I SUCCUMB instantly to cynicism when politicians start referring to family values, because it usually indicates some governmental wringing of hands and a refusal to take much-needed measures to control the growing minority who agree with Mrs Thatchers famous and shocking assertion that "there is no such thing as society".

Theories abound as to why a significant number of people, from all sections of society, feel so detached from the rest of us that they are unwilling to conform to minimum standards of decent behaviour, let alone stretch a hand out, or smile at another human being. But there is one thing that it certainly isn't. It is not a simple issue of the haves and have-nots. All of us who are over 40 (oh all right 50) can remember a time when doors really did not need to be locked, when people who had little of what today would be regarded as the necessities of life, were nonetheless fiercely proud of their decency, their honesty and their dignity.

It is the very family values themselves that are changing. My bugbear is the parent who remonstrates with a badly behaved child but fails to follow up when the child persists with its unacceptable behaviour. What on earth is the point of telling a child not to do something and then tacitly condoning the unacceptable behaviour by failing to deal with subsequent disobedience?

And what about those parents who smile benignly when their uncontrolled and noisy toddlers amble around destroying an environment in which other people and their well-behaved children are trying to enjoy themselves in less selfish ways?

We visited some friends a while ago. They have two sons who are privately educated, have most things that young pre-teenagers might hope to have and then some. Despite repeated exhortations from their very pleasant, well meaning but ultimately ineffectual mother, they continued to do exactly what they wanted to do, which included forcing my daughters to watch them driving around on their garden tractors, crawling under the table during lunch and going off to play on their computers whenever they felt like it. My girls were perplexed and amused in the same way that we are entertained when the chimpanzees in the zoo jam their food dishes on each others heads.

They agreed that they had no desire to be seen as quite so uncaring for others themselves.

The same family visited us some months later. The boys climbed out of a bedroom window on to our conservatory roof, necessitating the replacement of several sheets of corrugated plastic.

Their mother threw her hands in the air in a gesture of world-weary helplessness, as if to indicate that she could not possibly be expected to rein in these interesting free spirits to which she had given birth.

They have not been invited back.

But their unruliness is no less worrying than that of the roaming gangs of youths, from somewhat different backgrounds, who shout obscenities at one another in the street without caring about the sensibilities of those around, who push past you in doorways, who leave their drink cans in your garden and chuck their fast food containers out of the windows of cars.

They have never seen discipline in action and have no concept of how it might improve their lives. All they have learnt is that they can do what they like. Small wonder that they persist in living down to our expectations.