The kids are great, it's the parents that bother me

[agger_rob]

Ok, so I work with kids for a living, doing before and after school programs with them. Some of my friends have a hard time seeing me working and getting along with kids because I can be very blunt about things. I was having this conversation with one of my friends from the house this morning and the line came out of my mouth, "the kids are great, it's the parents that bother me." I explained how some parents just seem to be delinquent and rely too heavily on us to raise their kids.

But for some reason, this has been on my mind all day. You would think that kids learn most of their thinking from either their peers or their parents right? And some of the kids have said some pretty racist and derogatory things lately. One kid referred to one of the new counselors as "the black one," two boys told an asian girl that her grandpa was a "gook" and a percentage of them are constantly referring to things as "gay" and "retarded." (Granted, I've said those two from time to time, but not when I was in first grade and just got done playing with a mentally handicapped child.)

My question is, what goes through parents minds when they say things like that in front of their kids? I could have sworn our society was a little more culturally minded than that.

Sorry about the rant, I just had to get this off my chest.