[jambutty]

I did indeed garinda but the generations of between 200 years ago to the pre WWII years sorted things out so that society as a whole had got better by the time that WWII shattered so many lives.

I can only compare the generation that spawned me (my mum and dad) with today’s youngsters. Maybe my opening post should have made that clearer?

Originally Posted by garinda

If things were so much better in the past, and people had so much respect for each other, who brought up this present generation of young people with such appalling manners?

The preceding generation, that's who.

I blame the parents.

I also blame their parent's parents.

You have answered the question garinda although I knew that already. I was looking for confirmation to avoid the flack from the “It wasn’t me” brigade.

As someone has already mentioned, the rot (if I can put it that way) started to set in after WWII and each generation thereafter has relinquished more and more of parental responsibilities until we are at our present state.

I am a ‘war’ child in that I was born in 1937 and was just two and a half when war broke out. You don’t want to know what it was like being a small child with a father in a Nazi concentration camp for five years. I was lucky because sooner or later my dad would come home. Tens of thousands didn’t have that comforting thought. Their father and in some cases mother would not be coming back. During the post war years the survivors were so busy getting their lives back on track as best they could that parental responsibilities didn’t actually take a back seat but were a bit more lax than they used to be. But nonetheless their kids were still brought up with respect for others and the knowledge of right and wrong.

In turn, my generation, having had an austere childhood, made a point of not letting our own children be denied some of the things that we were denied. In order to do so mum would have to go out to work. Of course once both parents got home from work there was still the home to see to so kids were left more or less to their own devices. And so it snowballed.

So in general the behaviour of today’s youth is down to their parents and grand parents and to a lesser extent their great grand parents.

But we all knew that didn’t we? Just some of us don’t want to admit it.