They need more videogames, damnit. It might sound counterintuitive, but I was in a shared custody situation as a child, and every other weekend when I would go to my grandparents where my floozy drunk of a mother was ostensibly supposed to be? I'd get my homework done and park my ass in front of the Nintendo and later the SNES. When I got bored or frustrated with it, I'd go run around the neighborhood. Never made a friggin' peep as far as annoying the grandparents went. Of course, they were also smart to ply me with RPGs and my beloved Kickle Cubicle.

Again, Fontaine, I was being a bit facile (it's a character flaw), although frankly, that's an approach that worked for me. I saw video games as a reward, and thus, I behaved, or else the video games got taken away. The more I bitched or acted like a moron, the longer they were gone, and if I did the same thing again, they'd be gone even longer. So I learned to not act like a little fucktard and I got what I wanted, and my parents would explain why, or at least as much as they could without inadvertently giving me information that would allow me to do worse things.

I think Nekkoru's post is the closest to really making sense, at least as far as I've witnessed with today's parents. Somehow none of them learned anything from their own parents, and so a philosphy like that might bear some fruit. Personally, I'm not planning on breeding, and neither is my wife, so worrying about how children are raised really isn't my bag. I can say a few things, though. My father was a disabled harness horse racer, and his method of handling the situation was yelling and/or brandishing a horsewhip. So you learned really fast not to act like a fucking idiot or you knew that whip was going to catch you in the ass. Two, I grew up dirt poor, so a sense of entitlement was something that got purged out of my system but quick. I didn't throw temper tantrums over shit I wanted because I knew we were too poor to buy it, and that cut out fifty percent of the problems right there. Ultimately, I think a little bit of corporal punishment and a lot of clear boundary lines are the best way to go.