Lately, I keep hearing the same thing online. “Kids today have no respect.” “Parents these days don’t discipline their children.” “When I was growing up, I knew not to question an adult.”
I understand the frustration. I work with young people. I have seen behaviors in schools that concern me. But frustration is not evidence. If young people were experiencing a steady generational decline because adults stopped being firm enough, we should expect to see a similar decline across major youth outcomes. The historical record is far more complicated.
Youth violent crime rose sharply during the late 1980s and early 1990s, then fell dramatically after its mid-1990s peak. Academic trends tell another complicated story. Long-term national assessments documented substantial gains across portions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, followed by stagnation in some areas and serious recent declines, especially surrounding the pandemic. Those challenges deserve attention. They do not fit neatly into a story about children becoming worse because parents stopped demanding obedience.
For Black children, the conversation requires even more context. Long-term educational progress exists alongside persistent racial disparities. Black youth have also experienced disproportionate contact with school discipline and the juvenile justice system. Arrest statistics, suspension rates, and other institutional measures cannot automatically be treated as neutral measures of behavior. They also reflect differences in surveillance, enforcement, opportunity, school conditions, and exposure to systems of authority.
That matters when we start talking about respect.
I believe there is a form of respect every human being deserves by default. Children included. Their age does not erase their dignity. Adults should expect young people to recognize the humanity of other people, but adults carry the same obligation toward them.
Then there is another form of respect: trust, credibility, and confidence in someone’s judgment. That kind of respect grows through behavior. Age, title, or position alone does not guarantee it.
I can tell a young person, “Speak to your teacher respectfully,” while also teaching, “Your teacher being an adult does not mean your teacher is always right.” Those ideas do not contradict each other.
This distinction matters because obedience and respect are not synonyms.
Developmental research suggests that children gradually develop more sophisticated judgments about authority. They learn to distinguish between legitimate rules, social conventions, safety expectations, and commands that violate moral principles. That process is part of developing moral reasoning.
I want young people to develop that capacity.
I do not want a child whose primary moral framework is, “An adult told me to do it.” I want a young person who understands why rules exist, recognizes legitimate authority, considers the consequences of their choices, respects other people’s humanity, and retains the ability to say no when someone asks them to participate in something harmful.
None of this means adults surrender responsibility. Young people need boundaries. They need correction. They need accountability. They need adults willing to make decisions they will not always like. Shared power does not mean equal responsibility.
Adults have greater responsibility precisely because adults hold greater power.
The question is what we do with that power.
Do we use authority to develop judgment, responsibility, and agency? Or do we use authority primarily to produce compliance?
That distinction becomes especially important when we think about history. Many social movements we celebrate today depended on young people refusing to accept the authority structures handed to them.
Young people participated in lunch counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement. Children marched in Birmingham. Students organized during the Soweto uprising in South Africa. Across generations and countries, young people have challenged institutions, laws, customs, and adults who told them to accept conditions they believed were unjust.
We celebrate many of those young people now.
But at the time, they were not always described as courageous. They were called disruptive. Disrespectful. Unruly. Radical. Trouble-makers.
That should give us some humility when we encounter a young person who challenges us.
Sometimes a young person is wrong. Sometimes their delivery is inappropriate. Sometimes they need correction. Sometimes the boundary needs to hold.
And sometimes the young person is identifying something the adults have normalized.
Those possibilities can exist at the same time. I can hold a student accountable for how they spoke to an adult while still asking whether what they said was true. I can correct the behavior without silencing the critique.
That is the kind of authority I want to practice.
The goal of raising children should not be producing children who obey adults without question. Childhood ends. Our direct authority over young people is temporary.
The deeper question is who they become when our control ends.
Do they know how to think? Do they recognize harm? Do they understand accountability? Do they know how to disagree without dehumanizing someone? Do they know when to follow? Do they know when to lead? And when necessary, do they have enough moral courage to say no?
I teach young people to respect people. I do not want them to surrender their judgment.
Respect is not fear. Respect is not silence. Respect is not automatic obedience.
Sometimes respect looks like listening. Sometimes it looks like accepting correction. Sometimes it looks like following the direction of someone who knows more than you.
And sometimes a healthy, thoughtful, morally developing young person will look at an adult, an institution, or an entire society and say, “No. This is wrong.”
History gives us plenty of reasons to be grateful some young people learned how to do exactly that.