[jambutty]

It is up to the parents to instil discipline, good manners and the knowledge of right and wrong in their children in the first instance and long before they start school. This should be reinforced (not taught) by teachers and other adults. But it isn’t as cut and dried as that. Outside influences play a big part to undermine those attributes. Commerce has to take some of the blame. “Johnny has one so why can’t I have one” must be a familiar sentence (or something similar) to most parents. What about, “Mary’s mum lets her go.” So peer pressure also plays a part and probably a bigger part than we care to admit.

As AccyJay has pointed out parents cannot be with their kids 24/7 except during the pre school years.

The ideal situation of a two parents family with only one parent working means that the home bound parent sees (and is able to influence) the kids for maybe an hour in the morning before they trot off to school. Come the evening there is tea to be got ready, homework to be done and maybe the kids have a couple of hours playing out with friends or staying in with friends or watching TV. Back indoors again it is bedtime. So in reality the beleaguered parents have only a couple of hours in 24 to instil what needs to be instilled. There is always the weekend but the reality of the situation is that most of that time is taken up with individual activities.

It is even worse if both parents go out to work and much worse still in a single parent family whether that parent goes out to work or not.

Kids, as you point out garinda, learn by example but if the example is less with each generation we get what we have today and it has been this way for at least these last three generations.

I have my doubts if it can be reversed.