the decline of parenting in Western civilization...

[cookiepuss]

everywhere I go these days I see screaming children. children running through professional business bulding offices, grocery stores and restaurant. I see children behaving badly and I see parents doing nothing about it. Most of the time I see parents ingoring thier children rather than utter one very simple short word otherwise known as "no!"

I wasn't allowed to act like that when I was growing up. My mother would leave a shopping cart piled high with groceries and drag me out of the store and take me home before she allowed me to throw a fit in public. At home I was allowed to run around like a maniac and play and be a kid. and most of the time I was pretending to be an animal of some sort. But I was taught that I had to be a person in public and a polite person in fact. no running and screaming or throwing fits. that wasn't tollerated.and I learned that early on.

there's a dentist office down the hall here at work and I constantly hear kids trampling the hall like elphants and screaming like banshees. and there parents never stop them and tell them that other people are working behind the closed doors and it's not polite to disturb them by screaming.:mad: I've been tempted more than once to trip a screaming child in the supermarket or tell them to shut up because thier parent won't.

am I imagining things? do you guys see this going on an worry that within a fews years time we will be living in the rudest society on the planet? I mean what happened? there has to be some sort of happy medium between beating your children and ingnoring thier bad behavior.

any thoughts?
We have quite a few parents on the board and I'd like to think you don't let you children act like that. how do you feel when you seen other people just letting it slide? do you worry your kids will pick up on the bad behavior?

[Bob]

is it really a decline though? was it ever any better? i figure kids have always been jerks

[zorra_chiflada]

oh hell yes. i want to smack other people's children.

[icy manipulator]

parents are affraid of giving their kids a good old smack these days

[cookiepuss]

is it really a decline though? was it ever any better? i figure kids have always been jerks


I feel like it was. I don't remember any of my little friends getting away with more than i did. if we were obnoxious we all got in touble and/or sent home and couldn't play anymore.

and ask your grandparents. I'm sure they have plenty to say on the subject. Manners were much more emphasized in older generations....back when getting brutal beating with a belt was common place.

hummmmm....so is there something to spanking that's not so bad for kids to expereince at least once? if I was realy horrible I got a spanking. it hurt but it was never taken too far and I sure thought twice before repeating my behavior and usually decided not to go there again. I certainly wasn't abused.

[Nivvie]

I learned all I needed to know about parenting from Malcolm in the Middle.

My daughter's face the first time I took a black sack to her bedroom and got busy confiscating was priceless. We don't smack, we remove, or pick apt punishments.

I think part of the problem is people don't care what others think these days. My parents would have been mortified if anyone had thought I was a brat, but nowadays no one cares what thtier kids look like, or how they effect other people. It's just an extention of the lack of consideration people show each other in every area of life these days.

And kids have waaaay too much. No wonder they think themselves superior, what with the amount they get spent on them.

[LuciferHam]

Parenting probably reached its peak in the 30s/40s/50s (judging by the sitcoms). Since then things seem to have gotten a tad more loose but theyre still pretty decent compared to the stone age. Not that im a parenting historian or anything.

[Otis Driftwood]

It is total bullshit to hit kids up to 3 + 1/2 -4 yrs cause they don't understand what they have done wrong.
Two to three yr olds tend to whine a lot if a slight detail isn't according to their exact expectations, so take it with a hint of salt, tell em not to fuss or play along (sometimes you just must). That 'll help til they spot the next flaw in how you open the fridge door or something (it's called King of the World principle and they are cutest at that time). Later on the feeling that everything revolves around them lets up and they recognize there are things beyond their control, which tends to freighten them. They'll whine more and generally be more annoying, but start to grasp correlations.
At 5 they turn into fashion victims and consumer whores.

[skra75]

parents are affraid of giving their kids a good old smack these days

I'm sorry but, fuck off.
violence to our children only will breed more violence. Are you a parent? I didn't think so. good parenting begins with mutual respect and understanding, a clear set of rules and guidelines that are established early and often.

What parents really need to do is follow through with their enforcement of the rules. Violence does not need to be a part of this equation. Meaning, I will explain to my son that it is not right to run in the store. If I see him doing it, I'll remind him and set up a consequence (I'll take your game-boy away, early bedtime, etc). If he does that action again - there is no debate, he gets the punishment.

The reason he listens and respects me is becasue I don't fly in and punish him for something thathe didn't know the rules to in the first place. THAT is the problem with parents nowadays - no accountability with the kids - no rules and no respect to them as people. When a parent flys in and swats a kid, the kid is left with confusion and anger. That anger spills out onto other kids, and eventually right back to the parent.

As for kids being noisy in the store, again, this is a product of repeatedly failed discipline. The kids need to know why the action is offensive before they can change their actions.

By beating our kids, we only teach them to fear those who are in control. Fear breeds contempt, low self esteem, hate. Those are values I don't want to teach my kids.

[zorra_chiflada]

This Be The Verse

by Philip Larkin



They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.



But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.



Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

[skra75]

wow that's positive.
if we all followed that rule the human race would die.
way to go!

[zorra_chiflada]

too many people anyway

[Waus]

See Q's spanking thread from mid-summer.

[Otis Driftwood]

This Be The Verse

by Philip Larkin



They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.



But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.



Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

Jesus, what a pathetic fuckup that guy is! Emo goth poetry first, blaming someone else for it second. Yeah, it's his parents fault the other kids beat him up in school everyday!:cool:

[skra75]

See Q's spanking thread from mid-summer.

oh yeah..that's why I got that deja-vu feeling

[icy manipulator]

I'm sorry but, fuck off.
violence to our children only will breed more violence. Are you a parent? I didn't think so. good parenting begins with mutual respect and understanding, a clear set of rules and guidelines that are established early and often.

What parents really need to do is follow through with their enforcement of the rules. Violence does not need to be a part of this equation. Meaning, I will explain to my son that it is not right to run in the store. If I see him doing it, I'll remind him and set up a consequence (I'll take your game-boy away, early bedtime, etc). If he does that action again - there is no debate, he gets the punishment.

The reason he listens and respects me is becasue I don't fly in and punish him for something thathe didn't know the rules to in the first place. THAT is the problem with parents nowadays - no accountability with the kids - no rules and no respect to them as people. When a parent flys in and swats a kid, the kid is left with confusion and anger. That anger spills out onto other kids, and eventually right back to the parent.

As for kids being noisy in the store, again, this is a product of repeatedly failed discipline. The kids need to know why the action is offensive before they can change their actions.

By beating our kids, we only teach them to fear those who are in control. Fear breeds contempt, low self esteem, hate. Those are values I don't want to teach my kids.
yeah well i went to a primary school that still used the cane up until it was allowed and no one turned out bad. tho i dont believe it should still be used. Plus your system does not work for those of us not fortunate enough to afford lives little luxuries mate. and as for you saying when a parent swats a kid and is left with confusion and anger, ah yeah no, the kid will realise that they have done something wrong and will learn from that. i mean how fucking retarded does a kid have to be to confuse the difference between right and wrong

[QueenAdrock]

God, yes. Whenever I see a parent properly scold their child and explain to them why not to do something, I want to thank them. There's so little of that nowadays.

Some of the "only" children get away with EVERYTHING, too. At the dentist office I worked at, there was this little boy who was 3 and running around the office and trying to open all of the doors. The mother would smile sheepishly at me when I had this look on my face, and then she would say "No, no, sweetie, please don't do that," in a gentle tone that the child didn't understand. He just giggled, ran BEHIND my desk, and tried pressing the buttons on the fax machine. I put myself between him and the machine and said "Honey, go back to your mom," who at that point wasn't paying attention because she had busied herself with an issue of Cosmo. The kid wouldn't listen to me, and started grabbing stuff off my desk that I had to pry out of his hands, and put back. The mother finally woke up to what was happening and took the little boy over to where she was, and sat him down. She then told him that if he didn't do any more bad things, she would take him to McDonald's and get him ice cream.

REALLY GOOD PARENTING. (n) He learned that if he does bad stuff initially he doesn't get in trouble - he actually gets the option of stopping his behavior and getting ice cream. He learned that if he had never done the bad stuff to begin with, he never would have gotten such a reward. I'm going to scold my children when they do bad things, and reward them only when they've been perfectly good AT ALL TIMES when they've been out. None of this passive-aggressive bullshit.

[skra75]

He learned that if he had never done the bad stuff to begin with, he never would have gotten such a reward.

This is a huge, huge problem and one that I thinkabout 96% of the shitty parents I meet do. It's like they live in a fishtank where normal common sense doesn't fucking exist.

And they wonder why their kids end up getting drunk and wanting designer clothes and full-plan mobile phones.

[steve-onpoint]

any thoughts?

Yeah. Wait'll these kids get guns.

[The Notorious LOL]

one of my moms friends used to try to give her bratty son "time outs" when he would dump soda on her at restaurants and shit. Definetly didnt work.


Had she just spanked the hell out of him, he would have stopped.

[skra75]

yeah, it works terrific

[The Notorious LOL]

worked for me. I remember being spanked maybe 3 times in my life.

[roosta]

spanking worked for our generation, and the generations before...why shouldn't it be used now?

[steve-onpoint]

i was kept in line. and i turned out to be a pretty well-adjusted maniac.

[Lex Diamonds]

Kids are cunts, adults are uptight, deal with it.

[Kid Presentable]

Each time I was really spanked (twice, maybe 3 times), it was the only time I committed that particular spankable offense.

[abcdefz]

A proper spanking is appropriate at times.

Frankly, the way adults behave nowdays -- the world is all their own personal space (public arguments and indiscretions, cell phone calls while ignoring the person at their side, etc. etc. blah blah blah) it's no wonder that some children have zero sense of proper behavior. Why should they? Who's modeling it?

It wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of that acting out is just to try to get the parent's attention in the first place. It KILLS me when I see a daddy out with his two little tykes, talking on his cell phone or reading the sports section rather than interacting with the kids much beyond a "SHUT THE FUCK UP EAT YOUR FUCKING HAMBURGER I PAID FOR THAT SHIT NOW YOU EAT IT!"

[Kid Presentable]

A proper spanking is appropriate at times.

Frankly, the way adults behave nowdays -- the world is all their own personal space (public arguments and indiscretions, cell phone calls while ignoring the person at their side, etc. etc. blah blah blah) it's no wonder that some children have zero sense of proper behavior. Why should they? Who's modeling it?

It wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of that acting out is just to try to get the parent's attention in the first place. It KILLS me when I see a daddy out with his two little tykes, talking on his cell phone or reading the sports section rather than interacting with the kids much beyond a "SHUT THE FUCK UP EAT YOUR FUCKING HAMBURGER I PAID FOR THAT SHIT NOW YOU EAT IT!"

People are just scumbags, raising little scumbags. I agree with your point.

[QueenAdrock]

cell phone calls while ignoring the person at their side


OOOH! You have no idea how mad this makes me! Yesterday I was out with my one friend (just the two of us) and we were shopping and she told me "Oh you go ahead inside. I'm going to make a phone call and have a smoke." So it was pretty much like, well, you get to go into this place alone and awkwardly look around by yourself as I busy myself with more important things.

She also did it when we were at a relatively empty Happy Hour, too. She started talking on the phone, and then she said "I'm going to go talk to him, now." and left me alone in this foreign bar, to my quesidillas and beer. Being left ALONE IN PUBLIC to talk to a guy on a cell phone is much worse than having someone ignore you while they talk, I think.

[abcdefz]

To me, it's just fucking rude, period.

Let me get this straight: I'm the person who bothered to meet up with you, face to face, and you're going to use that quality time to ignore me while getting somebody else on the phone for a non-emergency?

Fuck that.

You know what I've noticed, though? If I genuinely occupy myself with something else, the person on the cell phone will often get off the line pretty quick. Which tells me it's a fucking power trip in the first place.

That ain't friendship; sorry.

[QueenAdrock]

Yeah, totally agree. I'll only talk on the phone if it's urgent, like my mom calls and needs to tell me about something. It's just MORE annoying when they get up and leave you to talk to said person. Ignoring the person and being next to them is one thing, ignoring the person and purposefully leaving them alone is just the rudest thing I can think of.

If this guy breaks up with her, she's going to cling to me too. She's one of THOSE friends that calls you all the time...when she's single. She disappears once she's in a relationship. She'll always favor the feelings of her boyfriend of my own, but I'll also be the first person she goes to once said boyfriend breaks her heart. :rolleyes:

[cookiepuss]

^ I have a "friend" who I pretty much gave up on asking over to my house anymore. everytime I would invite her she wouldn't even be at my place 15 minutes and she'd get phone call she just had to take...because "oh I haven't tlaked to this person in so long" or it wouyld be her ashole overbearing boyfriend and she didn't want to not answer because he would accuse her of cheating and other bullshit.then since the cell reception at my old house sucked she would spend a half hour outside talking on the phone. a 1/2 hour. or and hour if she got in a fight with her man. it was rediculous.

My boyfriend would always come out of our room and be like where did jill go? and I'd say phone. he'd roll his eyes and go back to the tv. at one point he even said...um I really like jill, but she's kind of a shitty friend isn't she? I really couldn't dissagree.:(

if I hadn't known her since like kindergartden I probably would not ever bother to talk to her again. but we still sorta keep in touch.

maybe I should give her a spanking the next time she tries to use her cell phone around me, eh? that'll learn her!

[little j]

about disciplining children...once they know right from wrong, and they choose to do the wrong i see no problem with disciplining correctly. spanking and grounding are the two punishments that worked for me...although i dont think i'd spank my own children. i dont think that time outs are good enough. i dont think children are disciplined enough these days...especially teenagers. i think teenagers need the most attention and discipline and they get the least.

about the friend conversation...its incredibly rude to answer the cell phone while at dinner or happy hour, or out with friends. If not eating i will generally answer the phone and say that I'll call whomever it is later.

ok.