Medway Messenger, 11th March 2005

I must be turning into a grumpy old man. I haven’t much enjoyed the recent snowfalls. They ruined my plans for a week off work. My car has been hit more than once when little oiks have thrown snowballs at it while I was driving. Irresponsible? Morons? Take your pick.

Others have fared much worse. Outside one local school, kids threw snowballs at cars, too. One mother panicked when her car was hit and steered into another car.

The same kids also threw snowballs with stones in the middle. One smashed the windscreen of a car carrying a small child.

A friend of mine witnessed these incidents and remonstrated with the perpetrators. She said she would report them to the school. “They can’t do anything,” was the mocking reply.

"I’ll make sure your parents hear about this,” she said.

Back came the devastating reply: “They don’t care.”

Couple this with something our childminder told us recently: the authorities who oversee her forbid her from telling any children in her care that they are naughty. So the moral vacuum at home is compounded by the moral mess of those who govern us. We want our daughter to know her boundaries: freedom only comes within limits. And children feel safe with boundaries.

Our failure as parents and legislators to care and set boundaries for our children leads later to delinquent behaviour and the collection of ASBOs. As a staff member at one of Medway’s more notorious schools told me, “Schools cannot impose effective discipline if it is not present in the child’s home. We can only build on what they have at home.”

The Bible observes that if we train children in the way they should go they will not depart from those ways in later life. (Sadly some will go astray despite the best efforts of conscientious parents.) That requires us parents to make sacrifices – not just sacrifices of our money, but of our time and other commitments, too. The pub visit or TV show may have to wait.

With our daughter, we’re currently setting boundaries and standards by simple emphasis on the words “please”, “thank you” and “sorry”. We pray we’ll give her and her brother a good foundation for life.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.