Why is the behaviour of young children so awful these days?

I'm not sure. I'm going to assume that you listen to your parents, and so you'll know that there are times when you really don't want to listen to them but in the end you do. The thing with younger kids these days is that they have plenty of options to report their parents' attempts to discipline them. This means that they do whatever they want without fear of consequence. The real influence I feel is in the fact that many parents are career oriented, or not even bothered, so that shows through their kids.

yes this 100% although I feel there are easy methods to deal with children aged 8-16 banning them from their I Pad or socializing which may see hard when they are 13-16 but even at that age if you are firm set reasonable rules and what not I think it can be done.

'cuz YOLO.

They're only young.

yes this 100% although I feel there are easy methods to deal with children aged 8-16 banning them from their I Pad or socializing which may see hard when they are 13-16 but even at that age if you are firm set reasonable rules and what not I think it can be done.

If I ever have kids, then I will whoop their butt if they act like dicktards.

So you're saying it's okay for 11 year olds to swear at me, throw things at me and verbally abuse me?

So you're saying it's okay for 11 year olds to swear at me, throw things at me and verbally abuse me?
Right...



For some reason though, many parents do not want to set rules for their children. This is what leads them to believing they can do anything.

My comment was intended to be satirical. It's what everyone says to justify stupid actions.

I get really annoyed when kids can mess about and other people say 'they too young to understand', but maybe that's just me being overly harsh.

Yeah although this is child abuse blah blah blah could result in prison sentence. Stupid really, if they have gone out of line a smack on the toosh should be allowed just to identify that it is wrong. Once done a few times they will have learned in general the difference between right and wrong. And then they will not be a 'dicktard' again.

So you're saying it's okay for 11 year olds to swear at me, throw things at me and verbally abuse me?
Right...



For some reason though, many parents do not want to set rules for their children. This is what leads them to believing they can do anything.

~TL;DR at the bottom! ~

Right, only read on if you want to read a rant about society.
Got it? Okay.

So, today I went out with my mum for a drive to some lakes. It's a place with lots of wildlife, which she loves, and people of all ages go. It's a perfectly normal public fieldey-lakey area, really.

So, we were sat in the car, looking out to all the birds on this particular pond, which were lovely. There were a pair of canada geese with 2 goslings, which were adorable to watch - the parents were very protective and it made us laugh how they blocked off the path and hissed at walkers. Occasionally a dog without a lead would go past, and they'd go into angry-goose mode and get very annoyed at it.

Anyway, 20 minutes later we see a group of 5 youngish children (probably about 11 or 12 years old) who were running about, scaring all the wildlife and trying to catch them with a large net. It was quite distressing to watch, really, as there were so many 'baby' birds swimming around the lake, and these boys seemed to find it fun to cause them stress. There seem to be a lot of children these days who find it both acceptable and entertaining to do this, which is, in my opinion, shocking.

These boys do this for about 5 or so minutes, and eventually stop. They then get the net and drag it through the water and throw the water at each other. They then get to the car park, running around with this net, and soak each other. Now, me and my mum have the car windows open, as it is sunny outside. They then get the net, dripping with water, and throw it at our car, where a considerable amount goes through the window. One of them then notices and shouts 'Alright love?' in a laughey tone to my mum, and she replies 'Well, no, not really, because a lot of water just covered us.'. Then, one of them decides to shout 'Hey, you just got that b*tch wet and she's dripping 'cause of you!', and various other sexual comments... all rather unfunny, rude and dirty jokes. I then say to my mum how funny it is that they are making jokes like that when, quite frankly, they a) aren't particularly attractive in my eyes and b) haven't even hit puberty yet. She then replies by saying how the only way she'd be wet is because she'd p*ssed herself laughing. She replies to them by saying that she isn't, to which they say '**** off you slut!' and various other comments. Anyway, we manage to put up with their pathetic humour for a while.

However, they carry on, and their comments get worse. Now, my mum has various mental health conditions due to an awful childhood and she is broken both mentally and physically (many of the lower vertebrae in her back have fused and broken, and her spine is kinked, causing her to be unable to move a lot of the time and in serious pain), and she often struggles to cope with comments like this. These boys then say 'Oi, slut, you know what they say?' 'Yeah, a Mcdonalds a day doesn't keep the weightwatchers away!' and they then call her various other names, referring to her weight and looks. She is by no means 'fat' or 'ugly', yet they continued to be horrible to her. Despite asking them to stop, they carried on with this behaviour, and it got no better. They told her to '**** off' multiple times when she asked them to leave her alone and they called her virtually every harsh name in the world and swore at her repeatedly.

Now, we decided to ignore them, with the hope that they would shut up, but their attention seeking side seemed to take over, and they all decided to form a group and shout things at us, like 'Hey lovely, don't ignore us you sl*g!'. It was ridiculous. We carried on ignoring them, and after about 10 minutes they walked a bit further away from our car. But they still watched us and spoke about us, deliberately loudly, I presume.

They then grabbed mud and rocks and threw it at out car, laughing when they hit it. At one point they threw a handful of stuff, and all high fived each other as they said 'Hey, I got it straight through the b*tches window!', to which my mum replied 'No, you didn't.' as we knew that they'd missed. They then called her a '****ing liar!'.

They eventually walked off a bit further, but waited down the road a bit. We knew that we couldn't stay in the carpark any longer, so we drove off. As we drove past them, they laughed and swore at us one last time.

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TL;DR:
Group of 5 12ish year olds who swore at me and my mum, threw water at us, caused distress to wildlife and proceeded to make rude jokes such as how they'd made her 'wet' that she was 'fat', 'ugly' etc. and that we were both 'sl*ts'/'sl*gs', they wouldn't leave us alone and they threw things at our car. It went on for about half an hour.

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So, what is the cause of this ridiculous behaviour?
What is it that makes it okay to behave like this in today's society?
Is it the failure or lack of punishments in the education system?
The lack of correct behaviour amongst role models?
The lack of care and attention from parents?

Would you have behaved like that as an 11/12 year old?

DISCUSS.

I mean, look at the way punishments in education work these days:
Children are able to swear at teachers and bully pupils, yet get no punishment at all because of 'freedom of speech' or some rubbish. For this reason, they carry on doing it. A teacher once told me, when I asked why they didn't set a detention for a pupil who swore at them, that the child was able to get away with it because they were merely "expressing their opinion and people should be able to speak about how they feel". Shocking, isn't it?

The parents don't discipline there kids enough, the kids witness there parents do it, then they think it's ok to do in public to other people

This was clearly intentional harassment and you could have easily called the police. In fact, you should have as it would've taught them a lesson about life.

I'm a teacher and I see year 7s often displaying these types of behaviours. It is usually down to their home situation or parents. When it is a group of children, they usually have a 'ring leader' who is often a very troubled young boy who has an extremely difficult home life and does not know how to speak appropriately to people due to this. Obviously, this is not an excuse for them but it does help to see where the cause of the behaviour stems from.

The education system can only do so much, so I don't think it is a lack of punishments or a failure on our part. Yes, there are schools that are too soft on pupils and this does not help the situation but many of them follow the correct sanctions etc. but it has no effect. Once a child realises that the worst thing a teacher can do is give them a detention or exclude them from school then the battle is lost. We, as teachers, cannot restrain (or we risk allegations against us), physically punish them (not that we should be able to...) or take anything away from them that they value so once they've realised that they don't care. On top of this, the government has now told schools that they cannot permanently exclude pupils and there are not enough spaces in PRUs so we don't have too many options at the moment when it comes to the most challenging pupils, unless we can persuade another school to accept them on a 'managed move'.

Parents need to ensure their kids know how to behave appropriately, that is not the responsibility of the teacher (who, have 29 other kids in one class to think about too!).

I grew up knowing that there wud. E consequences if I misbehaved but these days I think parents probably just can't be bothered anymore with them or don't when they r really young then give up when they r older cos they think it's too hard at that point

Yeah that is wrong or what I call a 'wet' teacher. A teacher who shouldn't be a teacher because she is one of those teachers who doesn't control the class, people who want to learn get like 5 mins of teaching, the lesson is crap and it happens every lesson because even after a year of abuse she/he can only muster 'please stop or you have to leave' yet doesn't even make the student leave the lesson.

Surprisingly it isn't a modern phenomenon. All the way back in ancient times, there has been complaints about the younger generation being less respectful. For a Cambridge dissertation, a student (Kenneth John Freeman) in 1907 summerised the complaints directed towards younger people in that time:

"Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters."

I agree, but I still feel that the rules should be changed, as it would significantly impact the behaviour of children.
They should know where they stand.

What rules should be changed? Each school has their own behaviour policy and the children know what it is (it is often in their planners and on the wall of classrooms).
The issue is when the policy is not implemented by every teacher or it is not consistent or the policy is too vague.

Children often know where they stand and they know that certain behaviours will lead to them being sent out/excluded/parents coming in etc. But the issue is they just don't care. They don't take school seriously and this is more often than not a result of their home life or early development.