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Mrs Chop is a primary school teacher and has been for 26 years. She has worked in a few schools in that time, mainly teaching the year 1 cohort. Most evenings she’ll give me a recount of her working day. Good grief it seems that every year the percentage of SEND pupils or children who can’t use a toilet, feed themselves or sit on a carpet without screaming and rolling around or trying to escape out of the fire door is going up. She’s a capable teacher, experienced and conscientious, but she’s finding in harder every year. She is not alone. Many of her colleagues are experiencing the same things, as are her friends in other schools.
What is going on? Is it covid related, diet, social media, micro plastics or a mixture of all of these? Each year it appears the intake of children is going down but the percentage of characterful pupils is going up?
Older parents is my hypothesis.
I'm currently not undertaking scientific peer reviewed studies to prove it.
That and 5G
I was in the break room at work the other day and some colleagues from education were chatting to each other - they're all student teachers on placement in infant schools so they were talking about the new starters this year (age 5).
There were examples of kids who were barely able to understand any instructions, kids who couldn't use the toilet, some with the comprehension / communication skills of a toddler... The list seemed endless.
From listening to them, most of it was simply crap parenting. As they were working in a relatively deprived area, it seemed to be a lot of young single mums, possibly overwhelmed by their responsibilities, unable to afford care or activities and the resulting kids who'd been left alone occasionally being yelled at to shut up or sit still.
There's also less provision for special needs schools and parents have greater choice to send their SEN kids to mainstream. Parents don't like the stigma of having kids in a special school or think that mixing in mainstream will help their children's development. Truth is they would get far better help and attention in a more suitable environment.
Sauce - my missis is a baller SEN classroom assist.
Poor parenting is definitely one reason. Lazy gits who just stick a tablet in front of a toddler who actually needs exercise, entertainment and motivation.
Source: my daughter who has recently packed in her TA job as she was fed up of looking after little uns who can’t use a toilet, can’t use a knife and fork, can’t talk properly and scream when they don’t get their own way.
Source: my daughter who has recently packed in her TA job as she was fed up of looking after little uns who can’t use a toilet, can’t use a knife and fork, can’t talk properly and scream when they don’t get their own way.
Sounds like some adults I’ve known… 😒
It’s very worrying. I don’t have any proper data. But the combination of kids on screen and parents on screen seems to an obvious issue.
Just genuinely glad that phones weren’t like they are today when i was responsible for 2 developing minds
I often refer back to this old article about child language development. It predates phones which will have only made things worse. Apologies for the use of class. I think the patents were actually divided by income. The results are of course averages
source https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/jan/02/society.schools
By the age of four, a professional's child will have had 50m words addressed to it, a working-class child 30m and a welfare child just 12m. Consider this: they found the professional child at the age of three had a bigger vocabulary than the parent of the welfare child. The way children were spoken to was also measured, how much they were listened to, explained things, given choices and in what tone of voice. So at the age of three the professional child has had 700,000 encouragements addressed to it and only some 80,000 discouragements. But the welfare child will only ever have been encouraged 60,000 times in its life, suffering twice as many discouragements, with the working-class child between the two. You get the picture: this is a statistical analysis of what we all observe - the damage done by the poor harassed mother walloping her child in the supermarket when the child has only made a reasonable request.
These ..
Just genuinely glad that phones weren’t like they are today when i was responsible for 2 developing minds
the damage done by the poor harassed mother or father walloping or shouting at or berating or ….. her/ his child in the supermarket when the child has only made a reasonable request.
Lots of the above but I can't lay the blame for poor parenting entirely on the parents (bear with me!)
I'm a volunteer trustee for an early years charity https://www.home-start.org.uk/ and even though we're in a mid affluent area, we are seeing increasing levels of demand. There's many reasons including lack of formal / state support but being a new parent isn't easy, and many young parents can't rely on their own parents for the support and guidance they had in the past. The average age of a first time mum in the UK is 29, and for a 'non-professional' mother that is likely to be younger, with career women often being older. This is just fact.
And with retirement age in the mid 60's, many of these younger parents just aren't getting the same wrap around of support and care from their own parents because they're still in work and can't afford to give up. It's where most of our volunteers come in, some are middle aged women who can afford to work part time, etc., but most of them are nans and grannies, going and providing nan and grannie type support on parenting, but also on where other support and funding is available.
Add to that increasing numbers of refugee and immigrant demand....
My kids were lucky, 2 parents, a stay at home mum in the early days and grandparents who could advise and support. Not everyone's so lucky and yet these formative years are so important, which is why charities like ours exist.
I'm not front line, I'm not out providing direct support, but the stories, especially the thanks that our volunteers get from mums and dads that were just at their most desperate are just amazing.
https://www.home-start.org.uk/Listing/Category/family-voices
A lot of very poor parenting. There may be many reasons why the parenting is poor.
On the other hand we didn't find parents 24 hours away in another country a problem. According to teacher Madame Edukator it's down to the investment the parents make in their kids irrespective of their age, socio-economic group, origins or whatever. Some parents invest themselves and some don't.
So no-one replying to OP has young kids then?
PPP-piss poor parenting.
And how easy is is for said parents to get child an ADHD diagnosis which in turn makes educating said child the responsibility of the state.
Its only going one way.
Margaret Thatcher.
So no-one replying to OP has young kids then?
Not sure what that has to do with the price of fish, but I do have 4 young grandchildren & a grandnephew all living nearby.
Always remember learning that nurturing as described by Edukator effects the physical brain size of children. Current recommendation for under 2's is zero screen time & very limited screen time up to 6yo, I guess the conservatives closing all the sure start centres hasn't helped either.
See we got some Richard Tice supporters here then.
which in turn makes educating said child the responsibility of the state.
I received a state education and I wasn't even diagnosed autistic until 49.
According to teacher Madame Edukator it's down to the investment the parents make in their kids irrespective of their age, socio-economic group, origins or whatever. Some parents invest themselves and some don't
I don't necessarily think that's fair or it's at least a fairly simplistic way of looking at it .
I think for a lot of people now the investment is both parents working full time so you can afford to house , feed , put clothes on them and put the heating on . That's not to say there's not bad parents glued to their phones but there are good parents who probably get to see their kids for an hour a night during the week .
Parenting or the lack of. Each generation it gets worse.
The state now has to try and take up the parenting role where it can but that doesn’t make people personally responsible, just leaves the next generation even more clueless and less inclined to bother
The need to both parents to work to pay extortionate mortgages or rents can't help.
The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.’ attributed to Socrates (469–399 bc) ‘
People have been complaining about kids since writing. I'm sure I read a translation of a clay tablet in a museum in London that said much the same.
My mate is a senco in a primary in New Zealand. The kid giving her the most trouble at the moment is 5, poos in their nappy then throws it at people. So whatever is happening here is also happening there as well.
Teacher in a primary here (was a secondary teacher for 15yrs) and parent of 2, one with an ASD diagnosis and an EHCP.
All of the above is often true - devices, PPP, lack of social interaction, lack of resources for parents (i.e. SureStart Rip), etc, etc.
There is a lot less funding for Send, more Send kids in mainstream, and a lot more kids with general behaviour and developmental problems that then takes funding and time away from those with more severe needs - I'm not going to say genuine needs, because all needs are genuine whether caused by nature or nurture.
It's a bit of a shit-show in schools right now, and I fear it will only get worse without a massive injection of funds to increase numbers of support staff (cos teachers can't cope alone!)
A couple of follow up points
Yes i blame poor parenting. But the pressures on low and middle income house holds is huge. Parents might have more than 2 jobs between them. Stress of financial worries. Single parents with not much support. Parents whose up bringing provided an inappropriate model of how to bring up a child
I think social media doesn’t help. It depicts parenting as the odd insta’ friendly day out or holiday. Mum and dad still with having amazing social lives and still getting to the gym 5 times a week. Less depiction of asking your kid how their day was, reading them a story of hanging out with a potty.
On a positive note I work in a college teaching physics. Which i accept is a huge success selector for any young person i meet. But there are still lots of wonderful youngsters coming through.
"So no-one replying to OP has young kids then? "
That would fit with the singletrackworld demographic
My eldest is autistic, no amount of 3 r's and good old fashioned discipline would make him not autistic.
As usual a number of things have added up to a complex reality, that cant all be blamed on poor parenting.
I jokingly mentioned age of parents at the top but I do think it's a factor in autism, like it is in a number of other conditions.
Re: standards of behaviour:
Screens are a factor
Diet is a factor
Poverty is a factor
Lack of expectation is a factor
Complex home lives are a factor
The options open to teachers to maintain discipline/deliver support is a factor
Good luck fixing all of them.
Not forgetting that current cohort starting school would have been born into COVID lockdowns, as was my nephew's son, both parents working in care, both immigrants into UK so negotiating how to get help & juggling childcare without any allowable or parental support was very difficult for them, totally convinced the kids outcome would have been hugely different under different circumstances, where as he's now just started school & is very much SEN.
At the time of lockdowns my eldest was living in social housing flat with wife & two young kids and no outdoor space, then moved to a caravan on a farm with other families, the change in the kids behaviour was massive.
PS as I'm sure @ajantom will testify, the processes for getting a child additional support are horrendous, move incredibly slowly (4 years to NOT get an ehcp in our case) and seemed to me to be focussed on the process and not the child. And for a pretty pitiful amount of funding IFsuccessful.
But who is sending a kid to school aged five that's not toilet trained. Most kids are doing this by age two. The biggest motivator is the cost of nappies - five years of them, blimey.
Good article here:-
There definitely is a change in parenting. My SIL is very different to her approach than my brother. She'll let the kids get away with murder as she was a bit of a rebel as a kid, whereby it drives my brother nuts - he's more strict, but he works long hours. We recently had a family meal and the 6 year old kicked off about something, having a tantrum over the fact something was broken (ah I remember his plastic fan had ran out of charge) - SIL took him out of the 'meal' to go to the shop to see if they could find another rather than tell him he'd have to wait to charge it up again. We were a bit shocked at the pandering. He still wouldn't come back into the meal, so brother went out and dragged him back.
I remember when my brother commented when we bought my kids a DS each, they were 9 and 11. His kids have been on 'tech' since the age of one. It's changed and it's the norm to stick a kid on a tablet when out for a family meal, headphones on, and totally disengaged with family. This is how this starts.
Parenting or the lack of. Each generation it gets worse.
I blame Diogenes.
What's up with his knees?
Time poor parents who have a 10x joint income mortgage and are both out the house for 10 hrs a day, as they need the big house as 3 kids plus 2 cars costs lots .Leaving no quality time for looking after and nurturing children who need interaction and positive re-inforcement rather than after school clubs and childminders. maybe .
Locally the children find modern life too loud, so they wear ear defenders in class. Quality , once one starts because they have genuine reasons it becomes accepted and normal then soon 1/4 of a class can ignore the teacher and sit in la la land as the worls passes them by in a quiet sensiitive way. As thats really going to help in the world of work.
It's a massive issue and is getting worse. The last 5 years in secondary has seen a massive change in behavioural standards and the knock on impacts. Authorities can no longer afford to give specialized education to the increasing number that need it. See ScotGov inclusion policies. Inputs from home are increasingly negative and hit social media before sensible discussions. Pupils arriving at school massively behind what we might regard as normal. (I had a pupil in S1 who when presented with 2, 4, 6, 8 couldn't hit the correct answer for 2x2, even when told, so no number recognition. Child in a mainstream class). Poverty, changing of social norms, screens, handing over of responsibility, social media, inconvenience of a child.
There's a PhD on the issues and a need for change but it's a complete societal change, potentially global, but we live in a world where 12 year olds can watch gif of someone being killed and then we wonder why they behave oddly.
Agreed, things are getting more challenging each year.
Education policy can introduce social challenges... and social challenges can themselves introduce issues in education. A bit too much for my little brain, but some of this stuff probably goes back a generation (if not two).
I suppose it's important to look back through history to see what has worked, and what hasn't. But do we? And if so, what have we learned?
How were those parents (or grandparents) educated. How has that affected their own aspiration and ability to parent effectively?
In terms of mainstream education - state comprehensives are a relatively new idea (in the UK at least). 65 years old give or take? Not long in terms of social evolution if you think about it.
Imagine the conversation - "let's fence up 900 teenagers for 7 hours a day, with only 50 adults to look after them". 😂 Prior to that secondary education was a more local, smaller affair. It's a bit of a beast to try to undo now.
A quote from Baroness Warnock herself (link below to see the full context):
"I still have very grave doubts about the rightness of integration as a general principle because I believe there are a considerable number of children who do not, and will never, flourish in a large school. There are hazards that people are not terribly good at noticing about large schools—obviously a lot of children flourish in large schools, but a lot do not. If these children were only in a small school, they might not have any special educational needs but get on perfectly well. The needs are—if not created or generated by it—compounded by the size and impersonality of the environment. This is a perfectly general observation that was valid at the time of our report and is just as valid now. It may be an impossible ideal but I do believe in the value of there being some small or smallish secondary schools."
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/8202/html/
In terms of SEND - inclusive schooling can be very beneficial. No doubt. But some educational professionals believe that the Warnock Report (1978) was somewhat abused (to save ££ in the short term, all those years ago). We see a lot of additional pressure on mainstream schools, some who really struggle to meet a child's needs... and yet they are expected to deliver more and more.
PS The pandemic did not help one bit - additional challenges for an already overstretched education sector.
What's up with his knees?
They kept scraping the barrel.
It’s very worrying. I don’t have any proper data. But the combination of kids on screen and parents on screen seems to an obvious issue.
Just genuinely glad that phones weren’t like they are today when i was responsible for 2 developing minds
I often refer back to this old article about child language development. It predates phones which will have only made things worse. Apologies for the use of class. I think the patents were actually divided by income. The results are of course averages
source https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/jan/02/society.schools
By the age of four, a professional's child will have had 50m words addressed to it, a working-class child 30m and a welfare child just 12m. Consider this: they found the professional child at the age of three had a bigger vocabulary than the parent of the welfare child. The way children were spoken to was also measured, how much they were listened to, explained things, given choices and in what tone of voice. So at the age of three the professional child has had 700,000 encouragements addressed to it and only some 80,000 discouragements. But the welfare child will only ever have been encouraged 60,000 times in its life, suffering twice as many discouragements, with the working-class child between the two. You get the picture: this is a statistical analysis of what we all observe - the damage done by the poor harassed mother walloping her child in the supermarket when the child has only made a reasonable request.
Some parents must be right chatterboxes. Assuming they talk to their child for 16 hours a day they would be spouting 34 words per second, every second, to get to 50m in 4 years. Assuming m is million.
Short term - the pandemic changed things for many.
Long term - we leave it to the parents, the ‘nanny state’ has retreated. It’s obvious that doesn’t work for an increasingly large minority of families, and that comes as no surprise to anyone really, does it?
[ the first reason above has been exasperated by the second, and visa versa ]
@irc thank you for the calculation.
We’ve just had our Grandson with us for a week on holiday in Wales, he asks lots of questions! I mean lots of questions. He always gets an answer but if it’s something he should know we fire it back to him. He has a vocabulary, understanding and memory that astounds us, he has an interest in all aspects of life. He spends time on the iPad with me looking at shore crabs, praying mantis, cuttlefish and other wildlife videos. He pokes around in the garden, puddles streams. He reads books with us and his parents, makes things and draws.
We give him boundaries and, yes, he does have tantrums. He starts state nursery full time on Monday, he’s three.
It’s easy to generalise about the behaviour of children today and the standard of parenting but I know many excellent parents. It’s easy to blame single parents too but I have nothing but admiration for parents on low incomes, trying to parent well whilst struggling just to keep the lights on, it’s very difficult.
Sure Start was an excellent scheme that was working, it saved the state money. It was starved of funding because it was doing well but wasn’t a Tory idea so was scrapped.
Let us hope the new “Best Start” scheme bears fruit.
I’m currently on an all inclusive holiday in Rhodes with our 3 year old - it’s staggering to see the vast majority of kids having a tablet/phone placed in front of them during meal times, while parents for all intents seem to ignore them - feels like there’s one on every table.
We don’t have a tablet let alone our little one.
Im not against kids using them now and again and totally understand parents needing a bit of a break but the sheer scale of it just jumps out and hits you in the face.
In such a concentrated collection of parents and young kids it’s been an eye opener.
We let ours play with some toys, Paw Patrol figures etc but are at least involved with her
I'm certainly not pretending to be some amazing, enlightened parent but it’s hard not to be judging when you see it.
…also, I’m amazed at the amount of adults that can’t seem to use a knife and fork properly and the bomb site of a table they leave for the waiters to clear up is really winding me up
Symptoms of a sick planet.
Some parents must be right chatterboxes. Assuming they talk to their child for 16 hours a day they would be spouting 34 words per second, every second, to get to 50m in 4 years. Assuming m is million.
34x60x60x16x365=2.8 billion
So i think you are incorrect
I get 34,246 words per day
Which is 2853 an hour for 12 hours
which is about 48 a minute
Given that talking at 150 words per minute is apparently fairly normal that would work with them being spoken to a third of the time for 12 hours per day
Note it says addressed to child not spoken by parent
Three years ago I employed an 18 year old woman who had her issues but was very well intentioned and desperate to break away from her families usual behaviour of living on benefits.
She spoke with a very strong American accent despite 2 Scottish parents and never having left Perthshire.
She said she'd been home schooled until she was 11 and the schooling was to watch American TV all day every day.
Unfortunately she left us for another job which was definitely going to make her rich but inevitably turned into a zero hours pyramid scam.
Anyway, Reform have got education all worked out. Apparently everything can be fixed by having the Union Flag in every classroom and making the kids sing the National anthem every morning 🙄
My son is 9. I have looked after him full time since he was born. We have talked a lot. His development has slowed down significantly since he started school.
At his inquisitive peak of 4, he asked while on a visit to the UK if there were a lot of wolves in the country. I explained why there weren’t and asked what had made him ask the question. “Because all the houses are made of bricks.”
shcool just seems to wear him out. I’m pleased that it doesn’t completely piss him off that he doesn’t have any major issues.
not really sure what my point is is, but there are some wild children in his school. Interestingly, it is a pretty homogeneous school in a pretty homogeneous area. Most the children live within a 20 minute walk of the school, the only children coming from further away are the rich kids from up the hill, but there is still a wide range of abilities and behaviours amongst the pupils.
I’m dreading him entering middle school with all the children from even further down the hill!
I don’t know if my kids are typical but my 15 year old daughter is a lot more switched on in terms of current affairs around the world than I was at that age. I think the internet has opened up a lot of information (good and bad I know) compared to what I had in the 70s. Reading the back of a cereal box while eating breakfast and John Cravens newsround was all I got. She would run rings around a 15 year old me in terms of general knowledge.
My 10 year old is also way ahead of me at his age. It’s mostly numbers and football facts but he is streets ahead of a 10 year old me.
I’ve also noticed a better attitude to alcohol in teenagers. Sure they will experiment but they are much more health conscious than kids were in the 70s when it comes to drinking and smoking/vaping.
When I was doing a PGCE a name that stuck in my head was Brownlow who noted something the Guardian article misses. Kids who do really well don't just have the language skills related to their social class they master a whole lot of "registers" and can operate well in any class, equallly at ease with the sheet metal beater and the CEO. Expose your kids to people using different registers and they will develop fit-in anywhere skills. Send your kid to Eton and OXford and they'll fail to communicate effectively with most of the population as the UK's current crop of politicians demonstrate. However, do athletics with the kids from the social housing, play in a band with cultured kids, ski with the professional classes, go to a state school but some how get into an elite university that takes from every social background, do Erasmus, collect languages
I've got 5.5yr old twins just going into the second year, they were 4 when they started and never had any issues going to the toilet, they'd been using knives and forks for a while before as well, main issue was one of them being so bloody strongminded but thats calmed now, they went direct from nursery so the cuddly nature of the nursery staff to the stricter teaching staff was a bit of a shock but it sorted itself within a term. They are at a Welsh school and fully dual-lingual, the School is 100% Welsh speaking
Me and their mam split when they were 18 months old so for 99.9% of that time its always been 1:2 ratio which makes things tricky as there's no tapping in/out once your frustrations at its max.
I've never had a TV, they don't have tablets or ever watch my phone, In the last month I've succumbed to a cheapo amazon projector but I bought that for movie nights, they watch a film before bed once a week at mine, nothing more and it's a nice family activity.
To the OP, most of their friends of the same age seem ok kids tbh, one has been diagnosed with ADHD which just seems a bit weird at 4.
To my mind its the screens, I was sat in a restaurant with mine the other week, it can be trying when both are starving hungry and there's no crayons and the foods taking ages but the Mum and Grandmother next to us had a 2 and 7 year old on screens for the entire meal, throughout the whole thing they barely spoke to them and just chatted away like they werent there, the 2 year old just watching a phone on its side the whole time, just made me feel really grim, I'm no Dad fantastic (I'm a nightmare for quickly glancing at the scores ever 10 mins when my teams playing) but jeeze it's not like it costs anything to talk to them - I get that there's time when you actually need some other adult chat as a parent and times limited but..
Mine need some better manners when talking to elders, it's like they've been born a bit too cool for school, they kind of dont know they're doing it being young + there a bit cheeky to make each other laugh sometimes but I'll sort that.
Screens for the lazy parents and working every hour god sends for some of the others to keep a roof over their heads, I cant see any of this getting better anytime soon, the kids will be raised by AI soon enough
However, do athletics with the kids from the social housing, play in a band with cultured kids, ski with the professional classes, go to a state school but some how get into an elite university that takes from every social background, do Erasmus, collect languages
I suppose the money saved on sending them to a state school will help pay for all the activities.
joking aside, while good advice, how many children or parents are capable would be capable of all that?
This will be contentious, and a bit tangential, but I reckon it's social media and diet.....
...People are being fed the idea on SM that eating red meat and nothing else is good for you. But they need to eat a well rounded diet including carbs, and greens, and fruit etc...
And we need the govt to bring back surestart to support the communities where this is happening
Kids dont want red meat, it's the carbs they go for. Biscuits, sweets, sugary pop, energy drinks. Biltong is a long way down the list.
Old eggs, old sperm, micro plastics, blue light, general diminishing of intellect and common sense. It can probably all be blamed on the Boomers. We’re all doomed!