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Kids rule

By Peter West - posted Friday, 20 October 2006


How many parents look at their children today and ask, “where did I go wrong?” Before I answer, let’s take a trip back into the past.

Before the 1970s, I found that children were usually raised strictly. My research was based on a small country town near a railway line. Children of either sex could be smacked: probably boys more than girls. Boys were held in place in many ways. Fathers spoke and their sons quaked: for fathers were respected.

Boys were scared of police; many of the boys I spoke to said they were “kicked up the bum” by a policeman. Other men could tell a boy off, perhaps raise a hand to him, or tell his father of his misdoings. Mothers were always there to keep a tight check on a boys’ tendency to skylark (the modern term is “goof off”).

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“Boys worked outside; girls worked inside” was often said to me. But all kids had their chores: feeding horses; moving the cows across to better feed; bringing in the harvest. Girls helped cook, sew, and stayed close to their mums as assistants.

Churches helped keep boys under tight control. All children were wary of teachers, who had a hundred ways of making you learn, whether you wanted to or not. Boys talked of being caught stealing apples by a neighbour. A neighbour would tell the policeman, who might tell the boy’s father when he saw him in the street or the pub. The boy would be sent to the woodshed to wait with his pants around his ankles until his father was ready to come out and whack him.

Thus the community worked together to raise kids. The boys I talked to enjoyed their youth and grew up wanting to be a husband and father.

Kids had to go to school for a specified number of years. If they “wagged” school, they would be liable to be picked up by truant officers and placed in reform school. This was so horrible that it was always an effective threat for any boy or girl tempted to take time off school.

This was not a perfect setup. Children could be punished in error. If I was caned at school in the 1950s for something I didn’t do, I would complain to my parents. They would do nothing. “That makes up for all the times you weren’t caught”, Dad would say. It made me think that life was unfair (and I’m not sure I’ve ever changed that opinion). There was too much room for abuse of many kinds, whether violent or sexual. Many bad things did occur and there was little to stop them. We are still finding out about crimes committed by “holy” priests, brothers and other clergy.

But society did keep kids in check. Parents usually had authority and kids didn’t rule the roost.

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Now look at kids today. Travel in a train or a bus and watch children with their parents or grandparents. Children scream their heads off while parents watch helplessly and try to hustle them away from watching bystanders. Almost any day of the week I can see children daring parents to stop their tantrums. Why do we need to have supermarket aisles free of chocolates and lollies? The conclusion is simple: parents are afraid of their children. They are afraid of what they might do. They are scared to hit them and they are scared to discipline them.

It starts early. Dad tells the child, “You can’t play with that, you’re not old enough”. So far, so good. And then he adds “OK?” Once a parent might have said “Turn off the TV and do your homework. Now.” Instead, Mum asks the child to leave the TV and promises a Happy Feast at McGluggs.

As Leonard Sax points out, the parent is afraid of the child disagreeing. Most parents think they can’t smack a child, ever, for any reason. I think we need to rethink this issue carefully, respecting the needs of parents and children. And children sense parents’ fear of being judged, and guilt of not having done enough. They demand their own way, though really they just want to know their limits.

Childhood obesity is a case in point. The Australian Parents’ Jury has denounced certain ads that encourage kids to buy fat-filled food. Yes, perhaps they should be banned. But can’t parents say NO any more? Do we all have to accept that American cuisine - however vile - will be used as a bribe for kids? Surely if we want healthy, fit adults we would all be better off if parents could get kids eating healthy food.

Look around you, and you will see many kids out of control. The “kids” can be 20 or 30, but they don’t know what’s good for them. Young children tell police “you can’t touch me”. There are incidents from Bondi to Brisbane of kids smashing cars and bashing people for thrills. Skin cancer rates have risen, because young people won’t take precautions. We are spending millions keeping police on beaches to enforce the peace - something we have never had to do before. Hospitals tell us that drugs and drunkenness take their toll, from vodka to “ice”. Savings have fallen dramatically and the under-40s are crippled with debt to buy the toys they crave. And young men everywhere are liable to cause trouble, get shoved into jail and cost us all in increased taxes.

We really have less idea what to do with young men’s youthful energy than any other generation. Most of the time, the media carelessly do their best to stir up racial tension and trouble between people and stir up trouble between parents and children. Almost nobody helps to reinforce the authority of parents.

Teachers tell me horrifying stories of children whose parents are afraid to say no to them. “You can’t make me do that” they say to the teachers. When I taught at an elite girls’ school, a mother begged the school to stop her daughter working 20 hours-a-week in a shop. Children stay away from school, sometimes because it suits parents to have them do chores or mind younger kids. Teachers seem powerless to force them to attend. “Hello, little boy” a teacher friend said. “Have you come to school to learn to read?” “No” was the reply; “only poofters read”. We can’t seem to make kids read and many adults can’t read at adequate levels.

My teacher education students, in the main, have been well schooled, and badly educated. (Well-educated people rarely want to be schoolteachers.) They have had too many years of writing about what they wanted and what amused them and they can copy notes. But they just don’t KNOW enough. And they don’t have the first-rate computer skills to educate students growing up in 2010. I have to threaten blue murder to make most of them watch Global Village on SBS-TV because I think it will educate them. Most students are happy if the university’s TV goes on the blink or the Powerpoint fails. “Oh good” they say. “Now we can go home”. Any excuse is a good excuse not to learn. And these people want to be teachers!

So much more needs to be done to get schools to focus on children learning. John Howard’s new plan to re-skill Australians wouldn’t be necessary if schools worked better in the first place. Too many schools seem to have lost the plot completely. Public school teachers in particular seem to have lost the will to get kids learning (apart from the selective and upper middle class schools).

Public schools in New South Wales are a battleground: on one hand we have a feeble Department of Education, weighed down with bureaucrats on expensive salaries, all scared of doing something that’s not policy this week. On the other, we have a militant teacher union, jam-packed with ideology, far removed from the concerns of teachers in distant localities. A huge proportion of teachers don’t have adequate Internet access at school. Many poorer schools mainly function as holding areas to keep children off the streets, if they can manage to keep them there.

There has been too much emphasis on fun and entertainment in school. Too many teachers feel they have to be entertainers. My students, when on their practical assignments, apologise if they have to drill number facts or enforce spelling. We have to bow down to all the correct ideas of the day and not offend anyone. God help any teacher who wants to talk about the benefits of British colonisation, instead of its many wickednesses!

We need to do the following:

  1. reinforce parents’ authority. Until we do that we will have young people out of control;
  2. work much harder to keep dads in families as people actively bringing boys into intelligent manhood. Dads play a vital role with daughters, too. We can’t have authoritative parenting for most kids until we put fathers back in the picture;
  3. parent education is necessary to tell parents what they can and should do with their children. Part of this will be teaching parents to say “no”;
  4. we have to find ways of working intelligently with police and local communities to show kids more constructive ways of growing up;
  5. give teachers more authority over children, so they learn the skills they need; and
  6. dismantle the state education bureaucracies and put schools under the control of parents and local communities.

We have to invest in our future, instead of wasting money on useless wars overseas. The effects of educational underachievement for students themselves and for society as a whole are too profound to be ignored. It all adds up to an enormous pot of trouble that we are brewing for our children and grandchildren.

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About the Author

Dr Peter West is a well-known social commentator and an expert on men's and boys' issues. He is the author of Fathers, Sons and Lovers: Men Talk about Their Lives from the 1930s to Today (Finch,1996). He works part-time in the Faculty of Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney.

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