Muck Up Day – a joke!

Perhaps I’m showing my age but when I attended High School we did not have Muck Up Day at the end of our schooling – despite Wikipedia claiming it was a common practice in all schools up to the 1980s. I grew up in South Australia and had never heard of Muck Up Day until our own daughters were reaching their final years of high school in the late 1990s here in Melbourne, Victoria. The news today have reports of all sorts of wild happenings with cars and property being damaged and people ending up in hospital. Just how far is this going to go? I dread to think.

I for one was terrified of the idea of going out into the big wide world and knew only the ‘safety’ of my school world – I wasn’t in a rush to get a job. So celebrating in the form of Muck Up Day just wasn’t on the agenda. But I did get a job at the grand old age of 16 – I didn’t have to do Year 12 simply because the course I was doing didn’t go that far.

You have to wonder about how far this stupid practice (Muck Up Day) goes. Where are these kids learning to disrespect the property of others, and even the feelings of other people? It can’t all be peer pressure, surely it has something to do with how they’re brought up? I heard Berni Dymet on LightFM say a couple of months ago that you get the teenagers you deserve and when you seen teens behaving like hooligans in gangs you do have to wonder.

I’m not saying our own teens were perfect – none are. But I am saying that I believe parents need to play a bigger role in teaching and shaping the lives of their teens. Too many have allowed their teens the freedom to roam the streets as they wish, partake of alcohol at an age when they just can’t handle it, and they are not monitored simply because their parents either aren’t at home or are too tired to care at the end of their days.

If our teens only have their peers for role models then it’s no wonder that things are running amok.