Are kids these days disrespectful?

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I am now a man who is in his mid-20s, who remembers his days as a kid well. I was well-grounded, stayed out of trouble. But nowadays, it seems like kids these days are just........ disrespectful.

They have disdain for many people, even me at times. Why? What happened?

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Feel free to talk to me, if you wish.

Every day is a gift- cherish it!

"A true, true friend helps a friend in need."

I work with children of all ages, and I have to say that they don't seem any worse than when I was at school.
Every generation thinks that the younger generation is horrible and the older one is out of touch.

If you mean with "these days" the last 4000 years, then you are right according to an 4000 year old found Egyptian stone someone used to blame the behavement of the youth for the coming end of the world. (No joke.)

I think social language has changed slightly (of course, I wasn't the best user of social language when I was a kid.) There is less of a difference in the way we expect children to speak and the way we expect adults to speak. Rigid rules about polite language have been relaxed; polite intentions are still supposed to show, but we don't expect use of specific polite phrases like you'd find in an etiquette book.

I can see where, for a person on the spectrum, this might be hard to navigate. I am realizing I am fairly good at interpreting intentions, but not very good at expressing them if I don't have scripted language to use.

Kids were pretty nasty when I grew up. I don't see anything worse about the new crop.

As a young person, I can confirm that many young people are needlessly disrespectful, to adults, and especially to each other, although, from the sounds of things, this is not specific to my generation.

People tend to think about this issue in very black and white terms, though. My default response to any new person is to treat them with respect, because I believe that everyone should be given the benefit of the doubt, but I really, really, cannot stand adults who simply assume that they have the right to even greater respect because of their age, which, in case anyone is unaware, is a predetermined fact of life, and something which they have no control over.

Young people often are needlessly disrespectful to adults, but to be fair here, many adults do bring it upon themselves by exerting their unwarranted superiority complexes over young people. As I said, my default response to people who have never wronged me is to be respectful, but when adults feel it acceptable to behave like this, I feel strongly motivated to respond in exactly the opposite way.

To anyone who fits the above description: hang your head in shame, for you are a biggot who does not deserve the respect they so desperately crave.

My family complains a lot that I don't teach my son to be respectful. That is not true. I simply instill in him the same value that I hold true: Some people deserve respect, while some simply deserve tolerance. His teachers (his teachers specifically since he goes to a special school where they don't treat the students like horse crap), myself and my husband, and people who show him respect, yes. My mother, after having a meltdown at my martial arts tournament because my five-year-old cried for a pack of M&Ms after she gave him everything he wanted for 2 days, and then proceded to scream "You've passed it on to him! Whatever's wrong with you, you gave it to him!" in front of a hundred people? Not so much. The clerk who asked why I had to be so damn difficult when I handed him 26 dollars and told him i wanted an order of chicken strips and the rest in gas on pump 2? Nope. I had no problem 2 years ago when he said "Does Grammy need a time-out?" or last week when he looked at the clerk and said "You're not very smart, are you? Or very nice."

When he is older I will teach him discretion, but I refuse to tell him that just because someone was born before him they automatically deserve his respect or are better than him. Such adult-centered, archaic attitudes are the primary reason that abused children don't come forward, or grow up with inferiority complexes. My child is no less important or special than someone else just because he doesn't vote yet.

On that note, there is a difference between respect and politeness. If he bumps into someone, he says sorry. And he doesn't say what's on his mind like that unless the person has been offensive. But if someone has proved themselves to be completely within the realm of "deserving simply tolerance" he will say what is on his mind. For instance, we were at the store one day getting food for our dogs. Even when he was a baby, we never talked down to him. And at almost 8, he talks just like us. So when I got the biggest bag of dog food he said "That's a lot of dog food." I said "Well, we've got a lot of dogs." He said "Yeah, we got Thor and Jet..." and I said "And Jet's progeny."
This woman turned to me and I'm not sure what crawled up her rectal cavity, but she said "Who do you think you're going to impress talking to a child like that." Before I could respond she leaned over my son and said "Honey, do you know what progeny means?" He gave her this look and said calmly "It means her puppies. Did you know that?" Maybe me and my kid just attract dumbasses...

I don't think the younger generation of today is really worse than any past ones....my brothers 18 and I know quite a few of his friends some are younger than that they all seem quite respectful enough to me unless someone tries to give them crap for no reason adult or not. But why respect someone who looks down their nose at you because they think being 'older' makes them more respectable than the next person.

Now if by respectful we're talking perfect law abiding angels, maybe not lots of kids smoke weed, drink even quite a few of the more respectful ones but in Germany drinking is allowed at age 16 so I don't know that such things are even morally wrong. But you can't say there wasn't underage drinking or drug use back in the day or that younger people disobeyed rules to indulge and I am sure plenty of them turned out alright.

There were disrespectful kids in my days too. I remember back in fourth grade, a teen walked by me with her mother and said "duh" in a snotty voice. I thought then that is how I was supposed to be acting in my teens. I don't know what the situation was. The teen could have meant it in a disrespect way or in a playful way and I didn't see the whole story. Sometimes kids say to each other "duh" and not mean it.

Plus there were kids that were bullies, kids even showed disrespect to the sub teachers because they don't take them seriously. They know there wouldn't be a real consequence and the sub isn't allowed to go to the office or anything and complain so she is on her own. So the kids act up in class and don't listen. It was always hard for me as a kid. So I would have problems too. Even in high school, I heard that kids have played tricks on the subs by switching names to confuse the teacher so our current teacher told us we had to be respectful to our sub we will be getting and no switching names.

Even in the early 90's there were disrespectful kids. I knew some in my neighborhood and their parents didn't care, one of them let their son talk to them being a smart ass and being disrespectful to them and they thought it was so cute. But then he would go to school and do it to the teachers and get into trouble.

In 6th grade I can remember kids goofing off in math class with the student teacher because she bored them with her explaining math assignments. They throw things and whisper and what was my disrespectful behavior? Reading a book or writing or lying my head down.

I also couldn't help but think, "Has it come to a point where pre-teen girls just like to flash their chests?" If that's the case, that says a lot about our youth today.

_________________
LIONS-STAMPEDERS-ELKS-ROUGHRIDERS-BLUE BOMBERS-TIGER-CATS-ARGONAUTS-REDBLACKS-ALOUETTES

The Canadian Football League - What We're Made Of

Feel free to talk to me, if you wish.

Every day is a gift- cherish it!

"A true, true friend helps a friend in need."

I dunno - when I was a kid, if one of my friends mums told me off I would have been m-o-r-t-i-f-i-e-d. If I tell my son's friends off, or not to do something, they just shrug me off and carry on doing the same thing - drives me mad...I will add that it's not all of them, just one in particular (and I don't tell them off that often - I sound like a dragon

I think people on the whole tend to remember themselves in a flattering light. They remember themselves as nicer and more likable than they really were. Our memories aren't objective truths-two people can remember the same event very differently. Memory is very subjective, and we tend to paint ourselves as the likable heroes in our own memories. There have been studies that back this up.

So when you were a kid, you probably were a lot more annoying than you remember yourself as being. We tend to remember memories that paint us in a flattering light. Kids have always been annoying, rude and bratty at times, it's part of being a kid. There was never any golden generation of kids who were perfect, respectful well-behaved angels all the time. But not many adults remember themselves as annoying or bratty. This is because your memories are from your point of view.