Parents and Kids Today

Controversy has been stirred up over a school bus driver that stomped on the breaks while a group of students were on the bus. The Vermont bus driver claims that the reason for her actions was that the students had gotten so far out of control that the only way for her to make them behave was to startle them. The driver has since been fired and arrested for putting the children in danger. My question is: were the children already in danger just by misbehaving on the bus? While I have never taken the school bus, I have heard things that go on during the time between leaving school and arriving home, so I know what kids do. Chances are that the bus driver was forced into doing things that seem wrong from the stand point that children are little angels. Parents need to get over themselves and realize that their children are far from angels–demons are more like it. Because I take public transportation every day, I am honored with their presence. Here in NYC, we don’t have school buses for teens, so the rest of us take the same buses as they do. There was this one morning a couple of years ago when one of the little brats decided that she wanted to play a joke on the bus driver, so she faked passing out until after the driver had kicked everyone else off of the bus and called 911. She thought it was hilarious that the other passengers were tossed off of the bus to wait for another one. As far as I know nothing happened to her, although I haven’t seen that bus driver in a while. I did see her a week later on that same bus. She was laughing with her friends about how she got the bus driver to pull over. Apparently she didn’t want to take her math test that morning.

The problem is that the parents today do not care what their children do as long as it doesn’t embarress them. I even heard the mother of a pregnant teen say something like “How dare you embarress us this way?” It is ridiculous! They don’t want to discipline them, so the brats do whatever they want without any real repurcussions. One girl I knew in high school would drink and drive (at 14) the car that her parents bought her. When she crashed the car, the cops charged her with underage drinking as well as driving without a liscence. Her parents yelled at the cops, claiming that she was only having fun, and since nobody had gotten hurt it wasn’t a big deal. No wonder teens are getting killed while driving drunk if this is what their parents’ think.

I was at the mall getting lunch at the food court yesterday when this woman brought her 5 spawns of Satan to the play place, telling the oldest (who couldn’t have been more than 10) that she was going shopping and to call her cell phone if something was wrong. She then turned to the woman sitting at the table across from them (a complete stranger) and asked her to keep an eye on them. That woman told her that she was leaving, so she would not watch her children for her. The first woman gave her this frosty look before turning to me. (I simply stared back at her.) Could you imagine what would have happened if something had gone wrong while I was watching her kids? She probably would have had me arrested for endangering her little darlings! I would have had ACS on her ass so fast she wouldn’t have known what had happened.