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

But they would all be in those ONS figures, because that asks people if they've been a victim - as noted, this is deliberately to make sure that police effectiveness isn't a factor as this does vary over time and so makes like for like comparison of crimes recorded by the police difficult. The police have actually, on average, got much better at recording crime - but again this is irrelevant to these figures.

The key info is shown in the graph below:

A few:

• Rates of teenage pregnancy have dropped really significantly since the 1990s: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/18/how-uk-halved-teenage-pregnancy-rate-public-health-strategy
• Teenagers today drink significantly less and begin drinking at older ages on average than in the 2000s: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/polopoly_fs/1.806889!/file/Oldham_Holmes_Youth_drinking_in_decline_FINAL.pdf
• As noted above, rates of violent crime (disproportionately committed by young men) have fallen since peaking in the 1990s.

People really struggle to accept the truth of these statistics because they don't fit their perception that the world has got worse as they themselves have aged, but this does seem to be a near-universal human perception, experienced throughout different times and cultures, and so pretty independent from actual facts.

Sorry, it looks like I can't copy and paste a picture in MN. It's now attached instead.

Reading all the replies has been quite interesting. As some of you have stated yes there are a lot of nice, well mannered children alongside the badly behaved one.l agree with some of you that it is a combination of factors, responsible for the bad behaviour of children. In my experience I think that a lot of parents have replaced their parenting and interactions with their kids with iPads etc which has worsened the behaviour of kids. I also particularly agree with one user who commented on the lack of activities there are for teens. It’s a shame that there aren’t many youth clubs for children to join and how expensive extra curriculars are.

I believe STDs among young people has risen exponentially as has sexual violence. Sexual offenders are getting younger. I thought teenagers now take drugs rather than drink.

My mum born at the end of the war said they went out in the morning and came back at tea time. No adult had a clue where the kids were or what they were doing......

My uncle came to work in the UK not long after that. He used to talk about gangs of poor kids trying to cut black and Indian men with razor blades / knives. So I doubt anything’s changed other than the reporting of it.

Drug use is down too (less dramatically). STDs are on the rise in all age groups.

Some things have got worse - I'm not trying to argue that everything is better now. But I do think your reaction shows perfectly what I mean about people just not accepting anything that shows that the very fixed idea they have in their heads that the past was better doesn't match reality.

I haven’t read the whole thread but would love hear from long term teachers who have seen 2 or 3 decades of students, they woukd be able to discuss the changes in behaviour they have seen surely?

i think children are definitely exposed to a lot more harm these days, social media, addictions to electronics, lack of exercise, bad diet (there is a link between gut health and mental health), all these factors contribute to poor behaviour and parents are sometimes unable to control.

have to say, the number of kids I see with bear bellies that belong to a 50year old, tells me there are plenty of lazy parents out there that cannot be bothered with their kids.

Yeah, I don't think that that was likely what my mum was up to.

I think parenting is more intense now & not usually to the benefit of the children. If I look back to my own childhood I was unsupervised (with a parent available to run back to) for hours and hours on end. I was allowed to roam our housing estate, go up the woods, go to the library, go on errands etc as a junior school kid. Very few have those freedoms now.

I asked for examples of better behaviour in children and parenting. You could only come up with a decrease in pregnancy and alcohol use.

We have a children's mental health crisis in the UK which is evidence that children's wellbeing has not improved, it's got worse. A recent study showed that British teenagers were the most unhappy in those surveyed.

We have a teaching crisis because not only are children not taught basic skills, they are more aggressive because of lack of discipline.

Children are being groomed and are addicted to porn because they are not adequately safeguarded.

STDs and sexual violence are a major problem with teenagers, many girls are coerced into performing risky sex acts that boys have seen in porn. Sexual assault has risen and the age of perpetrators has decreased.

Children are carrying knives and knife crime is through the roof.

We keep hearing about children murdering people, most recently the 80 year old man killed yesterday. A 14 year old is being questioned.

Something is obviously going very wrong and it's because of my rigid thinking and rose tinted spectacles - of course.

Ah, sorry missed that bit about the people being asked. Get it now!

Tosh.

How do you explain the demonstrable fact that the more equal a society is the less crime & more trust in its institutions it has?

Do you really refuse to accept that there have been children who have committed murder and other serious crimes in the past and that this is sadly not a new thing?

I do admit that there has been murder and it's not a new thing.

but one thing they know from the age of 3 - physical actions have very physical consequences. The banning of corporal punishment in UK families and schools is only reinforced by what happens in our judicial system - severe physical actions have no physical consequences - you kill a person you get a sentence in prison where you human rights are observed, which is the equivalent of 'you kicked your mum, you spat in her face, you broke your sibling's arm - now kindly go to sit and relax on the naughty step'

^

Agree with this wholeheartedly.

Very true op, and it's not just poor families and those on benefits that I've seen behaving poorly but married, both parents working, middle class kids who behave appallingly..one child kept threatening son with a gun, (dad has firearm license), his mum said it's kids just being kids...

But when her child was threatened with being hit with a golf club, both parents went in separate cars looking for him...so it's not just kids being kids

It's not tosh. If low crimes rates are associated with a more equal society then why does Dubai and many other middle eastern countries enjoy such low crime rates? Saudia Arabia, China and India also have the most trust in their government and aren't known for their equal societies. Poverty rates in the UK have decreased since the 1990s and yet most would agree that the issues around children's behaviour and poor parenting have got worse. There is plainly more at play here than simply money and deprivation. Cultural issues can't be ignored.

Children committing murder is more common than people think actually. I’m not saying it happens a lot but certainly more then you might think.

Sometimes, it’s a case of feral parents rearing feral kids. Shame really. ☹️

As someone with family that lived/worked in Saudi back in the 70/80s the low crime rate was likely due to the very extreme punishment for committing crime.

Amputations and Beheadings where a very real threat if you stepped out of line.

The society was also massively unequal with the very rich royals looming over the very poor peasants.

Obviously beheadings reduced the number of people willing to 'risk' it (didn't stop it) but I don't think that means we should bring back executions to strike fear into the masses.

If course you're right and I'm not suggesting we start beheading people but if you want to alter behaviour then inevitably there has to be an element of deterrent in place. At the moment many families and kids think they're untouchable. Working on improving deprivation and improving equality won't solve this problem.

I appreciate that that may be your experience, but I’m a teacher in an independent school and can tell you that these behaviours still occur. Yes, it’s usually linked to SEN and we have to implement strategies to deal with it, but it’s there and no less than in any state school I’ve worked in. In fact, it feels more concentrated here due to the smaller class sizes and parents of SEN children choosing us as they believe the smaller class sizes will allow better support for their children. (In reality, their children would like have better access to support in state schools).

I am a teacher and there is a noticeable change in children’s behaviour, but not to the extreme of murdering pensioners. Also, there are so many factors surrounding these behaviour trends which several posters have already mentioned, and parents “not wanting to raise their children” is not one of them.