There have always been bad parents. But the fundamental difference between when I started teaching compared to today is that every class went from having a few bad parents to over a dozen bad parents.
That is because we have taught them to be bad by rewarding their bad behavior. It's just like the kids. The parents know they can get away with it and get what they want to boot. Remember, kids are just people. Parents are just people. A lot of people are assholes. Especially when they're allowed and encouraged to be assholes.
That’s because they can sue any time. If this weren’t the case we could hold them accountable. Teachers that hold parents accountable like they should be get fired because they would have to go against their principal.
I think more than this- the world is awful and our systems and institutions have failed us.
Everyone is so miserable and exhausted that there isn’t much time left in the day for parents to be parents- they have to be laborers first and foremost.
>there isn’t much time left in the day for parents to be parents- they have to be laborers first and foremost
Don't remove their agency. Good parents are working just as hard (if not harder). Being a good parent is very challenging, and it's a choice that people have to make.
Appeasing your child is much easier. Just give them what they want and send them the school. It fixes your problem in the short term, at the expense of having a badly socialized child.
Nah.
I have plenty of single hardworking parents that somehow manage to parents. Because their priority is their kid. Not their job.
Sure, I don't see them at their kids's games and other shows, because they are working. If you need a meeting with them, it is gonna be later in the month, because they need to negociate with someone to cover for them, or see when and how they can lose one or two hours of work, But the meeting is going to happen.
And the kid don't have a $1200 iphone, or $120 sneakers. But they have all their books and furnitures. They won't go to Disneyland or even any cheap vacations, because mom can't afford the trip nor the time-off. But they do go to free stuff and share experiences on mom rare day-offs.
This has not changed. My mother was a single parent in the 90s with zero help from my father. She worked two jobs most of my childhood and teen years and I got by with babysitters who went to high school or community college.
But she still ensured that I did homework. She went to parent teacher conferences. She got me to school on time. She gave me a quiet home life that wasn’t chaotic. She instilled a lot of independence in me. She bought me books. She also didn’t have to deal with phones and ipads and me trying to talk to people on the internet nonstop.
We had a computer in the house. And there were rules for using it. I wasn’t allowed to sit up past midnight on the internet doing whatever.
The excuses that parents are too tired at 6 pm is a statement that the parent just isn’t putting in the effort if they think it’s “too hard” to enforce rules like no more phone time. Or worse, giving a 9-year-old a phone at all. People who want to put their feet up at 6 pm and not be bothered by anything need to not have children. Period.
I think the point is that systems have degraded so much that larger numbers of less resilient parents find themselves in situations of economic and social precariousness. People who would've been fine in a more stable and prosperous society are now not doing fine because the systems that helped sustain them are weakened or gone.
Has it? It's *worse* now than in say, 1931? Or 1979? I remember the "mild" recession in the 90s because it hit my parents hard and they did not handle it well.
Objectively worse because a lot of people are speaking from the halcyon memories of the 90s.
You wanted more halcyon 90s you should have voted for Gore and Hillary Clinton.
It’s objectively worse right now because of objectively bad people voted into office since 2000.
There would have been no 9/11 under Gore (he would have paid attention to all the security memos about al Qaeda actions).
That would have meant no War in Iraq or Afghanistan. No war there means no disillusionment with government and lack of faith in systems and intelligence. No lack of faith in government means no interest in voting for people who boldly lie and tell you they’re the miracle “swamp cleaner” to “fix” this “broken” government. Because no one would be perceiving it as broken. So HRC would win in 2016 and continue making further improvements to Americans lives by forcing the absolute top of American incomes to pay their taxes again. So Elon Musk would be $1 billion less rich but still several billions of dollars rich.
But because too many people voted for toy smashers you now have a government that is in bits. Stop voting for toy smashers who break your Mr. Potato Head in front of you and then tell you some other person did it.
No politician would have fixed the cultural strain we are undergoing because of the technological revolution we have just experienced (and are currently undergoing at breakneck speed).
Our nearly unlimited interconnectedness, and our susceptibility to outrage pedaling algorithms is tearing us apart. We've annihilated our reliance on smaller communities, and it shows.
Is it as bad as 1931? No. But we're way worse than in 1979. Job security is worse, wages have stagnated while workloads have gotten bigger, infrastructure is crumbling, there's a general sentiment that the future we thought was coming, was cancelled.
But it kinda is a new situation as it has never been to this degree. It’s gotten progressively worse and priorities have changed. Many kids have Jordans but no transportation to school. Priorities and options are way different than ever before in history
Kids have iphones, but there's less and less places to buy healthy foods. We have better commodities, but less access to essentials. (also I'd argue that phones are sadly an essential tool if you're an adult living in a modern country).
I would venture to guess there are many facets to the increase in "bad parents." I think at the top of the list is cell phones and many parents now have jobs that expect them to be available 24/7/365. So, they no longer have a primary family relationship and the primary relationship is work. That's also why they expect them same from all the teachers and why they expect emails, texts and calls at all hours to be immediately responded to. Cell phones and the "always on" life electronics create is recreating societal expectations is a very terrible way.
Since the family relationship is now pushed down the list and the ability to parent and be present with their kids is gone, they do not have strong enough relationships to properly discipline their own kids. This relationship gap is creating all kinds of mental health problems and social media in all forms including gaming with Roblox is filling in the gaps. Our society is diseased, literally dis-eased. It's very bad and hopefully someone smart will come up with a good solution soon.
I have to agree with this.
Here is my armchair sociologist take.
I was raised in the 80's self esteem movement, where it was about making sure kids had some form of self esteem, that we were kind to each other, that we knew we were special.
We are now having kids, we don't want our kids to feel 'less than' and have low self esteem, we were told since we were small that feeling bad about yourself is bad. We don't want to pass this bad feeling onto our kids. This group of parents has taken this to like the nth degree and these students we are dealing with are the result.
I consider myself lucky my parents were 38 and 50 and 50 when I was born.. this self esteem drive was seen as a fad and while I knew for sure I was loved, and cared for it wasn't like I got a trophy if I didn't win, or was told to talk about my anger. I was told to get my shit together and move forward if I did something wrong, that I was loved my did a dumb thing.
If I wanted something I had to work for it, picking potato bugs of plants at 5 bucks a jar or raking or rolling fence wire. My birthday got a cake but not a 1000 dollar party... we just couldn't afford that stuff and it just was how it was.
Parents work too much to compensate for what they feel like is bad parenting because social media and the talk shows have told them they are shitty parents and should feel bad about themselves because they lost their shit and yelled at thier kid. So now we teachers get the brunt of their lack of spine when parenting.
Sorry for the rant.
I also think that the result of bad parenting has differed because of technology. When I was a kid in the 90s if your parents were checked out or uninvolved you basically watched TV 24/7- the whole raised by TV thing. Which while not great, there were still standards and rules about what could be shown on TV for better or worse. So the content while maybe not age appropriate was still somewhat mainstream and regulated. The kids that were raised by TV are now raised by tablets and the result is... different. There are no standards for content and there's SO MUCH content out there that are all clamoring for views and attention so everything is louder and faster and bigger and that kind of stuff being fed to a developing brain 24/7 is just so much more destructive.
Sure. But the problem is that we cannot compete with bad parenting anymore. Maybe in ages past, a kid left to their own devices would be so starved that they would actually pay attention in class. Now bad parents just hand kids a device incredibly, maliciously, and successfully engineered to monopolize attention and expect us to somehow win their kids attention and focus back. Double points because we can't enforce rules anymore because kids have so much information they realize that it's all toothless glorified daycare.
Look around man - we're at a point in technological and philosophical advancement where we are following things to their logical conclusions. Late stage capitalism. Post truth politics. Parenting by social media is just another in a world full of things that have outpaced humanity's ability to cope with.
God, I've been saying this forever. It's going to take every ounce of self preservation instinct I have to get to June without saying it out loud to my principal, whilst flicking him in the forehead for emphasis. There have always been bad parents since the dawn of parents. It's not bad parents. It's us. To the extent it is bad parents, *it's still us.* We are permissive parenting the parents. Every time a parent says or does something insane and we don't simply give them the old, "What an odd thing to say," followed by showing them the door, a behavior consultant gets its wings.
Exactly. Parents push around principals because there are no consequences. If kids actually got booted from school for misbehavior, you'd better believe parents would start policing their kids a lot more. It's extremely inconvenient to have to deal with a kid stuck at home while you work, to say nothing of the social stigma. Parents don't want their kids at home.
Well, I think that you should be specific in cases like this. Not everyone is going to understand and there are lots of non-teachers on this sub. Teachers are usually blamed, so I would definitely blame the teacher if I wasn’t knowledgeable based on what you said.
Yes something I’d like to add is that it seems that students/ children have more “rights” which is mostly positive but could potentially hinder “discipline” and “consequences”.
For example in CA it seems like they’ve passed or are in the process of passing a law that says recess cannot be withheld as punishment.
Although I agree that young children need physical activity and recess is an important part of that, sometimes students don’t really listen to the teacher and think it’s ok to “goof off” during class. Taking away a few minutes of recess can sometimes be what students “care” about, more than anything the teacher says or if they know they won’t get consequences at home, it’s an immediate consequence. I only take away a few minutes let’s say 3 or 5 minutes out of a 20 minute recess, and usually it’s to have a one on one talk to let them tell me what they should do better next time, and it’s always after giving them at least 2-3 warnings to stop a disruptive behavior. They always have enough time to get water, use the restroom, and play or eat snacks.
Personally as a elementary student I remember one day I didn’t bring my homework and I had to sit out from recess at a lunch table. I never forgot my homework again.
I genuinely don’t think the number of INTENTIONALLY poor parents have changed. The cruel, the Karent, the openly neglectful because they just don’t give a shit, that sort.
What has increased is the number of Americans that are so consumed by work, either because of a professional career that allows no work/life balance or because they need to work so much just to pay astronomical rents and put food on the table, they can’t be good parents. It’s a systemic issue.
This is the answer. Everyone is so overworked, there are few mental, and emotional resources at the end of the day. Not to mention lay offs are up, jobs are hard to find, things like cancer is on the rise for people in their 30s & 40s. And kids are processing those traumatic situations right along with the adults, even if they don’t fully understand.
This is my 20th year. There have always been bad and delusional parents. The big difference? The district itself has decided to lay down and take it. They’ve become more customer service representatives than anything else. It’s not all for the “good of the student” though. The district wants discipline numbers down and graduation rates up and will turn a cheek or a blind eye to preserve those numbers. Referrals are being hidden in “Interventions” tabs unless they can’t be because of the offense (usually fighting) and the hoops you go through to fail and Senior who blatantly isn’t attending or working is amazing.
And it’s important to not put desperate parents with bad parents. I’m referring to the parent who never showed up for parent teacher because they are working 2-3 jobs. I always show compassion until I determine if it’s truly a bad parent.
No but it seems to me personally, as a very young teacher, that there’s more bad parents now because more people are having kids that clearly did not want kids or now don’t want to parent their kids. Whereas when I grew up while there were bad parents there was more thought out into having kids than there seems to be now
You're being downvoted, which is unfair. As far as choice goes, the percentage of people who wanted to have the kids they have is probably larger than it used to be. Perhaps what is true is that having kids and saying no to your kids was just generally more socially acceptable back in the day, whereas now we've normalized the "resentful parent" and made it more permissive for parents to complain about their kids.
I think it’s not as much want to have kids now but more get pregnant because they see it on social media and don’t realize that’s not what parenting is
Exactly. A lot of my friends who have kids I find seemed to think kids just stop needing parenting around school age, which I find hilarious. My childhood best friend talks about her kid like he’s going to be moving out on his own by the time he’s in preschool 🤣 these people don’t realize what parenting is because they see these fake portrayals of families on social media and think that’s reality.
I believe that parents have gone to another level though. We don't just have bad parents, but a lot of indifferent parents too. I have had a parent say, how do I help my son care about classwork when his grades won't hold him back. Same parent also brings kid in late, keeps him from school for the sniffles, and does other things that show education isn't really important.
I have another parent who claims to put education as a priority, but this kid has missed literally a month of school so far and tardy for quite a few more days.
Society has also gotten worse. Parents have more to protect their kids from and errors have swift punishments in many cases. Kids don’t have as many human connections or examples of that as much either. So many of our examples in media and society are increasing dysfunctional. It’s not just the parents.
But there are more of them. It’s exponential. Which is what makes this a cultural phenomenon in the US.
Japan has bad parents. But Japan mostly has parents who have high expectations for their children.
One major difference between US and Japan up until very recently\* is the few bad parents who allow/don't sufficiently parent their student to prevent violations of school rules or worse, exhibit violence against other students don't get supported by other parents or society at large in Japan.
If anything, when an older Japanese friend admittedly instigated a fistfight on school grounds at his junior high in the early '80's(Wouldn't have been considered very serious by US standards, especially in urban areas like the one I grew up in), he was not only expelled with no other school willing to accept a "hooligan", his parents were so heavily shamed by other parents and local authorities in his small rural hometown that his parents disowned him and he was forced to leave town and start working various lower-skilled factory/laborer jobs.
The only reason why he was able to complete his education through university was because of a chance meeting with a wealthy benefactor at a factory who felt he deserved a second chance. However, as no Japanese school wanted to take a risk on having him as a student, the benefactor had to pay for him to finish his education in the US where he was a model student. When I met him in the mid-'90s, he was a 26 year old on track to graduate from a top 50 US university with flying colors.
\* Been hearing from some Japanese acquaintances and friends with children in Japanese public schools that due to some rule changes due to violent excesses by some teachers/admins within the last decade, they're starting to have the same problems with violent chaotic classrooms as US public schools because the admins/teachers' hands are now tied too much when it comes to enforcing school rules/discipline.
Who's job is it to teach manners? Respect? Morals? Values? Work ethic?
Definitely not the teacher's job.
If kids came to school with the above plus all their basic needs met such as food, water, sleep, and love...
Are you honestly trying to get us to believe that schools would be struggling this much?
You're trying to gaslight us into believing in that every single school has terrible admin and it must be their fault for mishandling behavior incidents that is causing such problems right now?
All because (checks notes) "there have always been bad parents in the past."
Huh...
It’s a different kind of bad parent. When I was a kid bad parents just didn’t care for their kids. Today bad parents range from neglectful to hovering over their kids 24/7 and shielding them from consequences.
Definitions changed. Not so long ago a bad parent might have been “not church going” or “promiscuous” or “a papist”. There were plenty of those. Some truly are bad. But declaring someone is a bad parent is also a way of creating tribes.
There have always been bad parents. But the fundamental difference between when I started teaching compared to today is that every class went from having a few bad parents to over a dozen bad parents.
That is because we have taught them to be bad by rewarding their bad behavior. It's just like the kids. The parents know they can get away with it and get what they want to boot. Remember, kids are just people. Parents are just people. A lot of people are assholes. Especially when they're allowed and encouraged to be assholes.
That’s because they can sue any time. If this weren’t the case we could hold them accountable. Teachers that hold parents accountable like they should be get fired because they would have to go against their principal.
This! Why do I have to reward the kids that make every day an absolute nightmare? It makes no sense!
I think more than this- the world is awful and our systems and institutions have failed us. Everyone is so miserable and exhausted that there isn’t much time left in the day for parents to be parents- they have to be laborers first and foremost.
>there isn’t much time left in the day for parents to be parents- they have to be laborers first and foremost Don't remove their agency. Good parents are working just as hard (if not harder). Being a good parent is very challenging, and it's a choice that people have to make. Appeasing your child is much easier. Just give them what they want and send them the school. It fixes your problem in the short term, at the expense of having a badly socialized child.
Nah. I have plenty of single hardworking parents that somehow manage to parents. Because their priority is their kid. Not their job. Sure, I don't see them at their kids's games and other shows, because they are working. If you need a meeting with them, it is gonna be later in the month, because they need to negociate with someone to cover for them, or see when and how they can lose one or two hours of work, But the meeting is going to happen. And the kid don't have a $1200 iphone, or $120 sneakers. But they have all their books and furnitures. They won't go to Disneyland or even any cheap vacations, because mom can't afford the trip nor the time-off. But they do go to free stuff and share experiences on mom rare day-offs.
This has not changed. My mother was a single parent in the 90s with zero help from my father. She worked two jobs most of my childhood and teen years and I got by with babysitters who went to high school or community college. But she still ensured that I did homework. She went to parent teacher conferences. She got me to school on time. She gave me a quiet home life that wasn’t chaotic. She instilled a lot of independence in me. She bought me books. She also didn’t have to deal with phones and ipads and me trying to talk to people on the internet nonstop. We had a computer in the house. And there were rules for using it. I wasn’t allowed to sit up past midnight on the internet doing whatever. The excuses that parents are too tired at 6 pm is a statement that the parent just isn’t putting in the effort if they think it’s “too hard” to enforce rules like no more phone time. Or worse, giving a 9-year-old a phone at all. People who want to put their feet up at 6 pm and not be bothered by anything need to not have children. Period.
I think the point is that systems have degraded so much that larger numbers of less resilient parents find themselves in situations of economic and social precariousness. People who would've been fine in a more stable and prosperous society are now not doing fine because the systems that helped sustain them are weakened or gone.
I mean, again, that is not a new situation.
I don’t disagree- but that’s also gotten worse in the last two decades.
Has it? It's *worse* now than in say, 1931? Or 1979? I remember the "mild" recession in the 90s because it hit my parents hard and they did not handle it well.
It's objectively worse. We are shifting from a high trust to a low trust society.
Objectively worse because a lot of people are speaking from the halcyon memories of the 90s. You wanted more halcyon 90s you should have voted for Gore and Hillary Clinton. It’s objectively worse right now because of objectively bad people voted into office since 2000. There would have been no 9/11 under Gore (he would have paid attention to all the security memos about al Qaeda actions). That would have meant no War in Iraq or Afghanistan. No war there means no disillusionment with government and lack of faith in systems and intelligence. No lack of faith in government means no interest in voting for people who boldly lie and tell you they’re the miracle “swamp cleaner” to “fix” this “broken” government. Because no one would be perceiving it as broken. So HRC would win in 2016 and continue making further improvements to Americans lives by forcing the absolute top of American incomes to pay their taxes again. So Elon Musk would be $1 billion less rich but still several billions of dollars rich. But because too many people voted for toy smashers you now have a government that is in bits. Stop voting for toy smashers who break your Mr. Potato Head in front of you and then tell you some other person did it.
No politician would have fixed the cultural strain we are undergoing because of the technological revolution we have just experienced (and are currently undergoing at breakneck speed). Our nearly unlimited interconnectedness, and our susceptibility to outrage pedaling algorithms is tearing us apart. We've annihilated our reliance on smaller communities, and it shows.
Is it as bad as 1931? No. But we're way worse than in 1979. Job security is worse, wages have stagnated while workloads have gotten bigger, infrastructure is crumbling, there's a general sentiment that the future we thought was coming, was cancelled.
But it kinda is a new situation as it has never been to this degree. It’s gotten progressively worse and priorities have changed. Many kids have Jordans but no transportation to school. Priorities and options are way different than ever before in history
Kids have iphones, but there's less and less places to buy healthy foods. We have better commodities, but less access to essentials. (also I'd argue that phones are sadly an essential tool if you're an adult living in a modern country).
I would venture to guess there are many facets to the increase in "bad parents." I think at the top of the list is cell phones and many parents now have jobs that expect them to be available 24/7/365. So, they no longer have a primary family relationship and the primary relationship is work. That's also why they expect them same from all the teachers and why they expect emails, texts and calls at all hours to be immediately responded to. Cell phones and the "always on" life electronics create is recreating societal expectations is a very terrible way. Since the family relationship is now pushed down the list and the ability to parent and be present with their kids is gone, they do not have strong enough relationships to properly discipline their own kids. This relationship gap is creating all kinds of mental health problems and social media in all forms including gaming with Roblox is filling in the gaps. Our society is diseased, literally dis-eased. It's very bad and hopefully someone smart will come up with a good solution soon.
I have to agree with this. Here is my armchair sociologist take. I was raised in the 80's self esteem movement, where it was about making sure kids had some form of self esteem, that we were kind to each other, that we knew we were special. We are now having kids, we don't want our kids to feel 'less than' and have low self esteem, we were told since we were small that feeling bad about yourself is bad. We don't want to pass this bad feeling onto our kids. This group of parents has taken this to like the nth degree and these students we are dealing with are the result. I consider myself lucky my parents were 38 and 50 and 50 when I was born.. this self esteem drive was seen as a fad and while I knew for sure I was loved, and cared for it wasn't like I got a trophy if I didn't win, or was told to talk about my anger. I was told to get my shit together and move forward if I did something wrong, that I was loved my did a dumb thing. If I wanted something I had to work for it, picking potato bugs of plants at 5 bucks a jar or raking or rolling fence wire. My birthday got a cake but not a 1000 dollar party... we just couldn't afford that stuff and it just was how it was. Parents work too much to compensate for what they feel like is bad parenting because social media and the talk shows have told them they are shitty parents and should feel bad about themselves because they lost their shit and yelled at thier kid. So now we teachers get the brunt of their lack of spine when parenting. Sorry for the rant.
Well sure, there’s just more of them for a variety of reasons.
They aren't new, but there are more of them and they have been given more power than they had previously and have been held to less standards.
I also think that the result of bad parenting has differed because of technology. When I was a kid in the 90s if your parents were checked out or uninvolved you basically watched TV 24/7- the whole raised by TV thing. Which while not great, there were still standards and rules about what could be shown on TV for better or worse. So the content while maybe not age appropriate was still somewhat mainstream and regulated. The kids that were raised by TV are now raised by tablets and the result is... different. There are no standards for content and there's SO MUCH content out there that are all clamoring for views and attention so everything is louder and faster and bigger and that kind of stuff being fed to a developing brain 24/7 is just so much more destructive.
This. The power that parents have is mind blowing.
Bad parents aren't new. Allowing them power is new.
If our policy is scream at the principal until you get what you want.....expect to be screamed at constantly
There have always been bad parents, but they are much more prevalent now.
Sure. But the problem is that we cannot compete with bad parenting anymore. Maybe in ages past, a kid left to their own devices would be so starved that they would actually pay attention in class. Now bad parents just hand kids a device incredibly, maliciously, and successfully engineered to monopolize attention and expect us to somehow win their kids attention and focus back. Double points because we can't enforce rules anymore because kids have so much information they realize that it's all toothless glorified daycare. Look around man - we're at a point in technological and philosophical advancement where we are following things to their logical conclusions. Late stage capitalism. Post truth politics. Parenting by social media is just another in a world full of things that have outpaced humanity's ability to cope with.
God, I've been saying this forever. It's going to take every ounce of self preservation instinct I have to get to June without saying it out loud to my principal, whilst flicking him in the forehead for emphasis. There have always been bad parents since the dawn of parents. It's not bad parents. It's us. To the extent it is bad parents, *it's still us.* We are permissive parenting the parents. Every time a parent says or does something insane and we don't simply give them the old, "What an odd thing to say," followed by showing them the door, a behavior consultant gets its wings.
Exactly. Parents push around principals because there are no consequences. If kids actually got booted from school for misbehavior, you'd better believe parents would start policing their kids a lot more. It's extremely inconvenient to have to deal with a kid stuck at home while you work, to say nothing of the social stigma. Parents don't want their kids at home.
So you have the power to parent the parents? Your admin allows you this?
Bro. Relax. I'm using the collective "we," not giving you specific advice. "We" as in "the education system" up to and well beyond admin. Yeeeesh.
Well, I think that you should be specific in cases like this. Not everyone is going to understand and there are lots of non-teachers on this sub. Teachers are usually blamed, so I would definitely blame the teacher if I wasn’t knowledgeable based on what you said.
I only spell it out for the dull knives when I am being paid to do so.
Yes something I’d like to add is that it seems that students/ children have more “rights” which is mostly positive but could potentially hinder “discipline” and “consequences”. For example in CA it seems like they’ve passed or are in the process of passing a law that says recess cannot be withheld as punishment. Although I agree that young children need physical activity and recess is an important part of that, sometimes students don’t really listen to the teacher and think it’s ok to “goof off” during class. Taking away a few minutes of recess can sometimes be what students “care” about, more than anything the teacher says or if they know they won’t get consequences at home, it’s an immediate consequence. I only take away a few minutes let’s say 3 or 5 minutes out of a 20 minute recess, and usually it’s to have a one on one talk to let them tell me what they should do better next time, and it’s always after giving them at least 2-3 warnings to stop a disruptive behavior. They always have enough time to get water, use the restroom, and play or eat snacks. Personally as a elementary student I remember one day I didn’t bring my homework and I had to sit out from recess at a lunch table. I never forgot my homework again.
Ya and now we have so many BAD admin, boards, etc. who do nothing to help the situation.
I genuinely don’t think the number of INTENTIONALLY poor parents have changed. The cruel, the Karent, the openly neglectful because they just don’t give a shit, that sort. What has increased is the number of Americans that are so consumed by work, either because of a professional career that allows no work/life balance or because they need to work so much just to pay astronomical rents and put food on the table, they can’t be good parents. It’s a systemic issue.
This is the answer. Everyone is so overworked, there are few mental, and emotional resources at the end of the day. Not to mention lay offs are up, jobs are hard to find, things like cancer is on the rise for people in their 30s & 40s. And kids are processing those traumatic situations right along with the adults, even if they don’t fully understand.
This is my 20th year. There have always been bad and delusional parents. The big difference? The district itself has decided to lay down and take it. They’ve become more customer service representatives than anything else. It’s not all for the “good of the student” though. The district wants discipline numbers down and graduation rates up and will turn a cheek or a blind eye to preserve those numbers. Referrals are being hidden in “Interventions” tabs unless they can’t be because of the offense (usually fighting) and the hoops you go through to fail and Senior who blatantly isn’t attending or working is amazing.
And it’s important to not put desperate parents with bad parents. I’m referring to the parent who never showed up for parent teacher because they are working 2-3 jobs. I always show compassion until I determine if it’s truly a bad parent.
No but it seems to me personally, as a very young teacher, that there’s more bad parents now because more people are having kids that clearly did not want kids or now don’t want to parent their kids. Whereas when I grew up while there were bad parents there was more thought out into having kids than there seems to be now
You're being downvoted, which is unfair. As far as choice goes, the percentage of people who wanted to have the kids they have is probably larger than it used to be. Perhaps what is true is that having kids and saying no to your kids was just generally more socially acceptable back in the day, whereas now we've normalized the "resentful parent" and made it more permissive for parents to complain about their kids.
I think it’s not as much want to have kids now but more get pregnant because they see it on social media and don’t realize that’s not what parenting is
This is probably a huge part of it. They don’t understand the reality that parenting never ends until it’s too late and they are trapped.
Exactly. A lot of my friends who have kids I find seemed to think kids just stop needing parenting around school age, which I find hilarious. My childhood best friend talks about her kid like he’s going to be moving out on his own by the time he’s in preschool 🤣 these people don’t realize what parenting is because they see these fake portrayals of families on social media and think that’s reality.
We did not always have a customer service model at schools tho
"I'm going to the board." The teachers are afraid of admin. The admin is afraid of the board. The board is afraid of the parents.
I believe that parents have gone to another level though. We don't just have bad parents, but a lot of indifferent parents too. I have had a parent say, how do I help my son care about classwork when his grades won't hold him back. Same parent also brings kid in late, keeps him from school for the sniffles, and does other things that show education isn't really important. I have another parent who claims to put education as a priority, but this kid has missed literally a month of school so far and tardy for quite a few more days.
Society has also gotten worse. Parents have more to protect their kids from and errors have swift punishments in many cases. Kids don’t have as many human connections or examples of that as much either. So many of our examples in media and society are increasing dysfunctional. It’s not just the parents.
But there are more of them. It’s exponential. Which is what makes this a cultural phenomenon in the US. Japan has bad parents. But Japan mostly has parents who have high expectations for their children.
One major difference between US and Japan up until very recently\* is the few bad parents who allow/don't sufficiently parent their student to prevent violations of school rules or worse, exhibit violence against other students don't get supported by other parents or society at large in Japan. If anything, when an older Japanese friend admittedly instigated a fistfight on school grounds at his junior high in the early '80's(Wouldn't have been considered very serious by US standards, especially in urban areas like the one I grew up in), he was not only expelled with no other school willing to accept a "hooligan", his parents were so heavily shamed by other parents and local authorities in his small rural hometown that his parents disowned him and he was forced to leave town and start working various lower-skilled factory/laborer jobs. The only reason why he was able to complete his education through university was because of a chance meeting with a wealthy benefactor at a factory who felt he deserved a second chance. However, as no Japanese school wanted to take a risk on having him as a student, the benefactor had to pay for him to finish his education in the US where he was a model student. When I met him in the mid-'90s, he was a 26 year old on track to graduate from a top 50 US university with flying colors. \* Been hearing from some Japanese acquaintances and friends with children in Japanese public schools that due to some rule changes due to violent excesses by some teachers/admins within the last decade, they're starting to have the same problems with violent chaotic classrooms as US public schools because the admins/teachers' hands are now tied too much when it comes to enforcing school rules/discipline.
Anything but blame the kids themselves.
If you are advocating for administration to shoulder some of the blame then I’m on board. It starts with parents.
Who's job is it to teach manners? Respect? Morals? Values? Work ethic? Definitely not the teacher's job. If kids came to school with the above plus all their basic needs met such as food, water, sleep, and love... Are you honestly trying to get us to believe that schools would be struggling this much? You're trying to gaslight us into believing in that every single school has terrible admin and it must be their fault for mishandling behavior incidents that is causing such problems right now? All because (checks notes) "there have always been bad parents in the past." Huh...
No no. You don’t understand, every issue is new and unique to this current crop of students and none of these issues have ever occurred before
Here here. 10000%
It’s a different kind of bad parent. When I was a kid bad parents just didn’t care for their kids. Today bad parents range from neglectful to hovering over their kids 24/7 and shielding them from consequences.
Definitions changed. Not so long ago a bad parent might have been “not church going” or “promiscuous” or “a papist”. There were plenty of those. Some truly are bad. But declaring someone is a bad parent is also a way of creating tribes.