@lyndal1838 wrote:
Springy, stabbing and threatening family members with a knife is "naughty"?
You are much more forgiving than I would be.
I don't think it is so much a case of what is wrong with the children but what is wrong with the parents. Good old fashioned discipline seems to be a thing of the past....the long distant past.
While some parents may have gone overboard, I still think that a slap on the bottom or the legs when they were young kept many a child on the straight and narrow.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply the stabbers or attackers were just being naughty. Rather that the majority of kids are not vicious thugs.
I would say 95% of children I have come across are basically nice little people. I've sometimes had my run ins with them when they do the wrong thing
But then it's back to normal & I would guess most will grow up to be perfectly decent adults. In fact I know so because even though it just seems like yesterday I had them, some of the little preppies I taught are now in the mid 20s. I run into their parents sometimes at the shops and catch up on how they are doing.
It's those other 1- 5% though who might turn out vicious and violent. Some of it is definitely parenting issues in their cases, or if not, it could be drugs and running with bad company. As far as i am concerned, our courts are far too lenient on criminals. I'm in Melbourne and quite frankly, I think some of the foreign teen thugs here should just be locked up & deported the day they turn 18.
I'm probably a lot more hard line than you think as i also believe children who constantly disrupt classes or threaten other children and teachers should be pulled out of classrooms & face consequences, which is definitely not the way things are moving at the moment.
Stomp on the 5% hard so the other 95% of the kids have a better learning environment. My daughter was teaching in a school where one boy in the next class was vicious-big time trouble-kicked in one wall, demolished a toilet, threatened to slit another child's throat, swore all day at teachers etc. Went to stab the lollipop man. We're talking about a 9 or 10 year old by the way. One of my daughter's students, a bright little girl, was too scared to put her rubbish in the bin near the door one day because she saw HIM passing by.
My daughter said she could quite understand it & it wasn't right that other kids had to live in such fear. That boy faced no real consequences, sometimes he was taken out of his classroom for a 'restorative chat' but that was it. He'll be the sort to hurt someone by the time he's 18, if not before.
Most kids are okay, but the others-they need to face more consequences than they currently do in our society at the moment.
