Trouble on the street

There are differences according to the wealth and culture of families. My Chinese friend Neil says the difference between Asian and Western kids is that the former are driven to seek a better and brighter future. And they are driven by their parents, as the "Tiger Mother", Amy Chua, has explained.

Finally, many kids are wagging or jigging school. Police say that they often speak to kids and ask why they're not at school. But it's easy to find school age kids smoking and hanging round in shopping malls in school time. Nobody seems to interfere with them.

Rix says that when kids are absent from a Catholic school, a text message is sent to their parents. But kids leave school at 3 (or earlier in some cases) and no adult comes home till 6 or 7pm. Too often, kids just wander round in the afternoons with mates looking for something to do.

This is the most unsupervised generation of kids we've ever seen, says Rix. Kids used to be kept in place by fathers and mothers, churches, schools and a fairly tightly-knit community., as I reported in Fathers, Sons and Lovers, a book about how Australian men have changed since the 1930s. Those of us who grew up in the fifties and earlier under those tight controls can't understand today's free-ranging kids. Today, as we saw in London's riots, risk taking is an adventure, and consequences are slow to arrive. Parents often seem overwhelmed and won't persist with the hard work of keeping adolescents in line.

Parents must be more aware of what goes on out of school hours. They should do more to help kids use their time productively, rather than search aimlessly on the net or wander down the street with friends looking for whatever comes along. They need to be doing more: home chores, sport, music or hobbies.

It all adds up to more headaches for busy school administrators. But unless schools enlist parents to help them and face the hard facts of what happens on the street, we seem likely to go further down the path that leads to the riots we've seen on TV. And the worst excesses of American schooling.