Schoolkids won’t give up their bus seats. I’m not standing for it

When I was young, schoolchildren would always surrender their bus seats to adults. However, there has since been a shift whereby they occupy seats while adults stand. Did I miss the memo about this change in etiquette?
T.C., Mosman, NSW

Credit: Illustration by Simon Letch

You’re right, it has changed. As schoolkids, we always had to stand up for adults on public transport, even though it didn’t seem fair because we had tiny arms that couldn’t reach the grab-rails and flimsy legs that couldn’t withstand sudden jolts and massive schoolbags strapped to our backs, containing about 40 kilos of textbooks, a lunchbox the size of a Honda Civic, a pencil-case with Textas in every colour on the Pantone chart, a selection of sports gear/gym-wear/weightlifting apparatus and a physics project we did on the weekend where we constructed an actual, collapsed nebula that sucks up all light and matter in the universe.

But we did it. We stood there quietly, politely and in excruciating discomfort because that’s the way the world worked back then: grown-ups were our superiors, of whom we were gut-wrenchingly afraid, and we treated them with kindness and respect. But not now – nope. Spineless, modern parenting has created a generation of entitled children who have no fear of adults. You ask a schoolkid to stand up for you on the bus and you’ll get taunted, humiliated, filmed and, by the end of your trip, you’re a TikTok meme with a devil-horns filter and 1.4 million views.

It’s a back-to-front world where adults are lowly and kids are all-powerful and I scream, “Enough! Time to restore our position of superiority! End this reign of public-transport terror! Rise up to sit down!”

Who’s with me? Nobody? You’re too scared? Fine, I’ll do it alone. I’m not scared of stupid little kids. Maybe tomorrow. Next week. Soon. I’ll get onto it soonish.

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