Parents, you MUST tell your kids off – if you don’t they’ll grow up unbelievably entitled

I SPOKE recently to a young man who, at the age of 25, described himself as a “retired teacher”.

It seems he had done his best at the London school where he worked and even coped when one of the potty-mouthed kids threw a chair at him.

But when an eight-year-old pulled a knife in class, he decided enough was enough.

And that he’d be better off doing something safer.

Like bomb disposal.

Or wintertime North Sea oil rig maintenance.

So what’s gone wrong?

Why would a teacher in modern Britain find the job so difficult that they retire from the profession at the age of 25?

When I was at school, I was a bloody nuisance.

I put Polyfilla in the locks so classes would have to be abandoned.

I smoked constantly, played truant most afternoons and refused to play cricket.

I was always in trouble and that was fine . . . so long as my parents never found out about it.

This is how the teachers could cope with my constant bad behaviour.

They knew my mother would side with them.

Even if she thought they were useless or drunk or just plain wrong, she’d back them a hundred per cent and make my life at home hell.

Now, though, I get the impression it’s the other way round.

Parents always back their kids.

If I’d told my teachers that I wanted to identify as a girl, they’d have called my mum and she’d have made me sit under the stairs for a week.

A modern mum, however, would come round with a new pink dress and a packet of tampons.

It’s the same story with the police. When Plod turns up at a mother’s door to say that little Johnny has been nicked for shoplifting, it’s the constable who gets it in the ear.

Or the shopkeeper. “He’s making that much money, why’s he picking on my lad?”

I saw a fairly disgusting child the other day annoying a dog.

He was poking it and pulling its leg and when it had finally had enough, and growled, the parents went mad with the owners, saying it was all their fault and that the poor mutt should be put down.

You see kids misbehaving on planes and when someone complains about it, they are told by the parents to shut up and sit down.

“He’s only nine”, they say.

As though that’s an excuse.

I once asked a child who wanted a selfie to say “please” and the dad called me all the names under the sun.

And all of this explains why, when they become young adults, these kids are so unbelievably entitled.

They tell us how the world should work and that’s that.

You can’t argue with them because they’ve never had to face dissent in their whole lives.

The main problem is that in split homes a mother will often compete for the favour of a child by giving it more biscuits than its dad ever got.

Unbelievably entitled

And in households where both parents work they feel guilty that the kids have been left alone all day, and over-compensate.

Or they feel that the short time they have together as a family would be wasted if one of the kids was upset about something.

But really, the only solution is to understand that sometimes children are unhappy.

They have tantrums and the screaming abdabs. And it’s best to simply shut the door and leave them to it.

Or they’ll grow up fervently believing maths is racist, and that slavery caused global warming.

Wrong shots Rash

WHEN Mrs Thatcher had been in power for many years, she began to feel invincible and pretty soon she was trying to privatise air.

The same sort of thing happened to Tony Blair.

After six years of total popularity, he felt he could do no wrong and went off to Iraq to look for bombs that only existed in his head.

And now we get to Marcus Rashford.

Everyone said he was a brilliant footballer and a decent person and a meals-on-wheels saint.

And the next thing you know, he’s in a Belfast nightclub, giving it large with the tequila.

CAN I just raise a glass and say a big warm welcome to “wet February”.

I managed to get through all of “dry January” with nothing more than the occasional shower.

One of which did go on for a week, I admit.

French farmers growing on me

PROTESTING Dutch farmers did such a good job that a hastily cobbled-together political party won a bigger slice of the vote than the country’s prime minister.

German farmers were pretty good as well, and shortly after their tractors and combines had taken to the roads in a giant go-slow, the government was forced to cave in.

But as we know, no one gets close to the French farmers when it comes to making a nuisance of themselves.

And this week they blocked so many autoroutes with their farm equipment that Paris was virtually cut off.

As I write, food shortages in the capital are increasingly likely.

I salute their endeavours and was deeply flattered when one of them went on the news this week and said what they really need to help them win the war against unnecessary red tape and idiotically low prices is a French version of . . . Jeremy Clarkson.

You’ve already got one, mes amis.

Olivier Martinez.

Whenever I see him, it’s like looking in a mirror.

Bum sums add up

A HIGHBROW team of bottom enthusiasts announced this week that if men become just three per cent fitter, we will cut our risk of developing prostate cancer by a third.

Right. So what if you become four per cent fitter?

I’m no mathematician but I reckon that if you use those men’s botty figures as a starting point, it stands to reason that if we become nine per cent fitter we’ll cut our chances of getting a serious problem by 99.9 per cent.

As a result, I took the dogs for an extra-long walk today.

NEWS just in.

The new Polestar 4 – which is a sort of not very interesting electric Volvo – won’t have any glass in its rear window.

This will make it tricky to see out of.

So instead of a rear-view mirror it will have a screen which takes its feed from a rear-facing camera.

All of which makes me wonder.

What if we’d always had cameras and screens and someone came along with a simple new invention called “the mirror”?

I suspect we’d bite his hand off.

I FIND it hard to defend the awful Nicola Sturgeon.

But when she says potentially incriminating WhatsApp messages were deleted from her phone as a matter of policy, I have to admit she may have a point.

Sure, it all looks very dodgy when a politician says a message was “lost”.

But imagine if those messages were still there, and her phone was nicked.

Then we’d all be throwing stones at her for not deleting them.