Kids Are Acting Like Feral Animals, and It’s Our Fault
School is back in session across America, but the hallways aren’t filled with pencils and notebooks. They’re filled with shoving, screaming, and teachers reduced to glorified bouncers. I’m not talking about a few bad apples. I’m talking about a systemic collapse of basic decency among our youngest citizens. The stories coming out of classrooms from New York to rural Kansas are so uniformly disturbing that they paint a clear picture: our kids have stopped acting like kids. They’re acting like feral animals, and it’s not their fault. It’s ours.
Let’s get specific. A teacher in Ohio recently went viral for posting a list of behaviors she’s seen in her third-grade classroom this year. Among the highlights: students throwing chairs at each other over a crayon, a seven-year-old who told her to “shut up or I’ll call my mom to get you fired,” and a boy who bit a classmate so hard he drew blood—because the other kid “looked at him wrong.” This isn’t an isolated incident. In Florida, a middle school had to implement a “no running in the hallways” rule that sounds like common sense until you realize they needed a full-time security guard to enforce it. In California, a high school principal resigned after a single month, citing “unmanageable violence” that included a student punching a teacher in the face for confiscating a phone.
The numbers back this up. According to a 2023 survey by the National Education Association, 70% of teachers report that student behavior has gotten significantly worse since the pandemic. Suspensions are up. Expulsions are up. And the age of the worst offenders is dropping. We’re seeing five-year-olds who can’t sit still for five minutes, eight-year-olds who scream profanities when they don’t get their way, and teenagers who treat every adult like a punching bag—literally and figuratively. The New York Times recently ran a story titled “The Unruly Classroom: How America’s Kids Lost Their Manners,” and it read like a horror novel. One teacher described a kindergartener who “threw a block at a window, then laughed when it shattered.” Another said a first-grader “walked out of the classroom mid-lesson, and the school had to call the police to bring him back.”
So what happened? The easy villain is the pandemic. Yes, lockdowns disrupted social development. Yes, remote learning turned kids into screen-addicted hermits. But that’s a cop-out. The pandemic didn’t create this crisis; it just accelerated a trend that’s been building for decades. The real culprit is us—parents, society, and a culture that has abdicated all responsibility for raising functional human beings.
Think about what we’ve normalized. We hand toddlers iPads to keep them quiet at dinner, then wonder why they can’t focus in class. We let them binge-watch YouTube videos of violent, loud, antisocial influencers, then act shocked when they talk back to teachers. We’ve replaced discipline with “gentle parenting”—a buzzword that too often means no boundaries at all. A generation of parents is terrified of saying “no” because they don’t want to damage their child’s fragile self-esteem. The result? Kids with zero tolerance for frustration, zero respect for authority, and zero ability to coexist in a shared space.
Let me be clear: I’m not blaming exhausted moms and dads trying to survive. The problem is systemic. Our schools have become daycare centers obsessed with test scores, not character building. Our media glorifies rebellion and disrespect as cool. Our social media algorithms reward outrage and impulsivity. Even our churches and community groups have largely abandoned the task of teaching basic virtues like patience, kindness, and self-control. The result is a moral vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. Into that space has stepped the raw, unregulated id of the internet—and our kids are the victims.
But the impact on American daily life is what should terrify you. This isn’t just a problem for teachers. It’s a problem for everyone. When kids grow up without learning how to share, how to take turns, how to handle disappointment, they don’t suddenly become well-adjusted adults. They become the coworkers who scream at you over a minor mistake, the neighbors who blast music at 2 a.m., the drivers who cut you off in traffic, the citizens who have zero patience for democracy. A society that can’t raise children who can sit in a classroom without assaulting each other is a society that is, quite literally, collapsing from within.
Walk into any American public space—a grocery store, a park, a restaurant—and you’ll see it. Parents on their phones while their toddlers throw tantrums on the floor. Pre-teens screaming at each other in the aisle. Teenagers filming fights instead of breaking them up. We’ve all become bystanders in our own culture, and the kids know it. They’ve learned that there are no consequences. If they act out at school, the teacher gets blamed. If they hit another child, the other child’s parent is called “too sensitive.” If they get suspended, the school is accused of being “unfair.” The message is clear: you can do anything, and someone else will clean up the mess.
I’m not saying we need to go back to the days of corporal punishment or authoritarian parenting. But there’s a middle ground between that and the chaos we have now. It involves a collective acknowledgment that we have failed our children by refusing to teach them the most basic lesson of all: you are not the center of the universe. Your feelings matter, but so do everyone else’s. You can’t have everything you want, when you want it. And sometimes, you just have to sit down, shut up, and do the work.
Until we embrace that hard truth, the feral children will keep running the asylum. And we’ll all pay the price.
Final Thoughts
Having covered youth theater for years, what strikes me most about this 'kids act' phenomenon isn't just the polished performances, but the raw, unfiltered emotional intelligence these young actors bring to the stage—often cutting through adult pretension with a truthfulness we've long since learned to mask. The real story here isn't whether they'll become the next Meryl Streep, but how their unguarded collaboration forces us to reconsider what authentic storytelling actually looks like. In an era of manufactured content, these children remind us that the most compelling drama is simply honest human connection, and perhaps we should be taking notes.