A generation of the worst parents ever seen has brought behaviour in schools to tipping point

27 comments

1. [permissive society coming home to roost ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-3k0driKN8)

   i have seen teachers on reddit talk about how bad the children and parents can be. i know first hand from being a child in the 2000s the amount of crazy stuff kids did. throwing the teacher’s papers out the window. one kid was allowed to listen to music while in class as some kind of agreement. I even saw a teacher get pushed over.

   this sort of stuff would never fly in some other societies. no wonder there is a recruitment crisis.

   the middle class have their proverbial heads in the sand at why the zeitgeist is moving to the right. it’s multi-faceted, but a permissive attitude towards anti-social behaviour is part of it. Think of your local shop being robbed blind over and over again or a group of teens causing mayhem in your town centre.

   imagine the freedom of living in a cohesive city. it’s a type of wealth.

2. Evidence-free opinion piece. Various assertions made with nothing to back them up.

3. Right wing newspaper for old people thinks young people are the problem? Didn’t see that coming.

   My parents were secondary school teachers. They started to see big declines on behaviour before they retired, fifteen years back.

   Their view on the reasons were that you couldn’t easily exclude kids any more, or send them to other units, but the schools were not given the extra resources they needed to manage disruptive kids as part of mainstream education.

   I remember asking my mum once if the parents were a problem. She said of course there are shit parents, but there were shit parents in the seventies.

4. I feel like gentle parenting has gone a little bit too far honestly I know quite a few young parents who don’t even attempt to discipline their children and then wonder why they’re so badly behaved at home and at primary school, or just completely glued to an iPad.

   At the same time they’re utterly convinced their children have ASD or ADHD because of the way they behave – which honestly I really genuinely doubt.

   I’ve tried saying something a few times nicely now but the message is yet to sink in.

5. I find these tricky because theres always that lingering confirmation bias about

   On the one hand statistically they consume less alcohol, drugs, less teenage pregnancies etc
   But on the other, you regularly hear about the violence towards educators, also knives generally wasn’t something you gave much thought to 2/3 decades ago unless the area was a proper shithole

   They are exposed to alot of shit as well. Pales in comparison to discovering bush porn
   (no thats not a clever pun)

6. They complain about discipline but my kids secondary academy seems to have the most convoluted darvo bullying flowchart.

7. What an absolute car-crash of an opinion piece. No evidence is provided to show that:

   * Parents born in the ’80s/’90s received less “tough love” than other generations
   * The absence of “tough love” leads to permissive parenting
   * Parents who didn’t receive “tough love” are the ones now attacking schools

   “Tough love” isn’t even defined, and the embedded link supposedly supporting “the reality of tough love” says nothing on the subject. The piece ends up being little more than a generational attack dressed up with a climate-change style “tipping point” metaphor.

   If you want your biases confirmed that more “tough love” (whatever that means) is the answer, this article will scratch that itch. For everyone else, save yourself the click.

8. It seems to me at my daughters school the more naughty the child the more they reward and bend over backwards to let them get away with bad behaviour . Whilst the ones who are good get over looked and have to pay to attend breakfast club etc . The new free breakfast club is useless to us as we need them there 15 mins earlier than the free part kicks in .

9. Portrayals of lame, undermining parenting is seeping into TV adverts as well. It almost seems to be accepted? Seen the current Robinsons Squash ad where the mum is called into school because he’s been acting up? She takes him home, sits him at the kitchen table and just when you think she’s about to do her job and tear a strip off him they break into a fit of giggles!

10. My cousin has a rule that she will never say no to her child, because she doesn’t want to stifle them. She flipped out at her mum when she dared to tell the child off for climbing up on the dining table. Like the whole ‘you dont tell me how to raise my child’ thing.

    The daughter is pretty well behaved mostly, but she’s getting set up to be so spoiled. I can’t imagine never hearing the word no or having no boundaries, its ridiculous. Imagining a teacher coming in to try and counter that is awful for them.

11. Dealing with Chav guardians/parents has always been a major challenge for educators at the Primary level. Nothing has really changed recently as regards that – they’ve just gotten more aggressive and entitled.

12. This is weird to read because I have worked in early years, and the children there definitely seemed better behaved than when I was a similar age.

13. Forty years of people being told that teachers are lazy, that “we pay their wages.”, that “they’re all trendy lefties.”, that “there’s no point in school.”, has come to fruition.

14. Society has given the kids all the power. And it’s not good for anyone.

15. Some kids need a smack now and then. Since that’s been banned, these same kids that need it are running wild. It’s the dumb ass parents that abused their kids that have ruined it for everyone else. Responsible parents know how and when to smack for the benefit of the kids.

16. The authors main issue seems to be the existence of the legal rights of parents and children, which he finds exhausting. I also don’t always like other people having rights, but I do my best to chill out and consider that they exist for a reason before writing op ed pieces for the telegraph. The key is impulse control!

17. Absolutely it has – what did people expect from using iPad as childminders and refusing to utter the word ‘no’?!

    Since becoming a parent I’ve done absolutely everything I can to ensure my kids is not counted as one of these badly behaved gremlins. There are so many kids in my son’s year who act like literal feral monkeys and the parents couldn’t give less of a shit.

18. Nobody who navigated the Rave era as a youth will be surprised to learn that we grew into a generation of soft parents. When we weren’t watching Bagpus on Acid, desperately trying to unlock the buried ‘spirit of childhood’, we were levitating through dank warehouses telling total strangers how much we loved them. Our children didn’t stand a chance.

19. Everyone falls over themselves to claim the kids are degenerates these days but the stats paint a pretty different picture, far from perfect, far from no-reasons for concern, but the idea kids have crossed a tipping point is very much the real of opinions in opinion pieces:

    [https://youthendowmentfund.org.uk/reports/beyond-the-headlines-2024/summary/?utm_source=chatgpt.com](https://youthendowmentfund.org.uk/reports/beyond-the-headlines-2024/summary/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

20. Torygraph deflecting from the previous generation who have royally fucked the economy.

21. Its because nobody wants to fund the schools. And pay teachers good wages

22. Obviously, this guy would point the finger at parents when schools simply do not deal with the unruly kids like they used to. I have seen this first hand with my daughters school, known bully’s and problem children’s behaviours being excused time after time by the heads of school, with zero consequences.

23. That article said basically nothing, yahoo really do put out a bunch of drivel

24. I’ve got a alternative suggestion for the generation of the worst parents ever seen, hint: I’m a millenial.

25. 25 years ago we took our 5 year old son to look round some schools in the area we had just moved to. At one, we were told “ya, we don’t use the word ‘no’ here?”

    30 year olds who have never been told no aren’t a rational goal for an education system.

    What were rhey playing at?

26. Oh look…news that will surprise no one (least of all anyone who works in a school), yet every time a school tries to bring in a reasonable behaviour policy, parents and the media are all over how evil they are. And social media is no better.

27. Some things I learnt from 30 years of teaching. Anecdotal obviously.

    When I started even the ‘problem’ kids were still proud of being sort of a good school. When i finished any teachers who still insisted on standards of behaviour and work were seen as the problem. Throughout the time I was there teaching improved and improved with huge effort going into differentiated , entertaining lessons that appealed to kids.

    Some parents changed from just letting their kids behave badly, to making excuses , to actually encouraging them. It was like if they couldn’t discipline them , how dare you try to do so. Management went from telling parents this is how we do things here whether you like it or not, to locking themselves away and telling parents whatever they wanted to hear. While bollocking any teacher who raised a problem in a staff meeting where other teachers could hear.

    SEN kids suffered perhaps more than any others from the collapse in expectations of work and behaviour but it was pretty horrendous for kids who were just nice and well behaved. I’d find them crying outside classrooms because of the chaos inside.

    Behaviour, achievement etc all got worse but was constantly framed by management as improvement. The exodus of the best and most experienced teachers from a school no one (kids or teachers) wanted to leave before , was apparently (we were told in a meeting) getting rid of dead weight. When it really meant they could appoint new teachers who didn’t know it wasn’t normal to be sworn at all day or have kids jumping on the tables so just put up with it.

    I once had to defend a teacher in a disciplinary when the management wanted to punish them because a kid running around the classroom ran into the teacher and the teacher grabbed their jacket to stop them high falling over. The parents complained it left a mark. The management felt the teacher had ‘form’ ..because he had previously left his (empty) classroom to tell misbehaving kids off in the corridor.

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