AS THE latest litany of off-field misdemeanours committed by sports stars is exposed, spare a thought for the adolescent boys whose values they are corrupting. These youngsters are so slavishly devoted to the poster boys of the game that their moral compass is hopelessly skewed when the likes of Sonny Bill Williams urinates in public. These are developing, impressionable minds, after all.

Well, at least that's what's implied by the currency given to being a "role model". Williams and his teammate at the Bulldogs, Willie Mason, parrot that responsibility like it's some kind of corporate mantra.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a role model as "a person looked to by others as an example to be imitated". Are we to believe that teenage boys and young men simply ape the reported after-hours antics of their on-field heroes? That if Williams takes an ill-advised leak in the shadows, boys at large will soon be splashing their boots in the streets? Perhaps we should give them a little more credit.

Social commentator Celia Lashlie says adolescent boys do not equate sporting success with decency as a man. "Time and again I asked the students who their role models were and who influenced their view of what makes a good man, and almost always they replied in a way that separated the men in their immediate circle from the so-called role models in the public arena," she writes in He'll be OK: Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men.

In interviewing hundreds of teenage boys in New Zealand, she found they were easily able to distinguish between the men they wanted to be like - those with whom they had a direct, sustained relationship - and those who boasted all the accoutrements of success: money, glamour, women.

When a member of the Black Caps cricket team was involved in a drunken brawl outside a Durban nightclub, she wrote that she felt offended on the students' behalf. "I thought, and many other adults, too, that the boys would assess the player's behaviour and decide if he could do it, so could they. For the boys I was talking to, nothing could have been further from the truth."

Yes, Williams is a role model. A role model of how to play good rugby league. A role model of how to earn very good money through his athletic prowess. But there it ends.

A far more compelling issue that emerges from this infatuation with role models is the perceived need to idealise inaccessible sports stars.

In referring to youth who are susceptible to depression and substance-abuse, adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg describes a phenomenon of guilt-ridden time-poor parents who are much more likely to indulge their children: "Therefore, a lot of these kids are incapable of delayed gratification when they grow up."

The current generation of youth are the most tribal ever, Carr-Gregg says. In other words, they follow the example of their peers more than previous generations. "It's a fact that we've got a decline in social capital … the whole it-takes-a-village-to-raise-a-child mentality is dying in the arse," he says. "And a lot of these kids are growing up without access to grandparents or mentors of any kind, and as a result I don't think they have that accumulated wisdom, they don't have tradition, they don't have ritual."

Do we really expect football players, for example - many of whom are barely out of adolescence themselves, and who live in the gilded cage of media worship - to fill that vacuum?

When Chris Judd wrote on the West Coast Eagles website last year that he did not want to be a role model, it attracted predictable censure. But he later clarified his opinion. "If I were a parent, I would want my children to have as their role models someone they actually know," he said. "If people think that because someone is on TV, that makes them a better person than somebody else, then that is misguided." Common sense, really.

Footballers have a responsibility to their employers to project a positive image. They have a responsibility to themselves not to act like - frankly - dickheads. But if we believe footballers have a responsibility to be custodians of our youths' values and exemplars of social conduct, we have a serious cultural problem.