Comment by no-dr-onboard

The visualization is a good iteration on trying to get complex papers distilled into a digestible format. That was nice.

I'm not super sure how I feel about the message though as it operates on a handful of really big presumptions. I'll share my own bias to save everyone the tldr on where I'm coming from: I'm a parent advocate. I think the nuclear family is the backbone to society and that much, if not every, societal ill can be linked to the destruction of the nuclear family. Parents matter, and I agree with the general conclusion that we need to focus TREMENDOUS effort into raising children in a loving and safe way. If you are still reading, consider also that I'm a 3rd generation son of Mexican immigrants. I grew up in a lower economic class background in Los Angeles county during the 90s. I grew up shoulder to shoulder with many of the people included in this study.

The first is that it's somehow a bad thing not to go to college. The trades by now are a known lucrative path with significant upward mobility, especially as we consider entrepreneurship. This is, in my experience, hand in hand with a lot of cultural practices that just doesn't get captured in these types of sociological studies. I can personally attest to the increased risk tolerance that a lot of cultures have towards starting a business or joining a labor based trade. Food trucks, car washes, detailing services, maid services, laundromats, dry cleaning businesses, convenience market franchises. In the privacy of your own head, and without fear of judgement from your HN peers, I invite you to honestly consider the ethnicity of the people who own these businesses. See my point? The mobility is there. These aren't "bad" lives. They're different. These people also have different standards of living. Most people who are immigrants or 2nd to 3rd generation of those immigrants don't want a multi-hundred thousand dollar life. Just speaking from personal experience here, most lower class migrants see the prospect of making that much money in America as foreign and unsafe. Maybe this furthers the point that not everyone should or can be a doctor/lawyer/FAANG-engineer.

The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse experiences" is able to be categorized by the researcher's definition. Again, we're dealing with people of different cultures who have different standards for living. We're overlaying our own "refined" terminology of what constitutes "abuse" or "danger" to them and drawing conclusions. Worse yet, we're saying that those same conclusions are correlated to the conditions that they experienced, regardless of how they themselves would classify it.

"High risk" is a highly contestable term, especially as the diversity of subjects increases. Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around. Maybe mom was sleeping around and dad found out? Maybe mom remarried because dad died. Either way, non-intact households are being labelled "high risk" in a general sense.

"Being held back" as a bad thing is contestable. Some kids fall in that weird Nov-December enrollment period and make it through by being the oldest kid in their class. This isn't typically a good thing. The threat of being held back a grade is also encouraging for those who take their schooling seriously. Should it ever happen, its a serious kick in the pants for kids to wake up and take this seriously.

"Suspension", again any type of school based discipline, is seen as a adverse event. Suspension protects the children of the school, it notifies the parents of the suspended that there is a __real__ problem with your child, and provides a significant deterrent from bad behavior. It's wild to me that anyone would think of suspension as a noteworthy heuristic for adverse experiences.

Thanks to anyone who made it this far, even those that will disagree.