MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO

Children are impressionable, young children, very much so. Basic patterns of behaviour are picked up almost subliminally and often parents do not realise exactly what their youngsters are picking up on.

Nowadays children spend a lot of time in cars, driven by their parents. What do they witness? Mum double-parking at the school gates or perhaps Dad cursing at some other driver, a grown-up talking on the phone while driving, or Dad complaining about being caught by a speed camera. They witness many, many small examples of their parents, their role models, breaking the law. They know from eavesdropping on adult conversation that their parents regularly break the law and think little of it. In some families, they witness other crimes, such as shoplifting and violent acts. Even in families where the big laws are properly respected, little violations are common.

What do they learn from this? They learn that it’s correct to pick and choose which laws they obey. They learn that legal behaviour is optional and that it’s alright to disregard the law if it is convenient to do so. Little wonder that many children grow up having no respect for, or fear of the law. We are teaching them, in little everyday ways, that it’s how people should behave.

The heavier traffic becomes and the more stressed drivers become, children see behaviours that, for, most people happen only inside vehicles. Shouting and cursing at total strangers is not something most of us would do in the street, but it is something most of us do in cars. Deadly aggressive driving is also terribly common. Tailgating another car at speed (to get the other driver to move over) is, to my mind, a threat with a deadly weapon. Many people do this every day, and many more witness others doing it. One cannot make a motorway journey without seeing what, in any other mode of life, would be considered heinous criminal behaviour. The vast majority of people would instantly report a threat with a deadly weapon in any other circumstance to the police, and would expect and get a swift response, and yet if the weapon is a car, one would not bother to report it, and the police would certainly not take any action.

So in a major part of our daily lives, which children are part of, criminal and anti-social behaviour has become an accepted norm. Do we seriously expect a four-year-old to discriminate between behaviour in, or outside the car? Perhaps some do make this distinction, and perhaps many more do not. What they all certainly do learn is that one can pick and choose the circumstances in which it acceptable to behave in seriously anti-social and criminal ways.

I have chosen the car as an obvious and pervasive arena in which we are teaching bad things to our offspring. Unfortunately illegal behaviour by ‘law abiding citizens’ is all about us. From dropping litter in the street, to stealing by finding, knowingly buying counterfeit and stolen goods or perhaps a bit of cheating on the benefit claim, the example being set is consistent: It is up to you whether or not you respect the law.

This, then, is the case for zero tolerance. All laws must be enforced, big or small, in or out of the car, and the consequences for breaking the law must be visible and obvious. Children need to understand that the law is not a bin of pick-and mix sweeties, but an immoveable object that bites when you try to shift it. If one does not like a law, get it changed. In the meantime the law is the law, it is all that holds society together and it must be respected and obeyed, simply because it is the law.

Every day, in so many ways, we are undermining future society by our own adult pick-and-mix attitude to the law, which we are teaching our children to emulate.

If we want to mend the ‘broken society’, we must mend our attitude to the law. Otherwise generation after generation will grow up with an ever-lessening regard for the law and an ever-growing perception that obeying the law is a matter of personal preference.