The other day I was down the pub with some friends, and we started talking about 'young people today'. No one had a good thing to say about them. One friend told us a story about a group of kids causing trouble on his morning bus, another said she crosses the street whenever she sees a large gang of youths coming towards her, and yet another complained about the teens hanging out at her local park when she's there with her young children. My friends are not Daily Mail readers, but if there's one thing that everyone over the age of 25 can agree on: British teenagers are out-of-control and need to learn some respect. Or at least what's what conventional wisdom tells us.
I'm not so convinced myself.

As a general rule, I've noticed that when people start talking about kids, respect, and lack thereof, what they're really talking about is obedience. When did we start equating respect with subservience? I can't help feeling that part of the problem with today's youth has less to do with them and more to do with us oldies. The kids are all right, it's the adults who have the attitude problem.

No matter what our young people do, we are constantly putting them down. Every year when the A-Level results come out, there's always some pompous know-it-all on the TV complaining that the tests have gotten easier. A kid gets work at McDonalds, only to get their McJob sneered at by a Guardian reader. A boy becomes the first in his family to go to university, and a backwards Tory grumbles about political correctness when deciding university acceptance. When it comes to our children, we are a society of dead-beat dads who shows up every so often to tell our offspring how disappointed we are in them, and then complain when we don't get a father's day card.

I'm not saying that kids don't need discipline or manners, and that we don't have some serous issues that need to be addressed. The raise in knife crime, in particular, is a real concern. It's just that I'm not sure that ASBOs and dispersal orders are the best way to address many of these issues.

Rather than criminalising our kids, maybe we should be doing more to help them. Who would want to be young today anyway? According to a recent UNICEF study published earlier this year, of the 21 richest countries in the world British kids are the least happy. You know the real problem with young people today, is that they don't feel like they're going anywhere, and I can't help thinking that this is our fault. It seems that as soon as our kids turn 13 we stop talking to them. It's like we live in some sort of alternative version of Logan's Run, except rather than it being illegal to be over 30, it's a crime to be under 20.
Every generation as it ages looks at the preceding generation with alarm. You can take any story about today's youth, change the wording a little bit (replace 'hoodie' with 'punk', 'hippie' or 'mod'), and it could be from any time in the last fifty years. Let's face it, kids who had been die-hard punks in the 70s are now complaining about their own teenage children's choice of music. Hippies, after they stopped putting flowers in their hair, put on ties and sensible shoes, and are now running the country. Former Mods are starting to collect their bus passes.

We wouldn't talk about any other social group the way that we talk about our kids. Yes, some kids do need a good kick up the arse, but we need to stop dismissing our kids as 'chavs'. That's the first step to seeing what they really are: our children.

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