Cow The Kids

[retepsnikrep]

Bring them up in fear. It's the only way.

Things we should not give them:- self confidence, money, knowledge of sex, equality with adults, precedence on buses, pavements, or anywhere else.

Do they now have a joyful, smiling happy childhood? They don't. They scowl and sulk their way through, while cycling and skateboarding over old people and spending more money than their Grandads ever earned. They make everybody else's life absolutely miserable for years until they graduate to Ecstacy and Nightclubs and reach the estate of adulthood themselves.

Children swagger. Well they might, they've got a lot to swagger about. They're in charge. They have learned that nobody can do anything about them. Nobody can discipline them. The schools abdicated that responsibility some years ago, leaving chastisement to their parents.....Unfortunately parents had placed it in the hand of schools long before that, so the result is nobody disciplines them at all, and the bitter fact for all adults is that all children know it. As a child you can do as you like, it is the only time in life that you can. They are making the most of it. A child can follow a wheelchair-bound old lady down the street, shouting obscenities at her, and nothing can be done about it? Didn't know that did you? Well it's true.

As a witness to the wheelchair incident, what are you going to do? Smack?..Don't be silly. Do you like prison food.

Hold on to the kid and tell it off? Might as well go straight home and daub your own walls.

Gently rebuke the child yourself, verbally? You will thereby effectually transfer the abuse to yourself (and your family and friends) and can be followed round the streets all morning, with this child and it's cohorts, calling you a paedophile.

What if you just report it to the Police? They love the Police these little gangs of hooligans, they don't run away from them, no reason to. They smile when they come and have a jolly good time, play-fighting among themselves with arm-locks to confuse the officers. Teeny girls squeal at the extra attentions of teeny boys when the police are present. A 'telling-off' from the Police is both futile and dangerous, not to the child, to the Officer! Poor Police, impotent and baited.

Should you, or the Police, go to their homes and tell their parents? Ho Ho. There are a lot of unlikelihoods here. First it is not likely that there are two natural parents, maybe a single mother on her own, too harrassed to do anything. She's got lots of kids, it's not easy and she may take the line of less resistance and let the kids roam. She may be cross with the child, and be upset and cry. But the idea was to make it bad for the child, not the Mother. Maybe the single mother has a new man who must not lay a finger on 'her' kids. There's no wrath like that of a father who can actually give them a belt, and no substitute for the effect that can have. Even if there are two proper parents nowadays, they probably do not believe in physical punishment, it is also odd nowadays that parents do not believe that their particular little rat-bag can be guilty of anything.

These parents will also ascribe the anti-social behaviour of their little devil, to those with whom he associates, his unsuitable friends, who keep getting him into trouble. Great myth this is. It is the little devil himself, or herself, and all the other little devils who are no better than one another. Why these parents believe their child would become a paragon of virtue if his playmates changed is a mystery. Lying used to be the worst crime in the old days, in BTOC. (Before Tyranny Of Children) It isn't now. Kids will deny any wrongdoing. They always do, all the time, and for everything. They lie blithely you see. They lie themselves blue in the face. They have discovered that most often they get away with murder in the absence of proof. Lies are very powerful. No one can ever be sure. So the parents can't be sure he/she's that bad. You, or the Police, or the Archbishop of Canterbury do not carry much weight in your testimonies if their precious says it was not him. The precious is called Tom. He says the Old Lady was tormented mainly by Dick and partly by Harry. The parents will believe anything bad of Dick and Harry, in fact these are two of the children that will lead their Tom into bad ways.

We knew it all along. The little old lady in the wheel chair is at fault. She tried to get past the bikes on the pavement outside the Post Office. She might have tutted when they threw coke cans down. Perhaps she shook her head when they spat on the pavement, or waved a skinny hand and said 'Don't do that.' when they kicked the shrubs down in the Civic Gardens.

I accept that hitting kids is not a good thing. It's just a better thing than the Old Ladies treatment and all of us tip-toeing around letting little anarchists ruin the place. Not all kids need it anyway. They are different. The best do not perform the anti-social acts I have described. There is great pressure from their peers to do so but many, unfortunately at some personal cost, resist it and behave properly. Let's not start knocking that sort of kid about. It's more difficult for a kid to be good than bad thanks to the masses of nasty kids who are cheeky and rude and disrespectful and violent and cowardly because they have found they have such power.

These disrupters weren't bad to start with. They thought they were just kids and had better keep their heads down and keep out of the way of busy grown ups, and be polite, or they'd be in trouble with everybody. Surprise, surprise, they found they weren't in trouble with anyone. They could upset all those tall people, make some cry, make some argue with each other, but the effect on themselves was virtually nil. They learn to smirk at age six.

Kids don't worry about sanctions being applied at home. Taking away the Game Boy, no television, a few less Big Macs. This immediately turns the child more obnoxious at home than it was before. This obnoxious behaviour, which a 'clip of the ear' would soon cure, is so terrible, sanctions are soon relaxed, reparations are even made to restore the 'status quo'. 'Grounding' does not work. It is possible for the average eleven year old to wear down any two adults in an hour of whining and sulking. Those people who took John McCarthy and Terry Waite hostage for years wouldn't have kept them a day if they had been modern kids of twelve.

Now the boot is so thoroughly on the other foot Children can apply counter sanctions. Invoke Esther Rantzen and Childline. Dial-up premium charge calls on the phone. Be 'bored' i.e. start kicking the veneer from the kitchen base unit which is already falling to bits. Be 'difficult' at meal times. (one pea and it can all be thrown away) I'm afraid they have terrible power if they can't be intimidated.

This must all be turned round mustn't it? If these kids were hungry they'd eat anything. If they were always assumed guilty on accusation and given a thrashing, they'd start to avoid the circumstances which led to it. We should assume all children are guilty little swine first, not the adults. It's hard, but turning round this runaway juggernaut is going to be hard, when one extra click on the handbrake would have done the job a few years ago.

:-5

[annabelle]

pompom;484992 wrote: Is this gleaned from personal experience? I'm not being sarcastic but I know from my own experience of watching reality tv (supernanny etc) how easy it is to think like this. But my day-to-day life gives me definite reality checks - the kids I see/have dealings with are nothing like the demonic creatures invoked here! OK they aren't perfect but 40 years ago neither was I (sadly still not;))...and I know from my Dad's stories about his derring-do youth neither was he!...and so it goes.

OK there are bad'uns - is it the speed and accessibility of communication now that forces this scare-mongering stuff into the foreground of all our lives? It's very sad if true because we could be alienating and rubbishing our very future! :-6


It's easy to think like this because , sadly , every word of it is true. So how can you possibly call it scare-mongering?

You're quite obviously living on a different planet to the rest of us.

[RedGlitter]

I guess I must be on the same planet as PomPom. I know a lot of crappy kids who fill some of that bill but I know more who don't. I have a friend who is now a freshman in HS and has applied to colleges all over the states to become a veterinarian. He took care of his late sick grandmother. He is respectful to his family and to people of all ages. He's a smart, sensitive and humorous guy and he is going to grow up to be a fine man. I'd bank on it.



I think to a degree you will see what you look for. To a degree now. You're not completely wrong in your bill up there, but I would never paste that description on every or even most kids.