Yeah, and that’s another measurement that I think is inaccurate: people saying “In my day Teacher would have jerked me bald-headed for that!” Okay, so you had a woman who was probably 18 when she started teaching, never married because if she did she’d have had to give up work, probably didn’t want to be a teacher to begin with but found it the least objectionable of her four options, with 30 kids in one classroom and no air conditioning, and probably a lot of other aggravations you don’t have now…and we’re supposed to believe her judgment was always 24-karat.
What? My point was that society “degraded” equally a long time ago compared to now.
Huh?
Oh, I wasn’t disagreeing with you.
Ah, my bad. 
Bullshit. Some parents take helicoptering too far today, this is true. But there has not been some great shift in parenting. Some kids are still great and some kids are still brats. As it always will be.
I remember being a kid and hearing other kids declare, “When I have kids, I’ll let them do whatever they want!” I think a lot of them stuck to that promise. Even when I was kid, I thought there was something wrong with the idea.
But yeah, I agree that shitty parents make for shitty kids. I can’t count how many times I’ve wanted to just grab some woman and shake her until her eyes rattle, after seeing how she interacts with her kids in public. I’m talking about those mothers whose only apparent method of communicating with their kids is “scream at them”.
3-year-old girl drops her jacket on the floor?
“PICK UP YOUR COAT!”
Kid stops to look at something?
“GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE!”
etc., etc.
That’s right, I had forgotten about the industry writing books on how to raise your children in the Medieval Ages.
You’re about 60 right? Prime age for people of the “Greatest Generation” to think you were a lazy dirty hippie that stank and didn’t feel like working. Oh, and did I mention they thought you were lazy?
Are you a lazy dirty hippie? If so, get a job hippie! If not, isn’t it possible that old people don’t know jack shit about “kids these days”?
Just read the opening to the Voyage of the Dawn Treader from the early 1950’s.
Eustace is spoiled rotten and the biggest brat you could imagine, all due to soft, weak, spoiling parents. Same as now.
I don’t think it’s so much that Harold and Alberta Scrubb were soft, weak and spoiling. I think the problem was that they were [del]not holy-rollers[/del] progressive, and gave Eustace all kinds of [del]secular[/del] wrong ideas.
Also, Aunt Alberta does not like the picture of the Narnian ship, but somehow she’s special enough to have been the recipient of it as a gift.
That’s all we have on Harold and Alberta Scrubb, right?
A-ha! Liberals!
The underclothes thing suggests they may have been Mormons, but Eustace doesn’t behave like any Mormon kid I ever knew.
I agree totally with the OP. Everyone around my little town who encounters 10YO mudgirl goes out of their way to tell me how polite, delightful and well-behaved she is. Well, she is a good kid (that’s not ‘sneak bragging’, that’s real bragging! 
), but I don’t think she’s remarkably polite or well-behaved. She is, to me, an ordinary ‘good kid’. She often needs to be reminded to do her chores, or not to interrupt a conversation. She does have a very generous spirit, and I don’t think I have anything to do with that, it’s just the way she came from the factory.
But so many kids I see, I can tell you immediately what their problem is: yep, ineffective parenting. When I first moved into this building, I was visiting a tenant, and her 6YO was turning on oven burners just to see the flame ignite. :eek: So, 6YO turns on a burner, and Momma says “Quit it now, or you’re goin’ to bed!” Kid does it again. Momma says “I mean it! Do it one more time and you’re goin’ to bed!” Kid does it again. “Quit it! I mean it! I will put you to bed!” Lather, rinse, repeat.
Rule number one of good parenting: Do Not Make Empty Threats.
Updated by Billy Joel: “The good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems”.
Another parent who occasionally gets compliments on his kids checking in (although not so many now that’s she’s turned two…).
The two of us probably worry too much but make an effort to give the sprog moderated freedom while setting boundaries in the important areas (current battles are bedtime and sharing). She’s doing okay thus far, self-inflicted bruises notwithstanding.
Conversely we get a front row seat to the family next door, with the parents who shout abuse at their kids and give them very little positive attention. The boy is 6 and his sister 8, and you can already see the obvious signs of a future hooligan and teen mother respectively in the making.
(Whenever I’m out in the back the boy will often talk to me over the back fence about his day and will watch me mow the lawn - he looks so desperately in need of a positive male role model and it really ought to be his dad, not a neighbour he only sees occasionally.)
You are a horrible parent!
Teaching your children manners when the rest of the herd is stampeding along like a…well…herd of buffalo.
How.dare.YOU!
They are never going to get their own reality show at this rate!
Get them a shiv, teach them some fuckin’ swear words and shit, man.
Well done, Dad, well done!
Ahem I would like to boast that a couple of OLD GERMANS they are a picky lot, trust me on this score and getting a compliment out this group is impossible as I don’t think I’ve ever had one in the two decades I’ve had around them. complemented me/us on our spawn this weekend on “What nice children we have.” My Nice Son piped up that he is adopted he’s not. He’s the spitting image of his father. and I piped back that it was time for his four o’clock pummeling before I sell him to be turn into sausage.
Kids are less afraid of “authority” then they used to be.
I find I have an odd problem that little kids love me. I’m a 46 year old male and these little kids (usually under 7) both boys and girls, just come over and start talking to me.
For example a couple of months ago, I was in the public libarary and a little girl walks up to the computer I’m using and looks at it. She announces to me, “I can use a computer.” I said, “really, you look pretty young to do that.” She says “Let me show you.” Then she pushes her way in and sits on my lap and starts hitting the keyboard.
Of course I got up quickly and let her sit on the chair, but I mean you got serious problems if your little girl (she looked about 5 or 6) is pushing her way on to strange men’s laps in public libraries
So I think the boundaries between kids and adults are less defined than when I was a kid. Those boundaries were pretty much, speak when spoken to, call everyone Ma’am or Sir and all adults are boring
My youngest is 24, and I can testify that politeness carries over to interviews, and has gotten her jobs - and good references from powerful people, which may come in handy some day.
And things are different today. There was an article in the Times yesterday about how some colleges were organizing the drop-off procedure for new freshmen to force the parents to go home, and not hang around for days to make sure everything is okay. When I went to school 40 years ago, my parents dropped me off, dropped my trunk off, and were gone. Ditto for my friends.
Timed out and lost my post but I see several others have made a few points I was going to add.
Also, the consequences for antisocial behavior seem to be higher for children then they were years ago. What I would have considered typical childish behavior or pranks are now given the weight of illegal acts. I think the risks are greater for children who haven’t been raised well than they were a hundred years ago.
:smack:I think sometimes its hard to pin down what determines a kid’s behavior. I mean, sure, the most obvious way is how they’re raised, but in my fiancees family, the things that lead to them being polite are rather contradictory-
In her family, kids got rougher treatment regarding physical punishment. A lot of it might seem like borderline child abuse, but it lead to my fiancee and her sisters being incredibly polite, showing a lot of emphathy and also patience.
My fiancee got raised in a way that would make you THINK she should’ve turned out to be a hellion, but it actually ended up making her a very sweet, tactful woman. Her sister, not wanting to raise her kids the way she was raised, was easier on them, being more involved in their life, using alternate punishments instead of swatting them, not yelling at them, etc and now they are all over the place, go figure :smack:
Perhaps also it is not so much generations/age but cultures? For example, I find it seems more common for caucasian and african-american kids to be all over the place/noisy/hyperactive but I rarely, if ever, see this behavior in asian kids. :dubious:
I think a big part of the issue is that we (and by ‘we’, I mean ‘Americans’; I have no clue about how it’s worked in other cultures) went through a phase where new parents were constantly told how important it was to ‘build a child’s self-esteem’ by doing such things as praising them for chewing with their mouths closed, and telling them how wonderful and perfect they were for not pounding the crap out of their little brother for a whole morning. :rolleyes: This unadulterated adulation lead to a generation largely comprised of people who believed, truly and really, that the world revolved around them and they could do no wrong. Many of these people have now reproduced. They’ve not bothered to learn to parent properly because they were already convinced they could Do No Wrong.