Causes of rude behavior in children

Causes of rude children.

On (not) minding their manners: Why are children rude today?

Back in my day, children were seen, not heard." Growing up, how many of us heard this old cliche from an elderly relative? However, the fact that today's children strike adult observers as rude, despite the fact the same adults were told this cliche by 'grandma' may illustrate a common psychological phenomenon -- children seem ruder to the older generation, because older people almost invariably look back on childhood with either nostalgia for a more polite and simpler era, or with a romanticized view of all the previous generation suffered, that modern children do not have to suffer.

There may be other perceptual causes as to why children seem ruder today. Children today have more leisure time than they did in the past. Children are less apt to work or to have defined chores, and less apt to wander around the neighborhoods with their friends, unsupervised, thus they are 'seen' in the public space with adults, simply being children, more often than they were in previous generations. A child dragged to a fancy French restaurant by his parents who is complaining about the food seems ruder, for example, than a child with his friends at the Hot Dog hut complaining that there is not enough mustard. Context, in short, can make children seem ruder. Also, distracting technological apparatuses like Game Boys and cell phones may make childhood rudeness more annoying and vocal, full of beeps and loud shouting as well as the usual childhood crying.

If some children are indeed 'more rude' in actuality, however, the fault may less be that the children are not taught manners, but that they are imitating their friends. Children's peer groups often influence their behavior more than adult admonitions, at least on a daily basis. And finally, children may be 'taught manners' by adults, but they may be the wrong manners, by example. A child who sees a parent watch television during dinner is likely to do the same, as is a child who talks loudly on a cell phone in the library. These children are learning modern manners, they are not defiant -- but these are the wrong manners. Children may not care about minding their manners less than they did a generation ago. In fact it is very likely that children have similar anarchic urges to act out as well as to please adults as children of the past. But a constellation of social influences cause children today to seem to be ruder than the children of the previous generation.