"Parents are fearful about how they chastise their children," Clasford Stirling, a veteran youth worker, who runs the football club at Broadwater Farm community centre in Tottenham, said. "There's been an erosion of authority for a long time. Parents move very gingerly not to upset their own kids – that's the reality."

Broadwater Farm estate is again at the centre of the unrest in London. Mark Duggan, whose death last week sparked London's riots, was brought up here, and sent one of his sons to Stirling's football classes. On Wednesday, Stirling was making arrangements for his wake.

Struggling to make sense of the violence that has turned buildings on Tottenham High Road into smouldering piles of rubble, Stirling wondered whether weakened parental authority might have something to do with it.

A chorus of establishment voices responded to pictures of school-age children looting late at night by reaching to blame the parents. MPs were urging them to make sure they knew where their children were, David Cameron was talking again about a broken Britain, and London's mayor said adults and teachers needed to be given back the right to impose authority.

Stirling's analysis is more nuanced – citing poverty, unemployment, failings of the education system, police harassment, among other triggers – but he believes parents have become afraid to discipline their own children, and warns this is at least part of the problem that has erupted across cities this week.

"Bad behaviour and criminality has been glamorised on the streets. Teachers are scared to punish children. The modern child isn't frightened of their parents. They don't care if the police lock them up," he said.

Hovering between sympathy for the youths' sense of alienation and anger at their stupidity, he said the continued police stop-and-search tactics damaged children early on. "There is a big problem with stop and search. These searches leave a scar, a mark on that child. I condemn the violence, but we have to look at the frustration that everyone is going through. They don't have a platform, so they let off their frustration on the streets," he said.

Highly respected for his work with young people on one of London's most troubled estates, Stirling, who was given an MBE in 2007, has a sharp sense of the unease which has been simmering. This hostility towards the police, combined with an absence of parental discipline made for an explosive combination, he said.

"I've been doing this for 32 years, and I am worried. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't," he said. "Parents are losing their jobs; that overspills into the family – they can't buy them this or that." For their children "there is a reality to poverty. There are no jobs, they have nothing. What have they got to lose? Some didn't even bother covering their faces. They're not trying to rob the banks, they're going to Currys, they're stealing trainers, they're that poor that they're risking going to jail for a flatscreen television.

"Why aren't the parents calling up their children and saying, 'Come back here at once'? They can't. Those days are gone, that authority has gone. A lot of parents are not able to stop their child from going out. Young people have had enough. Look at how brazen they have become, going right up to police."

Dropping her six-year-old son off for football class, Chris (who did not want to give her surname) said she felt under pressure not to discipline her children. "Responsibility has been taken away from parents. People here will call social services if they hear you disciplining your children. Children hear about Childline at school. It's all very well trying to be liberal, but parents need to be given back their right to parent," she said.

This is a refrain David Lammy, Tottenham's Labour MP, hears frequently from constituents. He set up an all-party group on fatherhood earlier this year, because he was worried the subject was not getting enough attention.

He is careful to point out that every community has a few hundred troubled young people, who are unrepresentative of the rest of society, and to qualify any discussion of parenting in the context of riots, by stressing: "I'm not suggesting that it's OK to loot, rob, steal or burn down people's homes, but these are issues we need to address.

"In areas like mine, we know that 59% of black Caribbean children are looked after by a lone parent. There is none of the basic starting presumption of two adults who want to start a family, raise children together, love them, nourish them and lead them to full independence. The parents are not married and the child has come, frankly, out of casual sex; the father isn't present, and isn't expected to be. There aren't the networks of extended families to make up for it. We are seeing huge consequences of the lack of male role models in young men's lives," he said. "There are virtually no male teachers in primary schools."

Driving down the Tottenham street where his mother brought up four children as a single parent, he said he was lucky to have had the positive male role models of an older brother, of uncles and teachers.

"There are no role models for young Somali boys, young Turkish boys, young men from Portugal. This isn't America, they are not going to emerge any time quickly. This makes the role of the fathers, the uncles hugely important," he said.

"How do you find your masculinity in the absence of role models? Through hip-hop, through gang culture, through peer groups. It is hugely problematic. Teenagers are in school until 3.30, and then MTV, Facebook, the internet, kicks in with a set of values that comes with it. It is not clear to me that parents are equipped to deal with that. There's an inability to delay gratification, alcohol, sex, drugs – this is presenting real challenges, and as always it hurts the poorest hardest. Why? Because if you have money you can bring in other things – ballet, football classes."

Lammy knows the subject of weak parenting is so politically explosive that he was momentarily reluctant to discuss it at such a tense juncture.

The Conservative narrative of a broken Britain, championed by Cameron and the work and pensions minister, Iain Duncan Smith, which identifies poor parenting skills as the root of most social problems, had been broadly rejected by the left, he said. "The right have a lot to say about parenting, but no one on the left wants to talk about this. A void has emerged around it. It's a profound problem."

He laments the closure of a number of local youth clubs as a result of funding cuts. "These were some of the people who could talk to these young people, and they've lost their jobs."

Last year, he proposed the introduction of the national civic service, to help instil an ethic of service in young people, but the proposal got little traction. He would like government parenting programmes to move beyond focusing on the first few years of a child's life. "I've opened so many adventure playgrounds for under fives, but what about the teenagers? Sure Start is fine, but you need it to continue until the age of 18."

As well as maternity leave, he thinks parents of teenagers should be allowed to take chunks of time off to look after their children at difficult moments in their development. "We need to move away from a narrative that is just about the early years."

Across London in Kilburn, Jane (who asked for her own name and her son's to be changed) said being a mother to teenage sons in central London had been a "horrendous" experience. Her 18-year-old son, Luke, was arrested on Sunday night, with a group of seven other boys aged between 14 and 19, on an estate in Kilburn, erecting a barricade to stop police cars entering the estate. Some of the other boys in the group threw stones at a police car, scratching the paintwork. They spent 22 hours in police cells, and Jane heard nothing about where he was, until he was released without charge on Monday night.

"I try to talk to him about right and wrong. So many kids have no fear of authority any more. They go into school and they call their teacher by their first name, there's no discipline in schools. No one is getting a proper education and then they leave school and can't work because there are no jobs," she said.

Neither Luke, who has trained as an electrician, nor his elder brother, 20, can find work. "It makes me depressed and angry," Jane said. "I've always made sure they go to college to get decent qualifications, and it's just pointless. The longer they have no work, the longer they get used to lying about and not doing anything, then the less they want to work. If he was going to work, he'd be coming home at 6 or 7 and he'd be too tired to be hanging around on the street at night."

Sitting with his mother on the sofa, under instructions not to go back to the estate that evening, Luke agreed. "You can't find work, so you stay on the streets. If I'd had a job I wouldn't have been out late on Sunday night."

Luke has his own clear, if idiosyncratic, moral code. While he supports protesting against the police, he disapproves of the stealing. "When they're throwing stuff at the police, I can understand that, but when they're smashing up cabs or burning down shops, that's not funny. They're taking it too far – setting people's houses on fire," he said.

"People are saying it is connected to the man who got shot; it has nothing to do with that. This is just to do with trying to steal stuff. The reason they are looting is because they can. Who's going to stop 20 people from smashing into a shop when you've only got five police officers there? They know they can get away with it, because people are calling this rioting not stealing," he said, watching rolling news channels broadcast pictures of burning shops. "They should be rioting against the police. What's stealing shoes from JD got to do with protesting against the police?"

His hatred of the police comes from having been stopped and searched on an almost daily basis since he was 14, he says. His mother worries about the presence of gangs on the estates near their homes, the Ladbroke Grove gang, the Mozart gang, and she worries about the constant harassment of her son by the police, and knows there is little she can do to protect him.

"I wouldn't dream of letting him carry a knife, but then you think, he's out there unarmed. It's frightening to think about it. My worst worry is that he might be stabbed or shot, or that he might go to prison. Summer is always worse. There are long days, lots of boredom. I'm not terribly surprised this has happened. It's horrible. I can't sleep until I know where he is."

In the areas of London affected by the riots, the theme of modern parenting comes up a lot.

"If you have a child, you are responsible for that child," said Harry Cumberbatch, 62, from South Norwood, talking outside burnt out shops in Croydon. "What's going on here today? Children are making children. They are not old enough and haven't got the education to raise those children. So the children become just like them. They wind up with no education, no future. If the parents aren't there to give discipline that child will run like a wild fox until the day he dies."

Cumberbatch, who said he took part in the 1981 Brixton riots in protest at the police, had little sympathy for this week's looters. "They can't get up in the morning, they are lying in bed with two mobile phones in their hands – who would give them a job? These people were born and bred in this country. They were given all the opportunities. They should've taken all the opportunities, all the advantages. They couldn't be bothered. This is the price that we all pay now," he said.

In Tottenham, Marie, a volunteer community worker, and mother of a teenage boy, who did not want to give her full name, said she was at pains to make sure her son was in after school classes and weekend drama school, so that he had no time to get into trouble.

"Idle minds, idle thoughts," she said. She was surprised at the unchecked greed of the looters. "My mum used to say 'The patient man rides a donkey'. Until he can get a horse. She meant, you can't just get what you want when you want it, you have to be patient. I try to make him understand right and wrong. It's hard up and down the country to bring up a teenage boy, but here in Tottenham, I worry about him being stopped and searched by the police."

Yanna McIntosh, a volunteer youth worker with children and young people aged between 11 and 24, said as a parent she also worried most about effect of stop and searches on young boys. "You've got people here who have been turned into criminals by the stop-and-search policies. They are rude and intimidating and bullying. I have first-hand experience of that. That's what begins the violence," she said. She recoiled at any government criticism of parenting, pointing out that new policies forcing single mothers to start looking for work when their child turned five, were making life very difficult.

As they watched the ruins of the Carpetright building, where they owned a top-floor flat, being knocked down by bulldozers, Andreas Muller and Alex McCombie were also searching for what might have triggered the eruption of violence. McCombie said she felt most depressed by the people who attacked their home. Why did it happen?

"I don't know. Poverty in London; because of the housing estates and how they put all people from poor backgrounds in one area; because of the drugs; because of the gangs; because kids grow up without role models, without proper parents," she said. "There are massive social issues in London. I don't know how it is ever going to get better. You've got all these young people doing this, a whole generation. I think they have no morals. They have been brought up badly by parents; they're not part of society."

Further along the road, Steve Moore was watching cranes demolish the shell of his jewellery business, Paradise Gems, which he has run on Tottenham High Road for 32 years. "There's no discipline in the schools; they're not frightened of the teachers. Outside, they grow up seeing so many fantastic things around them. They want all that.

"People with not much money seeing people with loads of money, spending it like water … they are going to get envious. Things were a lot simpler when I was young, when there wasn't so much of everything," he said, sitting on a low brick wall at the back of the devastated building, breathing in air, heavy with the smell of singed brick dust. Somewhere under the rubble are 12 safes, that may or may not still contain salvageable bits of jewellery.

His shop was also a pawnbroker, so he saw how people were stretched financially, and knew that the cuts to local services were affecting his customers. "It's all about money. The politicians, the bankers have helped themselves and everyone else is getting richer, and the kids here get nothing. We have let them down really," he said.

Additional reporting by Patrick Barkham