We’re Scared of our kids
Parents, Teachers and even the Police are afraid of our children.
In the early morning of the 6th of March 2023 in the Northern city of Townsville, three stolen vehicles manned by five youth offenders chased two police cars, repeatedly ramming them and injuring an officer. The officers were only able to escape by fleeing to a manned police station to take refuge. The scene as it unfolded in the quiet suburban streets of the city was reminiscent of movies like Fast and Furious and citizens who watched it unfold, had to pull their cars over to the side of the road to avoid being smashed or overturned.
This event represented a momentous failure of the forces of law and order because it came at the end of a ten-year period of promises by police and government to “tackle youth crime”.
Remarkably enough a police spokesman stated, “I don’t think there was ever an intention to deliberately cause a lot of injury or harm to police officers”. He might as well have said, “People who fire weapons into a crowd are not aiming to kill anyone in particular”.
The government is struggling with Youth Crime Issues and so it has now decided to change the law so that Youth Offenders who breach bail are jailed. This has been greeted by a wail from Human Rights People and lawyers who insist that “jail is not the answer”. Rarely someone has the temerity to ask these activists, “and the answer is?” If that question is asked, the vague nebulous response follows, “We need to get at the root causes.”
What are these root causes? We need not look further than our schools where problems with truancy and behaviour have become unmanageable.
We are afraid of our children and that fear begins in school. The stark truth is that our education system is broken.
Teachers are afraid on many levels. They are afraid they will fail the students in the class who want to work but can’t because other students keep calling out, or worse, abuse them. They are afraid of physical violence, of things being thrown at them, of students standing over them.
Teachers are afraid that their students will lie about them. Students lie about their teachers and these lies are believed by parents and the school administration because other students in the class will back these lies.
Parents are afraid of their children. They are afraid that they will not love them if they don’t believe them about the nasty teachers at school who are mean to them. As Judge Judy said authoritatively in one of her dramatized court cases, “Children lie, they do it all the time because that is what children do.”
Too often parents come up to the school angrily declaring, “my child told me this and I know it’s true because another boy in the class confirmed it”. Really? Zero plus zero equals zero, an equation parents desperately need to learn. Once upon a time, teachers were so respected that their word would never be questioned. Now it is never accepted.
Parents are afraid to deny their children “screen time”, the endless trivial games, the stupid TikTok videos of people dancing and the constant texting between friends exchanging meaningless ideas.
There is no end of studies that show this excessive use of screens, mobile phones, iPads, and laptops are not only bad for the mental and physical health of children, denying them exercise, proper sleep, and the normal social interaction of the playground, it leads to a form of addiction.
The compulsive excitement children experience with screen games produces brain chemicals, endorphins, which are the exact equivalents of addictive narcotic drugs. If you observe children engrossed in these games the intensity of their facial expressions is similar to people ingesting stimulants. These symptoms might be acceptable in adults who are able to modify their effects, but the undeveloped brains of children cannot inhibit them.
We have produced a generation of screen and game addicts. Giving young children mobile phones before adolescence is a form of mistreatment. However, this is only one component of the problem.
We have produced a generation of screen and game addicts.
The other problem is the way that primary school children are managed. Children are not encouraged to sit quietly for long periods and read. This enforces discipline and improves attention span. Most of the instruction involves excessive activity with little encouragement to study and exercise memory. spell and copywriting script so that it is appealing and easily understood.
Handwriting by the time of middle school years is terrible and this is also exacerbated by texting and writing on computers and mobile phones. There is also excessive dependence on calculators and computers for maths. Children in the first instance should be taught to carry out simple calculations mentally. Quiet time has disappeared and so by middle school children are easily distracted and move around too much. Learning to sit still was one of the most valuable aspects of education in the last century.
All this distractibility and excessive movement has now led to the overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder and the consequent overuse of stimulant medication. When children are coming off high blood levels of these drugs they are impossible to teach. Teachers keep hearing the oft-used excuse, “He’s off his medication.” Is no one shocked by their observation?
The recent Covid pandemic had terrible unseen consequences for children in middle school and younger. Lack of school attendance combined with the widespread truancy that followed along with the excessive screen time has meant that we have produced a generation of illiterate, overactive, and aggressive middle schoolers.
The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) claimed in 2022 that behaviour in this nation’s classrooms is the most serious cause of declining educational standards. One or two children can disrupt a 50-minute lesson for 25 students completely.
…behaviour in the nation’s classrooms is the most serious cause of declining educational standards.
Children need discipline, in fact, they thrive on it but for psychologists, especially those who adhere to the school of “Positive Psychology”, discipline is a dirty word. Punishment is also a dirty word but children, like every other member of society need to be punished if they do the wrong thing.
You don’t have to beat children to punish them but you do have to punish them and tell them it’s punishment. Returning to the era of physical punishment is no longer possible nor, more importantly, is it necessary.
Returning to the era of physical punishment is no longer possible nor, more importantly, is it necessary.
When I went to school, they used to beat us. They used a variety of instruments, cane, leather straps rulers, take your pick. But being strapped was over in a moment and the pain is forgotten. What we really hated was being kept in, being made to do stuff, to read stuff repeatedly till we understood it enough to pass a test and not to be allowed out of detention till we understood it.
We hated being kept in to have a long lecture from a boring nun or Christian brother about ethics and good behaviour and treating others as we expect to be treated. What we really hated more than anything was not being allowed to play football or tennis in recess with our mates, and after school. Now that was punishment. Imagine if you told a schoolboy today who was the star of his footy team, “Sorry mate, no play till you behave.” In short, our teachers figured out, when caning was banned, that there were much more effective punishments than the strap.
In short, our teachers figured out, when caning was banned, that there were much more effective punishments than the strap.
As a side note when you argue with psychologists about the horrors of corporal punishment (the strap) they will tell you that research has proved that smacking children leads to bad outcomes. This is a lie. There is no such research and a moment’s reflection will tell you that no academic ethics committee that approves research would permit an experiment that compared two groups, caned children and non-caned children. Cross-generational comparisons are not valid.
In our society punishment does not apply unless people are over seventeen. Then if they smash stuff or attack people, they get punished. Teaching children that the protected world they live in changes to something else when they reach adulthood makes no sense. Positive psychology insists that we should never say anything negative to a child even though the media, the playground, the movies, and the shops are filled with negative comments. Perhaps instead of cocooning them in a positive bubble with their iPhones and iPads we should prepare them for the real world.
Psychologists tell us that if children are spending their nights playing video games and talking on social media we should have “a conversation” with them. This is unnecessary. You pay the bills; you confiscate the device. In fact, we need to have the strength to confiscate all laptops, mobile phones, and gaming devices until children reach adolescence. The research is in, the results are there. We are frying their brains.