The kids are not alright (Even in Canada)

I was chatting with my mom over breakfast today when she told me about some horrifying
things that has been happening back home. She told me my brother almost failed grade 7
because of his constant texting and slacking off. On top of that there have been countless brawls at his school and a kid even told my brother to wait where he was while he went to get a baseball bat to beat the shit out of him, But he left and went home then looked out the window and saw the kid with a baseball bat (Retard). Also some girl got her throat sliced opened and died at a house party not too far out of town from where I live, She was 16! What the fuck is wrong with kids these days and more importantly where the hell are the parents? When did parents all of a sudden stop caring about what there kids do? Well I am going to my parent's place for Canada day and I am going to have a talk with my little bro and tell him to get his shit together or he's going to find life a lot harder than it already is because he is no angel either and causes a lot of shit at his school.

tl;dr: Kids have lost it and this cliche of "What's wrong with kids today?" is
more like "What went wrong with society?"

Most ironic is that our caring about things like this as a society is a symptom of the problem itself. We have too much, and people get greedy and have time for all sorts of inane pointless things. And then we get together to bitch about them and think up new ways to treat the symptoms, which sustains and grows the problem at its roots.

I don't really have a solution for you, except to say that this is the age of science. We fix one thing and it breaks ten others, then we call it progression. You wouldn't think it from a casual observance, but society is sick with depression and all sorts of other psychological crap. Problems aren't new though, and they will never go away. You just get new and more complicated varieties.

Not that I have anything against scientific progression, to the contrary, my point is mostly against all of these new age media propagated issues that we are told are so important. I think there are alot more important things than depression and autism and all this other shit. We are on the verge of an energy crisis, and the only reason anyone cares is because gas prices have gone up. Theres half a dozen other real issues out there that people's time would be better spent on.

But I'm not an activist, and I really don't care. The problems will of course take care of themselves. If the world runs out of food or energy in the next half century people will have to work alot harder to get by I am sure, and there will be less house wives to sit about at home and care, and I'm sure kids will have more shit to do too.

Around the mid to late 80's i seem to recall there was a rash of kids calling child services(or whatever it's called in your area) on their parents for normal dicipline*. also strangers butting in and saying any physical disciplie was abuse. i think alot of parents were afraid of getting put in jail or having their kids taken away. the 'authorities' tend to be well meaning hippies who often over react. i've seen second hand how fucked up the system can be. as a kid i saw friends get caught up in the system, and then later friends whose kids were in it**. no molesting, beatings or neglect, just that someone suspected as much, or just decided they didn't like how the kids were being raised.

it's a messed up system for sure. if you suspect abuse you should report it, but if you are wrong, you just screwed that kids life up. once a kid is in the system, they're in it until they turn 18.


*[size=10]you may have seen parodies of this subject on southpark and/or the simpsons. art imitates life.[/h]
**[size=10]as a kid; messy divorce where one parent tries to abuse the system to screw the other parent.
as an adult; one parent who was a waste of space.[/h]

Fixed for truth. Free press is one of the worst double sided coins in history

That bolded part.
Interesting. Some guy sliced his daughters throat to "discipline" her, in the town I live in.
Crazy Canada and their slicer killers.

So true. And the worst one was that guy on the greyhound bus in manitoba who cut off a
man's head in front all the passengers.

I was raised with the belt being an option of punishment and it worked. Now my sister and her husband can't use a belt as a punishment because they would get there arses tossed in gaol. The town where I grew up as a teenager was safe and all that stuff...now I wouldn't step in there without a platoon of soldiers in full kit as a bare minimum...all because physical punishment is no longer allowed (even a open hand smack on the bum) and it is only going to get worse.

It's evolution doing it's job and weeding out all the kids who are stupid/weak. I for one applaud it's efforts and encourage it to keep going.

Another thing to keep in mind is the sheer amount of news coverage that all this unpleasant stuff gets. With the advent of the 24/7 news networks, you can't take a dump without it being a scandal and them playing it for 5 days nonstop every 15 minutes.

Yeah, the media coverage today is much bigger than several decades ago; the problems were there, but not all of them would be told, or would be instant blow-ed out to the world by mass media.

Still, it's hard to deny that there is a problem. I personally believe that it usually comes back to bad parenting. The whole "no stress" children-raising trend that was spoken about some years ago, is not working. The parents will give a child a few hundred bucks and leave it to their own devices. Either because they're overworked, or because deep down, they're too scared of the responsibilities that having a child entails, or too lazy to do it. With that kind of parenting, I'm not surprised that most kids nowadays go apeshit. Some people may say now that the good 'ol fashioned upbringing with belts, shouting, etc. when kid screws up are barbaric, but they work. My parents raised me like that, and I turned out okay, as opposed to all sorts of cretins in my high school.

I'm not saying everyone should now beat up their children, but generally parents should enforce stricter discipline...and that requires parents to care, which is second part of the problem. Most just don't. Or they pretend not to notice that their child is doing drugs, running with the gangs, getting some sick ideas, because, well, it's problematic for them. It doesn't work like that. If you want to have a child, you need to stay committed to it, raise it, explain the world to it, and sometimes crack the whip when it gets really stupid idea of doing drugs or slicing someone with a knife. If you can't do it, don't have kids idiots.

Thought for the day: All of a sudden, the idea of parenting licenses doesn't seem that bad.

Of course, you can never fix large-scale "people problem" completely; there will always be extreme cases of child/adolescent pregnancies, druggies, thieves, murderers etc. but at least you could try to control the width of such margin.

Long story short.

Even if you are a good parent and try to make sure your kid grows up right, there are other kids who were not raised right and can influence the good kids to do wrong.

Parents do not monitor their kids enough to point where stuff like this happens, but at the same time do not want to be overbearing and intrusive.

Really it's a decision of giving your child some freedom and privacy or keeping them under control.

I have a theory; if you hit your kids when they're young, other people won't hit them when they're adults.

i have seen proof of this. there were these two brothers in my neighborhood who had hippie liberal parents who hardly disciplined them at all. i ran into one of them much later and he still acted the same as when we were kids. i wound up smacking him in the mouth.

UPDATE: So I went back home today and my brother seems to have his shit together, But
I discovered something completely fucked up. Apparently kids have to look over there
shoulders because other kids who just want to fight will kick there ass. So IEAIAIO
you are right about the whole evolution thing, But I think it will just cause more problems
than it will solve. When I was walking downtown earlier today with my little brother 2
wangster punks started mouthing off at me and my brother as they past so I just turned
toward them and gave them both the middle finger and told them to go fuck themselves and
then they just kept walking and swearing. Who the fuck do they think they were even talking
to. Since I am a nice guy and don't want to go to jail for assaulting a minor I just
restrained myself. But if I had no self control I would have knocked the shit right out of
those little shitheads. These kids don't even think about who they mouth off to. They are
just lucky I wasn't an Independent soldier (A major gang in British Columbia, Canada)
or they would have been killed.

@ Everyone saying "this parenting method" or "that parenting method" should be used:

I think the type/amount of discipline used really depends on the individual child. Some respond well to beatings, others are psychologically damaged by it. Some are responsible enough to handle a more relaxed parenting style, others need structure and discipline. Both have their pros and their cons. Unfortunately, it is difficult or even impossible to tell which is better for your child in the long run. You can't peer into the future and see whether your kid will drop out of school because you didn't push him to get good enough grades, or if he'll take out his pent-up rage from being beaten by killing innocent people. :\

tl;dr: There isn't a universal "best parenting style".

Yeah, men will shoot and stab other people instead and women wind up in abusive relationships they can't get out of. The latter are usually beaten by others though.

What I want to say is - if you hit your kids, you teach them violence as an acceptable way of solving problems. So of course they won't get hit when they're adults, they are usually the ones to hit first, or even go beyond that.

i have seen proof of this. there were these two brothers in my neighborhood who had abusive parents who beat up their asses all the time. i ran into one of them much later and he still acted the same as when we were kids. i was stabbed by him later that day.

Hmmm, two good topics to discuss here - discipline and media:

Discipline, I think it all starts with Dr. Spock - we ended up with a generation of 'parents' who are more interested in being their kids friends than in being their parents. Kids need rules and discipline - and they need them while they are kids - without them, as several people have noted, they never grow-up, they stay the same selfish, self-centered idiots they were as children.

Over the last 30 years or so there has also been a slow but steady change to government thinking it can do a better job of raising your kids than you can - well we all know that's a joke, but look at the results. Schools don't teach, hell they won't fail a kid who doesn't know the work, parents have started looking on schools as day care and the internet as cheap baby-sitting. There is no supervision and little in the way of consequences. There is an empty townhouse next to mine, the previous tenants having just moved out. Two nights in a row there were load parties there, one night starting at 2 AM - turned out to be a bunch of teenagers who took the keys from one of their realtor mothers. When I tracked down the realtor's office the first thing she said to me was she didn't want to get the kid in trouble. WTF - a kid steals keys to a 500K house, has a party from 2 AM-4 AM (they were lucky - the kids didn't trash the place or destroy anything) and her first reaction is 'I don't want to get him in trouble'? He needs to be in trouble, should be in trouble, or he will never learn that there ARE consequences to his actions.

My wife was a elementary school teacher - she quit teaching - primarily because of the parents - if she tried to talk to a parent about behavior problems, the parents would (more often than not) jump all over her! Honestly thought that was her problem and why was she bothering them with it, or they simply went into denial and refused to believe there was a problem.

Actions do have consequences and its about time we started teaching that to our kids again. Hell if my teacher had called my dad about my behavior I would have had my ass kicked and I would have been in there the next day apologizing, not laughing about the teacher getting chewed out.

A lot of people who shouldn't of had kids, did.