It's encouraging to see that it is possible to put together an article on the UK riots that is free of finger-wagging and pontificating.

There's one more dimension that I would like to add to the summary offered by Ms Owen.

"We need to set high expectations and provide genuine opportunities, not diversionary or containment strategies, for young people as learners in school."

We also need to start setting some good examples.

Kids aren't stupid. Every day, they see how parliament conducts itself, how politicians are perpetually sleaze-bound, how police are regularly being examined for endemic corruption, how local authorities collude with developers to commandeer any remaining open spaces, how shock jocks inflame their audience to racism and religious intolerance.

It takes a strong individual to resist following their lead. Why should they behave, they might think, when all around them are instances of appallingly antisocial acts and unpunished bad behaviour, perpetrated by those who are supposed to know better?

It is a mammoth effort to break the existing vicious circle, made even more difficult by the "do as I say, not as I do" brigade of so-called adults.

But this pulled me up short:

"With 1 in 4 young people in Australia reporting mental health problems"

That is mind-boggling. Either "mental health problems" aren't what they used to be, or there is an entire generation of seriously unhappy people out there, the very existence of which won't make progress towards a solution any easier.

Yes, it's nice to see someone calmly discussing the issue. The hysteria has been a bit much.

I'd agree with what you say there Pericles, though that '1-in-4' figure is a bit hard to countenance. I can believe that mental health issues are indeed very serious and are on the rise, but 1-in-4? No, I'd have to say it's partly watered down classification requirements and partly a rise in how serious the issue is.

Unfortunately, it's become necessary to get publicity in order to attract real assistance to an issue, and for that you need attention grabbing statistics. I think that having lower standards for how we classify mental illness actually damages the cause in the long run, as people become skeptical of the numbers relating to what is definitely a very serious problem.

(Actually, I think we see similar problems with everything ranging from crime, to attention deficit disorder and even problems with infrastructure).

Pericles

I think that you have hit the nail on the head when you say that "we need to start setting some good examples".

Children in functional families are part of a network that provides good examples for children. A parent in this type of family can point to someone and say to the child, "This is what a good person does ..".

But some parents do not have this option. They are isolated from their family of origin or that family is also dysfunctional. So who or what can these parents use as a good example? As you say, corruption, greed and childish bad behaviour is in our faces all the time from public figures.

And the popular media emphasises the very values that we don't want our kids to espouse. The kids who don't have any good role models are those who are particularly susceptable to the influence of cheap and nasty celebrity lifestyles, that are advertised and glorified by those, like Rupert Murdoch, who will publicise anything that will sell and nothing that won't.

I agree with you Mollydukes, up to a point. You blame the Murdoch media that "will publicise anything that will sell and nothing that won't."

This I find problematic - it seems easy to blame the Murdoch media, but of course they publicise what sells. I wouldn't want them to do anything else. When they do, they legitimately open themselves up to accusations of bias from one or both sides of the political divide.

I blame the public, for consuming such rubbish. Sure, occasionally I'll click on an article headline I know is only leading me to a rubbish article, but I've reached the point where that occurs very rarely.

It's up to us to moderate what we see, and what our kids see. If we collectively stop watching rubbish, the papers and TV stations will stop emphasizing it.

We get the media we deserve. Profit-driven is better than ideologically driven. Look to China for the alternative.

Unfortunately I don't see how this could happen, but hey, I didn't say I had the answers.

TRTL I don't care which political party Murdoch supports. Neither right nor left is a proper ideology, they both need an ethical foundation. And what I am arguing is that Murdoch and other capitalist icons should provide good examples for all of us and particularly those problematic kids and their dysfunctional parent(s).

The young people who rioted don't read the political pages; only the lifestyle pages where they see lifestyles they will never have and people who behave very badly and are lauded for this behaviour.

I did think that somewhere back in my childhood I understood that my betters had a responsibility to set an example. The bias I want from Murdoch is toward values such as honesty, thrift, temperance etc. All the deadly sin things.

About the growing mental health thing. I do believe that the problem is increasing. There will be any number of subtle things and interactions between genes and environment that is causing the increase.

For example, the new type of classroom with lots of colours, noise and stimulation actually creates problems for kids with Asperger Syndrome (AS). AS people can be very intelligent, most IT departments are full of them but they learn best in a structured and simple environment.

Its not that we are lowering standards for diagnosis. The problematic behaviours are increasing because the environment we provide is more and more complex than it was in the past and so increasingly difficult for some to negotiate.

And furthermore TRTL you say that it is up to us to moderate what our children see and hear and that's fine for you if..

1. you live in a suburb where most people have jobs and a nice house so that the examples of good behaviour that your children see outnumber the bad examples. It is not a matter of choice for some of us where we live.

There is plenty of evidence from psychology that the wider environment and not just the home environment has a significant influence on a child's development. Obviously, if one lives in a poor suburb it is difficult to control what magazines and tv shows that one's child has access to - unless one locks them up of course.

Over the past few decades our suburbs have become mono-cultures and so the children of the poor and dysfunctional have no access to the examples of the well-off and functional families that used to live down the street.

The only examples of a decent family life for some kids come to them from the media and Rupert Murdoch has a responsibility to provide more of these examples and I have a right to ask that he cease to support porn and violence.

2. your child is 'neuro-typical' and does not have a brain type that is more vulnerable to some messages. For example children who have a brain type that predisposes them to over-eating are much more difficult to influence than children like mine, who tend to not eat when they are stressed. That doesn't mean I am better at controlling my kids eating habits. I'm just lucky that they didn't get those sort of genes.

Get over your ideology. Profit driven is not better than ethically and scientifically driven. Increasingly the science of psychology shows that we are not coping with a profit driven society.