To think worsening behaviour in school is due to the size of children these days?

[gassenhauer]

Obviously not the only reason, almost definitely not the main one, but certainly a big one I think. I have siblings a good couple decades younger than me, at 11 my sister is 5’7 (apparently the lower end of avg. height in her year), 14 y/o brother 6’4, both overweight and massive. I’m 5’3.

I do find it hard to imagine how teachers would be able to break up fights, or even properly confront bad behaviour if a pupil that big is known to be aggressive. Surely this must impact?

Everyone was complaining about how awful behaviour was when I started teaching in 2003. It’s never accurate to compare memories of your own school days.

I think there’s a real crisis in terms of parenting, and this creates real problems for schools.The levels of defiance, disruption and just a basic lack of respect, and even out-right contempt for adults, is evident and very troubling.
this. Theres a massive problem with ineffective parenting. It starts in infants. Infant children are easy to remove from a Situation. When it is easier to remove a child from a situation than deal with poor behaviour, it can become a lazy habit of parents. Then -bam- the child is a teenager and the parent has never tried dealing with the actual behaviour and now they are completely lost. and you would nit believe the amount of parents we phone to speak about the poor behaviour if their children and the consequences they are getting, to be told by the parent that no, they do not agree with that. It must have been someone else's fault… child now knows their parent is soft as crap and will support their poor behaviour and so continues to behave poorly.

I think, (without sources or inclination to find any), that at population level average height and weight has been steadily increasing for decades. So if it's a problem, its one faced repeatedly by many generations before, not unique to now, with children on average, growing taller than their elders.

But by 11 and 14, when this difference in stature is really becoming apparent, there's other things influencing the control, or lack of, of the class. I imagine, those misbehaving now were the same as those doing so as small children who could be handled physically, but weren't actually give any consequences (like physically moving to time out/away etc., not smacks)

In 40+ years of teaching, I’ve never heard of size being touted as the source of misbehaviour in class. For a start violence in the classroom is not the main misbehaviour.

Totally daft idea.

I've dealt with, and deal with big lads every day. Generally fine.

5ft 7 is not an average height for an 11yr old. My DD is 14, 6.5 stone and 5ft 2, her friends don’t tower over her too much

Those averages include all adults though. Younger people are generally taller these days due to better nutrition. And old people shrink.

This

In the land of the giants lol.

I think this is a very small part of the problem op but a part never the less. And more so when the child is very young. DS was an enormous 10 year old, Exactly the same height as he is now (at 27) 5'10 and 11 stone. More than capable of shoving his primary school teachers over and without the impulse control that you might hope to expect in at 16 year old of the same size. He never did hit one as far as I know, but he was bloody intimating and often destroyed property at school and school resources. Plus he often used to walk out or go over the fence by standing on a car if locked in. He was adopted age six and never, right from the start weighed less than me. Abuse has been found to accelerate puberty and he had been abused of course. So its like the children who have already been damaged and are in many ways already quite 'dangerous' are then cursed with an early puberty which gives them physical strengths to add to their predisposition to lash out.
I felt extremely sorry for his teachers and myself.
I always felt that it was much more luck than judgement that he made it to adulthood without a proper criminal record and was not a father aged about 13.

It’s not the animal in the fight it’s the fight in the animal, my Nanna was 4 foot nine and my god nobody crossed her.

but of course this was back in the day when people didn’t go around hitting and stabbing 4 foot nine women.

They are very very tall now. I’m 5’5 and most of my 11 year olds female friends are already as big as she me (DD isn’t, she is seen as tiny at 5’1). They all seem to be Iook quite grown up as well.

Get real?
I’ve been doing this job for nearly a decade and a half. Like I said, I’m less than 5 foot tall and so even the average year 7 girl is taller than me. It’s fine. I have no trouble with behaviour of kids over 6’ tall.

I’ve also seen 6’4” tall men totally unable to maintain order in a room of 11 year old girls. In fact, I’m sometimes the person on-call that goes in and restores order. There’s actually a stereotype of the very short woman teacher who is a ferocious disciplinarian. I’m not especially, but I’ve worked with a few who very much fit that description.

I'm assuming it's a typo for 4'7"

Indulgent parenting is a significant part of the problem, along with ineffectual SMT who don't like to rock the boat and so appease parents of challenging children rather than address the issues at hand. The fact that many children had little to no social contact outside their immediate family for the best part of two years is a scar that will fade VERY slowly...

Probably in Typo Town, and OP meant 4'7"

I work in a secondary school, the Y7s definitely aren't particularly tall and certainly aren't the same/similar height as the adults around them.

You're short at 5'5" tbh.

Utter nonsense. Are you saying female teachers cannot control behaviour of most of the boys in her school, seeing as it doesn't take a 6'2'' boy to knock down a woman?

Less of the versus, it's not a fight.

The OP has raised a frankly silly bogeyman, based on fuck-all evidence about a an aspect of classroom behaviour that does not reflect the reality of the shitty behaviour teachers see every day.

You're short at 5'5" tbh

No she isn't. Average height for women in the UK is 5' 3".

Agree with all of this.

I think it’s down to parents putting the responsibility onto teachers rather than owning the fact it is up to them to teach their children manners and boundaries

I had a teacher like that too. You could have a bit of craic with her, but everyone knew where her line was, and it was never a good idea to cross it.

It is irrelevant because you can't physically force a young person to do something. So if it was a 6'4" man, he'd still have to, for example, just watch the child smash up a classroom and walk out. Individually speaking, as a woman, you might feel more fear. But size and control are irrelevant.

Hear hear.

Children are not taught good manners or to do as they are told any more. Respect for teaching staff and anyone else in authority should be ingrained at an early age, and it just isn't happening. Kids start school and think they can do whatever they please, and when they get told off, their parents, instead of giving the child a telling-off, complain to the school.

A 5'7" 11 yo girl is unusual, she seems to be in a cohort not representative of the country as whole

Yes it's really daft to associate bad or threatening behaviour with a pupil's size. Also daft to underestimate the skills that teachers develop to handle classes successfully.