To think that not always, but quite often, it is the parents...

[ImImmortalNowBabyDoll]

I was a teacher for a few years and in the years I taught I saw behaviour getting MUCH worse and parents getting less and less inclined to support teachers.

I saw a facebook post today saying that it's unreasonable to blame parents for children's behaviour in school and it then went on to talk about how hard it is for ND kids to stay regulated at school and it's the fault of "the system" that they can't cope.

There's a family I know with 2 boys who are both constantly in trouble in school. The classroom frequently has to be evacuated because of the younger one's violent outbursts. He's about 8.

I saw him today in the library, running around, ignoring the librarian, and swearing profusely the whole time. They're both always out unsupervised, roaming the streets, and when I see him with his Mum, she speaks to him with the same language he uses for everyone else. Social services had to get involved because she kept smacking them, so now she swears and shouts at them and they hit her, and she asks what she's supposed to do now she's not allowed to hit them back.

I don't know if they are ND, but the problem is that they're barely being parented and when they are, they example being set is dreadful.

My DH is autistic (would have been Asperger’s in the 80s/90s). He’s a perfectly functioning member of society without shouting, throwing or other unacceptable behaviours. I think (and we have a diagnosed HFA child) that society does too much talking and too little consequences for bad behaviour. We can’t just say “it’s ok jimmy, you can scream in the supermarket all you want” it has to be “bad behaviour, we leave, we will try again tomorrow”. Demonstrate good behaviours, reward them when you see them, and call out and give consequences for the bad.There are profoundly autistic children which is entirely different here, but for those with mild SENS or HFA, a lot of parents enable imo.

There's definitely a large proportion of kids who are a direct reflection of their parents.

Recently took some GCSE kids on a trip and a handful were unbearable rude all day, repeatedly asking the same question, rolling around on the ground, generally being impolite.

Emails to parents explaining their sanctions and 75% replied. One of those said they were horrified by their kids behaviour and would speak to them, the rest accused me of various lies/said their children didn't understand why they had received said sanction - the tone of these emails was very rude and accusatory and as though we were attacking their poor darlings 🙄

If the parents cannot conduct themselves with good manners and grace, it's no wonder their children's behaviour is in the gutter!

What is wrong with your son that he can’t manage a train journey? 😵‍💫

My son is now 19 and at uni but when he was starting school, as a young morher with no piers who were parents I was excited to make mum friends. I joined enthusiastically the mum group chat. And when they organised a dinner and drinks night out I was thrilled. Only to become swiftly disenchanted when a parent expressed their frustrations about their hold having drawn on furniture and walls having been called in to talk to rhe teacher about their child’s behaviour and claimed ‘it happened in school so it’s their responsibility’ I was horrified. And then my horrification grew when approx half of the present parents agreed.

It’s down to the parents!

M child can’t manage train journeys or any public transport- do you have a problem with that?

My kids are at a private school where they’re strict and the pupils are as civilised as you can expect teenagers to be….
my son’s teacher nervously called me to complain about him and of course I was fully supportive and told her to get on and give him detentions if needed.. she said “that’s music to my ears”

She’s clearly used to parents being entitled pricks. I felt horrified. clearly this attitude goes across the board!

Is your child an adult in an adult relationship, like OP’s son? If yes, you really should have a problem with them not being able to manage a journey on PT tbh!

Oops seems I posted on wrong thread sorry all!

Yes my child is an young adult. She has autism and it’s hugely distressing for her. She has had support from services to overcome it and in education. She can’t. Should parents of children with more visible disabilities have a problem with their children not managing public transport?

My next door neighbour let's her DC primary aged play up in the garden way past 9pm last night, closer to 10pm. No one else had their DC, just them. Some people don't care.

As a teacher, it’s more common than not for all children from the same household to exhibit very similar behaviours. Which would support the OP’s hypothesis.

It’s been a while since I’ve worked with kids. In my era, I was wary of teachers but terrified of getting in trouble at home. My parents weren’t awful, but I did feel a sense of duty.
When I started teaching it was obvious that most of the issues brought into school started at home. Now and again you would get a rogue offender with lovely parents.
Went into the private sector, much stricter, better behaviour but the problem then was often the parents. Demanding that their child be considered for Oxbridge with 5 GCSEs. It wasn’t always the case, but many thought paying for schooling meant buying results, and I was just another member of the family staff.
By the time I left, and I was still young myself, I had been upskirted and groped, sworn at and threatened. I’d seen it happen to female students. Last time I mentioned this on here I was blamed for that. I did my best but it’s tough when your powers are reduced.
One of my young male colleagues had a pregnant wife and a few male students had bunked off and found her, Threatened her in the street. She was 23. They moved out of the area in the end.
One thing I worked out is that parents being ‘best mates’ with their kids is not the best idea. Let them have their own friends.

Weak, it’s never my fault, parents of MN assemble.

There’s a lot of single-mum-bashing on this thread. Shitty parents come in all shapes and sizes but surely none as bad as the completely absent dads.

The reality is we have gradually created a system in this country over recent decades that increasingly allows parents to shift their responsibilities onto 3rd parties. School and SEND services bare the brunt of it. There is an entire generation of parents who have realised they can label any annoying trait as autism and/or adhd and pass the buck on the parenting. Scarily, half of them genuinely believe that there is something wrong with their child wrong because they display negative behaviour. They can’t conceive it is due to their gentle parenting style, being a friend not a parent, and lack of boundaries.
This is demonstrated day in day out on MN.

It's also quite common for ND children to have ND parents, which is a bit of a factor.in how hard people find it to parent.

DD13 has ASD. No LD but does get DLA for an idea of severity. Her behaviour is amazing, and one of the things I've found a bit irritating over the years is the number of teachers who think that's unusual- there's a sort of low base of expectations for her where if she's not throwing chairs out of the window it's some kind of miracle and job done. Have we done a good job with her so far? I think so (low screens, working really hard to get the right supports in place, structure, stretching her just the right amount) but I'm also aware those strategies might not work with another child or parents might have reasons themselves why they are difficult to implement.

We have a lot of ND in the family. Most of the kids are great (not without bumpy periods) because the parents are capacitated to parent them and are relatively privileged and can access resources and activities. We have one who is a bloody nightmare and I think would be even if NT, because the parenting is very weak. But parents are ND as well and struggle with boundaries and structure for themselves.

Parenting interacts with ND of course. It interacts with everything else about a child. It really really helps a lot of the time, but not always. But if you have no model for that or can't implement it will compound issues.

My son was my fourth child diagnosed autistic at 2 and a half statement in place before he entered any educational establishment. For a short while he attended the school his older siblings had attended. His older siblings were very able and well behaved and I had never had any concerns raised about their behaviour or learning. My son had many challenges with autism and the co morbids but I had secured 1 to 1 support with his statement.
The change in attitude from the school was incredible, they seemed to think that I just hadn't bothered to parent my son after parenting the first three and all his difficulties were seen as a lack of parenting. I even shared with them a letter from his paediatrician that stated I was knowledgeable, experienced and effective.
The school struggled to manage him with his 1 to 1 but saw themselves as superior when I managed him largely 1 to 4 as his df worked away. I laughed when they wanted 2 to 1 if he was outside of school as I walked him to school and back with his siblings every day.
Suffice to say we moved school and the new school didn't seem to have any of the difficulties managing son as the previous one had and we worked together to support him.

I agree. Flip it and think back to when you were a kid and how your peers from 'strict' families behaved compared to those from a slacker regime background.

It's definitely piss poor parenting that is at fault. My DBro was a teacher for 22 years and decided after the behaviour of parents over the school play that he was done. He was brilliant at it too if the cards and messages he got from the kids and parents are anything to go by.

He got the role against 222 other candidates.

Time will come when no-one will teach and the little feral fuckers are the parents responsibility 24/7. That will happen just before the Police get involved.

I went to what was accepted as a 'bad school' but by todays standards of behaviour, it was an excellent school. What passed for bad behaviour (and was instantly crushed out of existence) then would be laughed at now by comparison.

I think nowadays there’s a lot of ‘parenting noise’ from SM. Its easy to say ‘ignore it’ but when your algorithm gets going and keeps showing you stuff like shouting at your kid causes trauma to their brain or not spending every minute with them/sending them to nursery is detrimental to their brain make up it can be a lot!

I do think the rise in parenting as a subject on SM has had an effect on it. When I had my first about 10 years ago, gentle parenting was on the rise. Obviously this then slipped to permissive parenting dressed up as gentle but there was and is a lot of it still on display with their peers.

I also think life is hard in a different way nowadays, external pressures are higher than in my parents time. Back then you rarely had families with both parents out working a 9-5, most had a parent around for school runs/homework etc. Now it’s increasingly difficult to make one salary stretch far enough to support a family. This means parents are time poor and energy poor. If you’ve been working a stressful job all day, I can see the temptation to plonk them in front of the tv while you cook a freezer dinner meaning their diet and screen time is poor. It’s not an excuse in itself but I can see how it all plays a part.

Especially if you are easily influenced by social media.

I think it is simplistic to blame it on one thing alone. Especially when talking about SEND and the fact that too many children are in mainstream who would likely cope much better in specialist provision.

I started school in the sixties. The post war baby boom classes were 40 plus pupils. Streamed classes back then. Top performers in one class, middle class class for the average pupils and class 3 was for the ones who learned at a slower pace, and those who were "challenging". Discipline was much stronger. If you got bollocking off the teacher and your parents found out, you were the likely recipient of a thick ear.
Then along came the "mixed ability" classes, grammar schools kicked to the kerb and it started to go downhill.
Fast forward 40 odd years and now were have parents threatening the teachers, pupils threatening and assaulting teachers and other pupils. Running riot in classes. Single mothers which children of several absent fathers. Add a spoonful of social media and here we are. Some of these kids, and their parents would benefit from a bloody good hiding.
I'll get my coat....

Yep the boom of individualism driven by the constant me me me of social media . The expectation of personalised adjustments. The obsession with what should be done for them , not what they can also contribute.

It's also the constant drip of expecting schools to delve into the emotions of every kid rather than punish. I've been at the same school many years. 15 years ago if you swore at a teacher it would be a day isolation. Now it happens regularly and it's a detention. This has come about from parental complaints "yes he shouldn't have done it but he's angry/struggling/upset/etc/etc/etc
Some students with SEND need specialist provision but if you are a child with SEND in a mainstream setting you need to behave in a mainstream way. We are not actually helping children anymore in a meaningful and caring way, which is sometimes firm and boundaried

I have taught in some of the least successful schools in the region I live in. The catchment has come from some troubled estates with a high number of pp and SEND students. Bereaved, traumatised, involved with SS - these sorts of profound issues affect a much higher than average number of our students. Historically - I think I am that old - the students were disengaged but easily winnable and you could build a classroom community that supported everyone. Many children were successful somewhere even if it was work, the black economy or at theft or similar! They were capable and the relationships I had were excellent and much better than say with the police.

Now it’s much harder to build a classroom culture and to get the relationships where they need to be as the lack of engagement is so enormous. Thinking about the students who struggle well they don’t work, play or engage with each other to the same extent. I almost think of the gobby lad with hustles and girlfriends and a bit of a line in crime as being a bit old fashioned. His modern counterpart is more likely to walk out when challenged, to sleep, to just refuse to engage. I still on the whole am well liked and viewed positively by the kids but they are less capable on the whole and that is social change, technology (the average SM time for my year 10s is 9hours a day-the ones that weren’t that high were gaming instead) and the curriculum. It impacts at all levels on the SEND students who used to get much more nurture and one to one, on the undiagnosed ADHD and the super hard working who get overwhelmed in different ways. The super lively and challenging in some P5 lessons used to be redirected to a different classroom or activity (I used to use some difficult boys as TAs to the younger students for their P5 lesson and what a win all round but now that would be denying them a full curriculum and schools wouldn’t dare allow it no matter that it got them engaged, got them learning too and was an all round lovely thing that prevented them from causing mayhem and getting in bother).

I used to know that if many of our kids could dodge prison they would do just fine and hey did. Now I teach many who it is hard to see ever working. They have got so much emotional growth to do. Their physical resilience is really low - standing makes them tired, stairs are steep, writing hurts their hands. An academically bright student yesterday slept through his English exam this week - he told me his bus was late so he was in a bad mood and he had been up late so was tired. They used to be so ready to enjoy holidays and then ready to leave school - now the they just want to sleep or chill. I know the parents are often a problem as we have quite a few students who are great but their parents are amazingly oppositional. We have a list of ones not to call unless you are a designated member of staff - the abuse and threats are standard even if it’s a positive call home! Our school is very nurturing, very accommodating of needs even when not on plans (too many have been to so many schools things that could help aren’t officially in place) and we work with families but despite this we have parents whose behaviours are shocking, One turned to her daughter last week and shouted, ‘You do right-don’t do what that bitch says…’ in the middle of a meeting!