JENI O’DOWD: Lax millennial parents are partly to blame for behaviour crisis in classrooms

Imagine being reported to the police for doing your job because a 10-year-old didn’t like being told off.

That’s what happened to one Year 5 teacher I know. She asked a boy to put a ball he had been playing with back in the shed. He hurled it across the oval instead.

When she said she would give him a notification (students get detention after a certain number of notifications), he refused, calling her a “stupid wog”.

Then he went home and told his parents she’d assaulted him. Grabbed his collar, pulled him backwards and threw him to the ground. They, in turn, believed every word and, without even getting her side of the story, reported the teacher to the police.

The teacher, a long-time friend of mine, has been in the profession in NSW for 15 years and holds a senior position.

The next day, the principal asked to see her. She sat there, incredulous, as he told her a police report had been lodged.

The only thing that saved her career was CCTV footage. It proved she hadn’t laid a finger on the boy.

But even though she was cleared, there was no apology from the student. No apology from his parents. If the camera had been angled slightly the other way, a career in which she always shone would have been over on the word of a 10-year-old backed by delusional parents.

And the boy who made the false accusation? Not one consequence. Not one.

Teachers aren’t the only ones on notice. These days, a clumsy word can cost you your job, a poorly timed joke can land you in HR and a false complaint can do more damage than a criminal record.

And now, the culture of complaint has entered classrooms, which the government has known for years are among the worst-behaved in the developed world.

A 2023 Senate inquiry into classroom behaviour in December 2023 found that, on average, Australian teachers spent 15 per cent of class time managing student behaviour instead of actually teaching.

A teacher with nearly 50 years experience told the inquiry: “Classroom behaviour has only grown worse in recent years … my worst-behaved classes are now worse than anything I saw decades ago.”

Another said: “Staff have been hit, staff have had furniture thrown at them; staff have had the windows next to their heads punched in.”

Is this the result of lax parenting? Millennials, after all, introduced gentle parenting, where discipline is a distant dream. Or is it the impact of social media where kids are exposed to so much unfiltered content, with slurs, abuse and shock behaviour rewarded with likes?

Or is it the fallout from COVID, where months of missed kindergarten left a generation without routine, social skills and the simple ability to sit down and listen? Or all three?

The Australian Institute of Family Studies says children who miss or skip the early years of structured learning are more vulnerable across every domain: language, social skills and behaviour.

Criminologists have a name for what we’re seeing. Gottfredson and Hirschi’s self-control theory argues that ineffective parenting, lack of early discipline and failure to instil self-control before the age of 10 are the roots of criminal and impulsive behaviour later in life.

Now, those gaps are colliding with permissive parenting and the culture of participation trophies, where kids learn they can get rewarded for little to no effort or talent.

Instead of backing teachers, too many parents helicopter in to blame them or the school. They don’t correct their children, they don’t enforce consequences and they encourage a culture of complaint.

Teachers I’ve spoken with say Year 5 is now the most challenging year to manage. It seems that COVID did leave its mark, after all.

In 2023, a survey by the Australian Education Union found that 39 per cent of new teachers say they plan to leave within a decade.

Parents who turn a blind eye to bad behaviour, or hand over parenting to an iPad because they want to watch Netflix in peace, must bear some of the blame.

Parenting without discipline is fuelling classrooms where respect is optional, authority is undermined and teachers are left to mop up the chaos. Meanwhile, kids can demand respect if they decide they want to identify as a cat.

We have lost sight of the basics: respect, discipline and boundaries. We’ve elevated self-expression above self-control, and the result is classrooms and schoolyards where chaos takes the lead over learning.