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    I blame the parents

    I'm sure this must have been done at least 347 times on the old board, but still. It's a slowish day for once for me.

    Anyway, the Metro* this morning made me wonder if society really has decided to absolve parents of all responsibility for their children. The front page headline was "Drink, sex, STDs...at age of 12" and in the article, you've got clinic directors blaming drink and the high cost of 'leisure facilites' for making 12-year-old kids have sex. Then you've got the girl who had liver failure at the age of 14 whose mum blames "irresonsible advertising".

    Now I don't think I hold with either 'it's all society's fault' or 'it's all the parents' fault'. I guess it's a bit of both. But what on earth do parents *do* in their everyday lives about this? Is it really OK to blame advertisers and schools? Is it really OK to expect parents to do more given the pressures people are under these days?

    My mum pretty much let us do whatever we wanted - drink, clubbing on school nights, night buses, staying out, etc, but I never did anything *really* bad or really addictively like these articles seem to be describing.

    I don't know if there's an answer or if so, what it is...

    * I know! It's my own fault. I don't, usually, but it was on the bus and I finished my novel.

    #2
    I blame the parents

    I think it's inbreeding. Ireland and Britain are islands and quite a lot of inbreeding must have gone on in the past. So everyone is fucked in the head and is turning to booze.

    Similarly, the small island town of Urk in the Netherlands, known for it's extreme religiousness and isolation, has a massive cocaine problem.

    It's genetics. You can't blame the parents for that.

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      #3
      I blame the parents

      I'm not sure what causes all this, but I bet it's got something to do with political correctness

      or rap music

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        #4
        I blame the parents

        See when I was a teenager we'd go out and we'd listen to hip-hop and we'd drink a couple of pints of snakebite and we might snog a stranger on the night bus but in the end - it was all innocent fun and we stayed in school and got our exams and only two girls I knew were pregnant before they were 16.

        Maybe it *is* the advertisers. But really. If they stop making those cretinous WKD adverts, that would be great, and all, because they're fucking offensively bad, but are all teenagers going to morph into sober sensible kids who don't spend their time standing on corners snotting all over the steet or sitting in parks swearing at people? I think not.

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          #5
          I blame the parents

          The thing is, So Solid Crew have disbanded now, and our youth still insists on misbehaving. I just can't figure it out.

          And I'd love, absolutely love, m'lovely daughter to come home one day in the future clutching a copy of Metro and saying tearfully, "I know! But it was on the bus and I finished my novel!"

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            #6
            I blame the parents

            I knew there was more - in the letters page there's a thing about a 13-year-old boy who burned himself using a sunbed. Some people think kids should be banned from using them. One person thinks that it was his own stupid fault, and that of his mum, who, guess what, blamed the sunbed place.

            I spose some of it's along the lines of coffee having to be marked as 'warning - hot' etc these days.

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              #7
              I blame the parents

              Natural selection innit.

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                #8
                I blame the parents

                I think that the sort of parents who would blame advertising for their child's gross stupidity are probably very irresponsible people with a predisposition to shirk their obligation providing proper guidance and boundaries for their children, and probably many of their other basic ethical responsibilities as well, and therefore their kids probably would have ended up in some sort of trouble anyway with or without advertising or mass media.

                But these are just the cases that make the lurid headlines. I doubt they're really a trend.

                In this country, at least, youth crime has generally trended downward in the last 30 years as has teen pregnancy, I think. I believe I read that somewhere.

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                  #9
                  I blame the parents

                  But they are saying it's a trend. 200 "children" diagnosed with STDs every month in Britain, some as young as 12. 12 years old! They say the figures are rising and also that there's a larger percentage that likely don't see a doctor.

                  And re the drink it says treatment for binge drinkers of school age has gone up 40% in the last 6 years.

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                    #10
                    I blame the parents

                    I'm skeptical that that's a real trend as opposed to better diagnosis or perhaps just shoddy reporting.

                    I'd guess that widespread advertising for alchohol in Britain started a bit earlier than 2002.

                    If there's an STD problem, the best hope for a solution is better education and easier availability of condoms (although I always find those university campus free condom campaigns give me the heebie-jeebies). Kids don't need advertising to tell them they want to have sex.

                    I also think there should be a massive disinformation campaign telling boys that if they have sex with a girl before they're 18 they will dramatically stunt the growth of their willy and then be laughed at by women later on in life.

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                      #11
                      I blame the parents

                      Maybe it is reporting. Like I say when I was young, we had pregnancies and we had drugs and we drank. But no one had syphilis or herpes or liver failure or a crack addiction. Or maybe they did but it wasn't all over the newspapers. I don't know.

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                        #12
                        I blame the parents

                        The thing is, So Solid Crew have disbanded now

                        Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

                        Oh wait.

                        Meh.

                        On the parenting question, and I may be clutching at red herring-shaped straws here, but does the increased visibility of "bad examples" make any difference?

                        In other words, nowadays you're held accountable (well, pointed at) nationally or globally (thanks to the reach of the mainstream [TV, newspapers] and non-mainstream [message boards, YouTube, etc] media) so you can point the blame wherever you like since people don't know you, whereas previously the disapprobation would've come from your family, friends and local community, so forget blaming "the media" or "advertisers" because you're not getting off the hook that easily.

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                          #13
                          I blame the parents

                          Number of things wrong with my last post:

                          1: generalisations ahoy!

                          2: it's gibberish. even I don't believe it.

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                            #14
                            I blame the parents

                            Sorry Crusoe, but it's true. So Solid Crew have indeed gone their separate ways.

                            I often wonder about these booze and sex studies of teenagers. Let's face it, teenagers are not and have never been prone to exaggeration about any facet of their lives, so why on earth would they ever pretend to drink and have sex more than they actually do? It baffles me.

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                              #15
                              I blame the parents

                              Eggchaser wrote:
                              So Solid Crew have indeed gone their separate ways.
                              Thats an awful lot of compass points in use at the same time.

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                                #16
                                I blame the parents

                                does the increased visibility of "bad examples" make any difference
                                I believe so. Anything which has a normalizing effect on a topic tends to increase its prevalence. Once we accept 'that's what everyone else does', we are more likely to do it. That includes common littering at the low end, to (what?) teenage pregnancy and group swarmings at the high end.

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