Fair or Not? Family gets evicted from council home because son was a rioter

[Gandalf]

i know what you are saying but times have changed. The playstation generation and internet age is upon us and it dominates their lives.

Was football on park in my day - matahces that lasted six hours with breaks for lunch and tea.

And to be honest I bet you would ask many a parent now who would say they would rather have their kids inside on a playstation than outside and not worrying what they were up to or if they were ok etc..

Different times

I was born in '81. And the first playstation came out in '94 and the internet really became popular in America around 1996 (when I was 15) with America Online for the dial up. I had all that. And so did a lot of kids in my neighborhood, you can say it was a well off neighborhood financially. But one thing about this community was that parents were pro-active in their children's lives. My high school is considered to be one of the best public high schools in the nations that yearly has kids getting accepted into America's best universities like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech, UCLA and other schools on their academic merits. This community has produced educated and well rounded individuals. So what was it? I say the parenting was the catalyst.

You sound like you were from a middle class family in a middle class neighborhood. Quite different from a single parent family in a council estate in Nowhereville. Those kids grow up living quite different lives from the one you had. Good parenting clearly helps, but so do other factors. Have you been to a school in an inner city or had to grow up in an environment where there are scores of other not so good kids all congregating. It is very hard to escape that environment once you are caught up in it. Clearly there are bad parents in those environments, but there are many good ones too, but it isn't always easy to steer a kid into being a well heeled middle class type from those areas. There are so many factors at play.

I agree that good parenting helps. Obviously. But to ignore other social factors is dangerous. Schooling, policing, community, peers etc, it all plays a part. What works for one kid also might not work for another.

[Mark TKO]

On saying all that though Zero Tolerance and police brutality is the key.

Kids must fear the police and teachers - it helps. And fear consequences of illegal actions

[generalbulldog]

i know what you are saying but times have changed. The playstation generation and internet age is upon us and it dominates their lives.

Was football on park in my day - matahces that lasted six hours with breaks for lunch and tea.

And to be honest I bet you would ask many a parent now who would say they would rather have their kids inside on a playstation than outside and not worrying what they were up to or if they were ok etc..

Different times

I was born in '81. And the first playstation came out in '94 and the internet really became popular in America around 1996 (when I was 15) with America Online for the dial up. I had all that. And so did a lot of kids in my neighborhood, you can say it was a well off neighborhood financially. But one thing about this community was that parents were pro-active in their children's lives. My high school is considered to be one of the best public high schools in the nations that yearly has kids getting accepted into America's best universities like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech, UCLA and other schools on their academic merits. This community has produced educated and well rounded individuals. So what was it? I say the parenting was the catalyst.

You sound like you were from a middle class family in a middle class neighborhood. Quite different from a single parent family in a council estate in Nowhereville. Those kids grow up living quite different lives from the one you had. Good parenting clearly helps, but so do other factors. Have you been to a school in an inner city or had to grow up in an environment where there are scores of other not so good kids all congregating. It is very hard to escape that environment once you are caught up in it. Clearly there are bad parents in those environments, but there are many good ones too, but it isn't always easy to steer a kid into being a well heeled middle class type from those areas. There are so many factors at play.

I agree that good parenting helps. Obviously. But to ignore other social factors is dangerous. Schooling, policing, community, peers etc, it all plays a part. What works for one kid also might not work for another.

I knew you would use the bad environment factor to come up with yet another excuse to try and dismiss good parenting or lack of it, in fact this excuse is commonly used to shirk any type of responsibility for bad behavior such as, "Oh little 16 year old Johnny committed an armed robbery and shot 6 people dead because he grew up in a bad environment. It's not his fault or his parents, it's his environment." Here I'll post this video once again just like I did in the UK rioting thread.

Now, this video is of Korean immigrants during the 1992 Los Angeles riots in a very poor section of Los Angeles opening up these little corner shops that sells potato chips, milk, cigarettes, candy, etc. They have their shops being looted and destroyed during these riots, basically their livelihood right there so they went out and protected it with guns. Why? Because these shops put food on their table and managed to put their kids through college/university. When there was a huge migration wave of East Asian immigrants after the 1965 immigration laws were relaxed many of them came over here, most notably the Koreans from S. Korea and Chinese from Hong Kong since those places have yet to reach 1st world status at the time. So they basically came to America piss poor just like many other immigrant groups before them and pretty much lived in shitty neighborhoods and going to shitty run down public schools. But here's the kicker, they managed to have their kids accepted at high rates into the elite universities of America as in Yale, Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, UC Berkely, MIT, Caltech, etc. Them and their kids managed to have very low crime rates for their population despite living in bad neighborhoods and bad environment, they managed to rise up the socio-economic ladder here in America despite these circumstances. Pretty amazing isn't it? So sociologists tend to ask what was it? Well they took a look within their families and the cultural values they have, they took a look at this Confucian culture that lionizes education and respect for the law and authority.

You live in Korea right? You did notice that they heavily emphasize education right? You did notice the low crime rate there right? The same thing also applies to China and Japan. Other Confucian societies.
So basically when they immigrated to western nations in a poor and destitute state while living in a crime ridden and poor environment, their kids still manage to get into these top universities at a very high rate and after graduation they managed to hold white collar jobs to rise up from the depths of poverty. Another group, the Jews at the turn of the 20th century in America also came out of poverty by emphasizing education heavily while living in very poor conditions. The word ghetto was meant to describe their living environment during these times.

While environment plays a factor, it is minimal compared to the cultural and family values instilled within the person. To say because of bad schools, bad neighborhood, is the reason why these people are fuck ups completely ignores the lack of strong family values and ignores the cultural mindset of these people. You should also read the culture of poverty thesis.

And BTW, I did go to university with these poor East Asian students, there were a lot of them. They were mainly on financial aid, scholarships, student loans, etc. I'm too lazy to get the US Census of Bureau, but it breaks it down in detail by numbers on crime rate by ethnicity, educational attainment by ethnicity, crime rate of that ethnicity, etc. And many academic peer review journals also talk about this kind of stuff, I did a huge report of this in my sociology class many years ago on education and how different racial groups approach it.