The Decline Of Today's Youth?

[Videoskooter]

I'm starting a thread about a problem that's keeping Belgium in a firm grip for over the last weeks. What you're going to read here is maybe not shocking for people living in the U.S. or other big countries, but believe me, for a small country like ours it's rather unusual.

-3 weeks ago a 17 year old was stabbed to death in Brussel's Central Station
by an 18 year old, just to get his MP3 player.

-last week an 18 year old, punished by his school, went to the city of Antwerp,
bought a rifle (legally), walked through central city and started firing on colou-
red people (he admitted he was aiming at "foreign-looking-people". He severely
wounded a Turkish woman, killed an au-pair from Mali and...the 2 year old kid (white and Flemish BTW) she was walking with and if, after that, he wouldn't been shot by the Police he would have walked to the central place and who knows how many victims he would have made there!

-yesterday two nine-year olds raped a 8 year old guy in the schoolyard.

As we are not used to such criminal and irradic behaviour from youngsters, a lot of people/politicians/journalists are asking the BIG question: is a part of our Youth going bezerk? Is there too little guidance from the parents? Does the schoolsystem fail? Does the Judicial system fail? Is it the large amount of violent videogames? Is it gangsterrap-culture?

Should we be more strict on our kids? Do we punish them enough when they misbehave? Do we need Bootcamps for the hardliners?

What do U think? Is it as bad where you are living? Do you see solutions, methods?

[DiscoMan]

It's all of the above. I have no answers. I only know that in raising our son my wife and I tried to isolate him from certain influences as much as we could. We totally and completely devoted our lives to him and taught him how to deal with certain influences in his life And at 22 he seems to have learned those lessons well.

[Energyguy]

im glad that I am not raising children in todays world.. My sister ahs two young children and she worries about what kind of world thye are going to be living in... things just seem to get worse.
When I left school back in 1985 I was thinking about taking up teaching as a career - When i see how todays kids behave and the stories you hear about taechers being threatened by kids (and their parents) Im glad I gave teaching a miss....
I honestly dont know what has happened but there just seems to be a total lack of discipline/respect nowadays.

[Videoskooter]

So it's global! And the sad news that came in: this afternoon, an 18-year old was spotted in Kortrijk/Belgium, wearing a black coat and a rifle and probably on his way to kill his former girlfriend. He was captured by Posa, our special Police.

...he was a good friend of the guy who killed the people in Antwerp recently and went to the same school. Let's just hope that there will be no more copycats!