Nobody is surprised anymore.
That is probably the most troubling part of the whole thing.
A group of teenagers parks at a local Circle K. Loud mufflers, littering, speeding through the lot, driving over the grass. They supposedly took a bathroom door off its hinges and walked out with it. They apparently steal. Bylaw has been called. Police have been called. The owners talk to them. Nothing changes.
And the community shrugs, because what else is new.
There is a version of this story that is as old as time. Every generation has looked at the one coming up behind it and asked what went wrong. The complaint is ancient. The kids, though, are new. And the world they are growing up in is something genuinely different.
Those of us raised in the 1980s and 1990s were not angels. Far from it. But there was a ceiling on the chaos, and that ceiling had a name. It was called your parents finding out. Most of us were more afraid of that phone call home than we ever were of a bylaw officer. Respect was not a value we internalized out of deep moral conviction. It was a survival strategy.
That is not a nostalgic golden age. It is just an honest accounting of what kept things in check.
At the same time, it is worth saying plainly what often gets left out of these conversations: there are teenagers in this city quietly doing remarkable things. Young people who run small businesses, win provincial awards, volunteer, compete on national stages. They do not make as much noise in a parking lot, so they are easier to overlook. They exist. They are not rare. And they deserve to be part of this picture.
So what changed?
Part of it is economic. Raising children used to be possible on a single income in most households. It is not anymore, not in any meaningful sense. Both parents are out the door before the kids leave for school and not home until after supper. The hours in between belong to someone, or something, else. That is not a failure of parenting. That is the consequence of a cost of living that has quietly stripped parents of time they never agreed to give up.
Into that gap walked a screen. And inside the screen, an algorithm.
Children have always chased whatever culture puts in front of them most visibly. In the 1980s and 1990s it was NHL players, rock stars, action heroes. The ambitions were unrealistic but the ceiling was high. Today the algorithm serves up people who film themselves opening packages and earn more than most doctors. It shows teenagers that the path to wealth and status is performance, provocation, and follower counts. Not skill. Not discipline. Not showing up.
Western platforms are built to maximize engagement and advertising revenue. They are very good at it. What they are not optimized for is the healthy development of a 14-year-old with nothing to do on a Tuesday night.
Nobody made a conscious decision to raise a generation on that. It just happened, incrementally, while everyone was at work.
None of this excuses a stolen bathroom door. None of it makes the noise on 12th Street acceptable, or the littering, or the casual disregard for a business owner just trying to keep the lights on. Accountability still matters. Consequences still matter.
But if the question is why, the parking lot is the wrong place to look for the answer.
The kids did not build the world they inherited. They are just living in it the only way anyone taught them to.
Dan Gray is the founder of BorderPulse.ca. The views expressed in this opinion are his own.
Read more: Opinion – The end of an era
