Comment by subpixel
2 years ago
Positive relationships with adults is shown to be means of counteracting adverse childhood experiences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/
I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
This is old news.
Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives.
What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
> What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my depression, which I've never really been able to do before despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that I see depression as a chronic condition I have (say perhaps analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as opposed to something that I am at my core, it makes it much, much less scary and threatening to me.
In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very, very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good enough there either.
Very true. Self-confidence and grit are immensely important in overcoming or even just rationalizing the obstacles of life, doing so in an almost logical way without letting a person's self-defeating emotions or perceived shortcomings get in the way. It's such a huge divider and it singularly is based on what kind of adult(s) that person had in their life when they were young.
This is 100% accurate.
In the wise words of the late child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell:
In order to develop – intellectually emotionally, socially and morally – a child requires participation in progressively more complex reciprocal activity on a regular basis over an extended period in the child's life, with one or more persons with whom the child develops a strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment and who is committed to the child's well-being and development, preferably for life. (Bronfenbrenner, 1991, p. 2)
Or paraphrased by him:
“Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”
> The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
My experience is it's the opposite and you need to overcome learned helplessness and understand that you can change your life.
Are there any good studies that could tell us which of us is correct?
Learned helplessness can also afflict adults, especially those who are not accustomed to dealing with computers. I get that quite a bit, and it's not just older people. Young people who have only used tablets, phones, and Chromebooks also are affected. YMMV
> What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed
Speculative. I rather think that it shows them that there are other ways of living and that they have agency to get there.
No. They can see that there are other ways of living by watching their peers or random people on the street.
But they need somebody to make them understand that it’s not them who are destroying the relationship with their surroundings and their chance for being happy but the other way around.
Some children in bad situations understand that without guidance but they are rare.
ding ding ding!
I call it "Bastard's Syndrome"
You can select a dropdown at the end for "Parenting style" which divides the groups by number of parents involved. This seems to be the strongest correlator of any of the data shown.
Parenting style is much more likely to not be causative though
Citation, please?
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Strong argument for helping more parents be more involved.
> I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change
Teachers and volunteers are how I was able to find a better life. What you're doing matters.
How do you volunteer at the local school? My wife and I are both passionate about and interested in improving children’s lives, but not super sure how best to do it outside of donations and big brother big sister-type programs.
As an aside, maybe it’s because I’m inexperienced, but I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.??? Is it just me? I am clearly very ignorant about all this
>I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.
I recently started volunteering at my county’s animal shelter. The experience has been very rewarding.
I would like to volunteer as well, but it would have to be outside of home and school since I live in Texas. I would like to help young people learn to cope with being LGBTQ+, ADD, and other things, but I don't think parents would appreciate it.
Yeah maybe you should reserve that stuff for your own kids. Which you probably don’t have.
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Where I live the superintendent and local groups formed a task-force style intervention and looped in local volunteers.
The scale of the problem is most visible through 'special ed' allocation. Once a program for kids with learning challenges, it now also encompasses what are essentially behavioral problems.
Kids don't get kicked out of school for throwing raging tantrums or hitting teachers - they get placed into programs designed to keep them in school. (If that's what life is like at school, imagine what life is like at home.)
Thank you for volunteering.
Less kids in households that don't want them. This is a pipeline problem. Intentional children only. Hard topic to cover online, nuance and emotions on the topic.
> I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.
Related, and equally hard to cover online:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”")
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It would also help if more people that are doing marginal work could receive a wage that they felt secure with. Money is one of the biggest stressors for couples and families.
I don't understand how to practically make this work.
There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary.
Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to participate in society and failing. That's truly heartbreaking.
At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage" and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of second-order effects/unintended consequences without actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.
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I do not disagree. But it will take years, if not decades, for labor rights and organizing to improve the situation you mention. Preventing unwanted children takes less time and effort, tragic as it is to type out.
You can change up the emotions on the topic pretty quickly if you change the framing to "intentional sex only" rather than "intentional children only," even though the former accomplishes the latter.
It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as soon as you suggest they should only have sex when all parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the risk of pregnancy, you're a killjoy.
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Are you suggesting that humanity will die out so long as only willing, intentional parents have children? That is an interesting thesis and conclusion to come to (total fertility rate = 0 vs somewhere between 0 and 2.1 [replacement rate]).
We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
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Even if it was the case, would it be a problem? What is more important, having less humans being happy or more humans having a crappy life. Why should specie survival be more important than overall happiness of those that would have lived?
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Presenting dire conclusions without providing a shred of substance?