It gets harder and harder to teach kids to respect their elders with the world full of media that teaches the exact opposite. We've gone from Leave it to Beaver and the Brady Bunch to the Simpsons and others I don't watch. There are many subtle places kids are taught/shown that adults don't know anything. We recently had to remove Calvin and Hobbes from our son's library as I linked his reading it to a rise in disrespect to his parents, and I have nothing against Calvin and Hobbes from a grown up perspective, it just wasn't suitable reading for my kid. There are even Disney and PBS shows that foster this same attitude. There is just no substitute for good involved parenting. It's a difficult environment to be raising respectful kids in, and mine are by no means perfect, but it's not impossible for kids to learn respect if the parents will put some effort into teaching it. They sure aren't going to learn it from their environment.