authoritarian parenting.

I say this with respect and care for teachers (I'm married to one), but every generation of teachers say they've seen a deterioration in children's behaviour. It seems to be an absolute constant of getting older that you start thinking children are worse behaved, and teachers aren't immune to it. In this thread the 90s are being held up as a time where it was all much better because children were so much better behaved - back in the 90s they were busy having their own panics about the collapse in behaviour in schools. In the 70s they said how much better it was in the 50s, in the 50s it was all going to hell in a handcard, unlike the 30s...

The thing about being more closely parented is true, to the extent that children spend less time independently out of the home, and take fewer risks than previous generations (e.g. apparently teens today are having less sex than previous generations, fewer learning to drive etc... this might all be US stats but it could be broadly similar in the UK). I read/listen to a lot of psychology/sociology research books/podcasts!! 😆

However, children are getting more sucked into the digital world, and there are many parents who don't keep a close eye on this at all. It's like the risks have morphed into something less tangible and obvious, so it's overlooked or downplayed.

The problems are more complex than money and they start young. If you are taught to behave reasonably you can have a fair crack at building a decent life regardless of where you started. That is on parents

But if kids don't have parents who do this, then it does take money for the state to intervene, either by supporting the family or by supporting the child. If we don't intervene the problem continues down to the next generation. Families and kids can be turned around but its expensive and time consuming to do this. (of course, its more expensive not to do this in the long run).

I don’t know, you kind of know if you have more children who aren’t potty trained or communication problems year on year.

Well if you work with children you will see less than adequate parenting but that doesn't mean its increased
There have always been bad and disinterested parents .

Wh-what????

@OoLaaLaa
I was behind the school if my son got into trouble some parents aren’t and blame anything other than their lack of parenting

My friend now teaches at a school that I taught at in the 90s. Then the children were very well behaved. Now the dinner ladies won't go out with the children unless there is a teacher on duty at the same time. Friend describes their behaviour as feral. She and I qualified in 1989. She will leave teaching at Christmas.

Touch a nerve did it?

Teachers are just as prone to cognitive biases like rosy retrospection as anyone else.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1ddegp8zvo

They are having to put in new plans to deal with changes in their intake. I’m not sure that can be dismissed as cognitive bias.

You need punctuation, otherwise it's still hard to read, sorry

This is an aspect of human perception but there is also data and statistics. Look at the increase in the number of children going to school not potty trained. The increase in consistent school absence which has seen the introduction of increased fines. The increase in agency support, the number of children on CP largely for being neglected. The increase in the amount of children living in food poverty. This also happened at a time when a lot of family and support services such as Sure Start were cut.

All of these factors will have an impact on the emotional and mental well being of hundreds of thousands of children and impact them significantly.

If your talking about lockdown it was nearly five years ago ,how long are people going to blame every social issue on the pandemic?