Something interesting

Kids have always behaved badly, it's the parents who've changed
By Miranda Devine
August 21, 2005
The Sun-Herald
www.smh.com.au

Every day we are assailed with stories of kids gone wild. If they're not drag-racing cars, they're drunk or ingesting ecstasy at rave parties. If they're not brawling in junior football, they're assaulting teachers and playing too much Nintendo.

From toddlers to teenagers, they rule the roost at home and only a jackboot super nanny can stop their backchat.

Young people, it is moaned, are rude, disrespectful to their elders, dress immodestly, chatter inanely on mobile phones and MSN, fail to give up their seats for adults, are fat, slovenly, spoilt, materialistic, illiterate and downright foolish. Gosh, it wasn't like that in the olden days.

But if you know ancient history you'll know the more people change the more they stay the same.

"The children now love luxury; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise," said Socrates 2 millennia ago. "Children are tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when their elders enter the room. They contradict their parents . . . gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannise their teachers."

But an excellent new book, Parenting For Character, from which the Socrates quotation was taken, points to an essential difference in modern times. It is not that children are different but that parents have lost confidence in their ability to mould character and instil the perennial virtues that will ensure a happy adulthood.

Author Andrew Mullins, headmaster of Catholic Redfield College in Sydney's north-west, says the age-old "understanding of the link between good habits, character and happiness has been discarded in the last 50 years". He describes his book as a "manual for building good habits in children" and has drawn on "universal principles" in the writings of the East, great books of religions and classical literature. Over 27 years of teaching in Sydney schools he has also gleaned the wisdom of parents.

As he says, it is easy to make children happy for now: "Just take them to McDonald's or put on a PlayStation." But that won't help them achieve happiness in adult life. For true self-determination, says Mullins, they need the four cardinal virtues: wisdom, self-control, justice and courage. Mullins calls these the "foundation habits for happiness".

We live in an era in which notions of sin and personal guilt are a joke and virtue is a dirty word, where we try to build self-esteem in children artificially, by shielding them from disappointment and failing to teach them the resilience that will help them deal with failure in adulthood. But good parenting is about raising children to "let them go", he said on Friday. "If children reach adulthood without resilience and self-control they can become beholden to material goods and won't be very good at permanent relationships."

Parents often feel helpless in the face of powerful forces outside the family. Hence the recent Federal Government push to teach "values" in schools. But, says Mullins, values as good intentions are not enough without virtues. They are like ethics without a moral framework.

The biggest danger to children is the "collapse of family life" - not simply divorce, but the failure of families to connect. It is a struggle for parents to "get enough weight in the home to outbalance the media and the peer group". But this book just might help tip the balance.

EDIT: I accidentally copied and pasted stuff not related to this article but now I deleted them. XD