The perennial nature of “kids these days” being insolent and otherwise generally poorly disciplined is that discipline is something to be cultivated within and

The perennial nature of “kids these days” being insolent and otherwise generally poorly disciplined is that discipline is something to be cultivated within and not imposed from without. As a result, children who lack years of practice in discipline are not particularly well behaved. Adults tend to forget their childhoods, remembering only bits and pieces. In truth, every child was scolded for his/her bad behavior, and each generation tends to have the same bad behavior as the one before it. If each generation of kids were perfectly well behaved there’d be no need for raising, and there’d be no statements from old people such as “children are to be seen and not heard” or as “do not speak unless spoken to” or even as “get your elbows off the table”. That such statements are uttered and remembered by multiple generations proves that kids have made roughly the same “mistakes” over the course of those selfsame generations.