Oorgo

Breeding Hooligans

Ever day many of us read in the paper or hear second-hand about a teenager or young adult, or pre-teen that is completely out of control, a vandal, a thief, has committed assault or worse. I can tell you what's causing this but you probably already know.

Last Tuesday Xavier was playing in the playground outside his preschool, Amber was standing along the sidelines with our 1 1/2 year old. Amber saw a boy the same age as him pick up sand and threw it in Xavier's face so she went up to the kid and said "You don't do that, you apologize". The kid went running back to his parents who just said in a somewhat condescending tone"'Oh, are you being bad?" but did... you guessed it... SQUAT. No "Go apologize" no reprimand, no "I'm taking you home", no "Go sit in the car" no .. anything.

If my mom had seen me do that when I was a kid she would have either reprimanded me right there, told me to apologize, or grabbed me and we would have went home where the punishment would be much worse.

You know what? 4 year olds make mistakes, they can be mean and malicious and stupid and everything that their parents are, but if you are a responsible person you say "Don't do that" and "Apologize right now!". You don't act like your little angel could do no wrong or that you are better than everyone else so you don't have to apologize, it would be too embarassing. That's right, it's embarrassing to you, because he's acting just like you do.

How the effin' hell are kids going to learn unless we teach them? How did you learn? I don't think any of us magically had all the social finesse that we have today, we all bumped into kids, threw fists, got into trouble, yelled and screamed. We made mistakes, we were corrected (sometimes too corrected) and we learned how to act in our society.

We wonder why kids are such a problem, we wonder why there are such terrors in middle upper-class neighborhoods. It's not the poor kids who are the problem anymore it's the kids of the "I don't have time to discipline you or be a parent I have a golf game/massage/spa day/club to go to" generation. The "My kid could do know wrong" parents are breeding bullies and sociopaths because they're doing what the single parents and work-all-day-and-night-to-make ends-meet parents have been accused of --> neglect.

Posted by Oorgo at May 7, 2007 04:58 PM Permalink - Category: Family | TrackBack