> Is it because of playdates culture and not being free to play on the street with neighbours after school which helps socializing kids? All children need to

> Is it because of playdates culture and not being free to play on the street with neighbours after school which helps socializing kids? All children need to be "socialized", which means "taught the local method of the art of civilization". Currently in the western world there IS no "local method of the art of civilization". There's barely even a "local people". Most people grow up around transplants and whirling hodgepodge of rapidly-evolving ethno-social practices that never comes close to stabilizing on a single, repeatable way of life. The US's and Canada's failures to raise up kids to behave a certain way is due to the fact that the modern western world is in a local period of flux/chaos. Children rarely see their full-time working parents and live in environments where they have little freedom and few trustworthy allies that will remain with them throughout their whole lives. The several people I know who grew up in the USSR did not experience this, and while they experienced shortages, authoritarianism, and poverty, they also experienced very intensely local community with people who they understood and expected to live the same way. (This broke down across ethnic lines, of course.) The necessary fixes are far more pervasive and difficult than many people realize, and mostly start with "fixing the adults" rather than "fixing the kids". Bullying is a deeply primal instinct, with the end result of establishing a social hierarchy with the most powerful and violent on top and people who will listen to them and provide goods and services on the bottom. The reason that adults who commit crimes end up in prison is that modern western governments keep a really well-armed and nasty gang on a leash (police) and have a system to deal with the bullies who don't learn how to keep their bullying in line with social acceptability. (For instance, you can emotionally torture an employee into depression, but you can't punch them in the face.) I believe that the bullying we're seeing children do now is closer to status-jockeying in a post-civilization world than as a consequence of our current society's setup. They're trying to establish hierarchies and social norms for themselves, because they've never observed or been taught any.