OneAndOneIs2

If you're a Facebook user, you might have seen this particular status getting passed around over the last day or so:

RIP Broken Britain.. You went soft on discipline!.. Parents were told.. 'No you can't smack the kids'....Teachers were prevented from chastising kids and the belt was banned in schools.. The police couldn't clip a troublemaker round the ear.. Kids had rights blah blah blah.. Well done Britain..You shall reap what you sow.. We have lost a whole generation.....thank you !!!!!

Isn't that a charming sentiment?

The reason there are people rioting in the streets is nothing to do with politics, benefits, broken homes, the economy, or anything else. It's just another instance of "Tut, kids today, eh?"

Yup. The only problem we have is that the new generation suffers from bad upbringing. Luckily, though, there's a solution: All we have to do is encourage parents and authority figures to clout kids more often, and the world will be a happy and polite place again. Kids will soon learn to behave if they're hit often enough, even the kids who already get the shit kicked out of them at home and only go to school because it's the only safe place they know.

This is obvious to anyone with half a brain: Our parents grew up with corporal punishment, and they weren't our rioting on the streets thirty years ago, were they?

Well.. there WAS the Brixton Riot in 1981. And again in 1985.

And some Poll Tax Riots too.

But none of them count, obviously, because they had a better excuse than TODAY's lot. Everyone knows that OUR generation was the last decent one, the one(s) that came AFTER ours are a RIGHT bunch of yobbos. I mean, have you HEARD the MUSIC they listen to?!?

</sarcasm>But never mind all that. And let's be charitable and say that people aren't being LITERAL when they repost that meme encouraging violence from every quarter.

Let's stop and think for a second about the idea that the reason hundreds of young people across the country are rioting is because their upbringing was at fault, and the people responsible are the parents, police, and schools.

Okay...

So, I don't know about you.. but if I found out that the kids in my neighbourhood were being brought up largely by the local police force, I'd be making plans to move a long way away as fast as possible. Let's face it, there's not even CLOSE to being enough police for them to be even considered as a significant presence in the life of a typical child.

But schools.. now schools are often blamed for the way kids behave. After all, kids spend more time at school than they do at home, right? Teachers are THERE to be substitute parents, right?

Wrong. The clue is in the name, people: Teachers are there to TEACH. Teachers are people with a good understanding of a subject and a willingness (and ideally, an aptitude) to pass it on. Their job is to EDUCATE children. Not raise them.

Let's be realistic here: A typical teacher might have twenty classes a week. Each class contains up to thirty kids. Being ludicrously generous, let's give them four hours a week with one particular teacher - maybe they have two double-period lessons or something.

That's still only eight minutes A WEEK with each child for that teacher. Even if teachers were willing to be parents to the 200-odd kids they might spend their days with, it's sheer lunacy to suggest that they have enough time.

And frankly, if you really want teachers to be true surrogate parents, then you HAVE to give them the power to be. And that doesn't mean the freedom to use a belt. It means that if you want them to bring up a kid, you have to LET them bring up a kid.

You have views on sex before marriage? Well, so does your kid's teacher, and they're allowed to encourage your kid to adopt their views over yours. You're raising your kid a vegetarian? Sorry, but their teacher doesn't approve of restricting diets, so they're feeding them bacon sandwiches at lunch. You're a devout christian? Well, the teacher's pagan and you'll have to accept them taking your kid to the local sabbat.

Think that's going to happen? Me neither. So let's stop pretending that teachers can be parents: If you're not going to allow them to be in charge of your kids upbringing, you don't get to insist that they should be held responsible for it.

There's only one place that you can legitimately place the responsibility for a child's upbringing, and that's with the parents. And that IS becoming a problem, because there are a lot of kids out there right now whose parents are too busy to be good parents. And there are a lot of kids out there with parents who were never shown HOW to be good parents, and so they're not capable of being them. And there are kids out there whose parents are kids themselves, and that's just a whole other world of pain.

When dreadful TV shows like Supernanny are a massive success and people watch open-mouthed as a woman turns a problem child's behaviour around in the space of a few days by doing the same damn thing every single time: setting rules and limits; defining the punishments for breaking them; and consistently applying them - when this is seen as a revolutionary approach, it's a clear sign that there's something terribly wrong with a large chunk of today's parents.

But if there's one ray of hope, it at least proves very simply and clearly that the solution isn't to immediately whip out a cane and beat the bad behaviour out of some poor bloody kid whose only real crime was to be born to a lousy set of parents.