Quote Originally Posted by generalbulldog View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Mark TKO View Post
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.