US Youth Have Serious Mental Health Issues 818
Ant writes "Google News carries a Canadian Press report that 'a new study has found that five times as many high school and college students in the United States are dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues than youth of the same age who were studied in the Great Depression era. ... Pulling together the data for the study was no small task. Led by [San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge], researchers at five universities analyzed the responses of 77,576 high school or college students who, from 1938 through 2007, took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI. The results will be published in a future issue of the Clinical Psychology Review. Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938. A few individual categories increased at an even greater rate — with six times as many scoring high in two areas: 'hypomania,' a measure of anxiety and unrealistic optimism (from 5 per cent of students in 1938 to 31 per cent in 2007), and depression (from 1 per cent to 6 per cent).'"
In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop being a bunch of wussies!
Seriously, kids today have to wear helmets just to ride a bike, have some pediatrician putting them on powerful Autism medication if they don't start talking at just the right time, are diagnosed with Asperger's the second they show the least bit of shyness, are taught by teachers who scream "AHDHD--Drug him up!" the first time they act out in class, and come home to parents who think that a child molester is hanging out on ever street corner just waiting to kidnap their kid. *They're* not the ones who are screwed up, it's the adults around them that are screwed up.
JUST LET THEM BE KIDS, for Christ sake! Stop acting like there is something wrong with them because they're not perfect, or act differently than you expect, or make stupid mistakes. That's what makes them kids. Stop cocooning them like they're delicate eggs who will crack at the slightest risk or challenge. And, above all, stop drugging them up. A kid shouldn't be taking medication for anything less than a serious physical problem. You don't give a kid powerful psychotropic drugs just because they're rebellious or shy. They'll have plenty of time to dope themselves into a stupor and cry at a psychologist's office when they're adults.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what I said when the doctor said my boy had cancer! Stop coddling him, or he's going to grow up soft and spoiled. What if he were grown up and had cancer? He's going to have a family to feed, and trust me, they need to eat. They won't take an excuse like "I've got cancer and that's why I can't work" when they need their dinner on the table and a roof over their head.
Kids seriously need to man up these days.
Alrighty, enough sarcasm. Why is it that there's always at least one guy in every crowd without any empathy, but with plenty of (wrong) answers?
Things were harder back then (Score:5, Insightful)
With myself (sample size of one) I find that I have a near constant level of neurosis (which does thankfully decline overall as I get older). When things are going badly in some area, I can direct my dwelling towards real anxieties that actually exist. Dealing with relationship, earning a buck, dealing with family etc. When everything is going well I find some new unrealistic area to direct those anxieties.
I suspect in the good old days, people were too busy trying to feed themselves to worry about needless shit. In this age of relative abundance and leisure time, we have much more time to devote to our neurotic navel gazing. And our self survey results reflect that.
"Unrealistic Optimism" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:0, Insightful)
dunno, but at least he's modded into obscurity.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA backs up parent.... (Score:3, Insightful)
FTFA:
Experts say such high expectations are a recipe for disappointment. Meanwhile, they also note some well-meaning but overprotective parents have left their children with few real-world coping skills, whether that means doing their own budget or confronting professors on their own.
So by bringing up our kids like wusses, we're creating wusses. That's not to say we need to go back to beating them "spare the rod spoil the child" BS, but giving them healthy limits and letting them screw up and pay the consequences.
That's were modern parents fail: they're either too strict and pushy or they're overly permissive and rescue the kid whenever they screw-up - even if it means getting them out of jail.
The above, of course, is in general. There are some wonderful parents out there.
American youth have it easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
American youth today have it very easy.
When I grew up in Hungary in the 1950s, life was somewhat difficult. My family was lucky, as my father was a supervisor at a washing machine factory, and my mother was lucky to have a job as a seamstress. We at least had food, and did not go hungry like so many of our neighbors!
We had one neighbor, Piotr, who had several children. One of them died just after birth, and another drowned. His three remaining children grew to be adults. But when they were young, old Piotr did not have enough food to feed his entire family! He would provide the best nourishment to his children and wife, while during tough times he would eat grass, paper and sawdust.
But let me tell you, what the children ate was not so good compared to today's food! The bread, it was almost always stale. So it was used in horrid stews of left over meat and dirty water. On rare occasion there was chocolate (maybe once or twice a year). There were no Coca Colas! There were no potato chips! There were no McDonalds or Burger Kings!
When you have not any food, then social pressures become quite irrelevant. Success becomes defined by the meager foodstuffs in your pantry, not by the newness of your cellular telephone or the shine of your gold ganger jewelery or the brand name shirt with a stupid logo on it.
Greater Knowledge (Score:2, Insightful)
This reminds me of some comments I've seen old people make. That things were better in the '50s because people didn't have "these problems" with mental health, minorities and whatnot. And how they act as if homosexuality was something invented in the '80s or '90s to shock and offend them. Forgetting or course that many of the mental health problems existed but were classified as demonic possession or something stupid, and people were generally less likely to seek assistance because of both societal disapproval, and lack of knowledge on their part. Also, obviously, so called "problems" like homosexuality have existed forever, it's only in recent decades that society has become tolerant enough that some people are no longer hiding it.
I didn't read the article and am in no way commenting on it. The writeup and headline just reminded me of my grandmother's husband.
Re:Too much input (Score:4, Insightful)
People are suffering from information and media overload...no down time for the brain. The whole GIGO business.
Suffering? Suffering? I'm enjoying it!
But seriously, I think humanity is going to have to find a new way to live. All our new technologies change the rules that our bodies and minds are adapted for. Either that or these technologies can't be sustained. We are fast approaching either total environmental burn-out or a new era of abundance... perhaps both at the same time. We are drowning in information, pollution, and choice. Most of human history has been a battle against starvation followed by a battle against ignorance followed by a battle for individual liberty.
It was easier to eliminate information scarcity. Water, food, power supply will be harder to fix. Abundance of each of these unleashes new problems. Abundance does not equate with quality.
Information Anxiety is the new ADD. (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the year 2000 (er, 2010) and meet your new friend Information Anxiety. I'm 30 years old and I feel it. I constantly feel like I need to keep up with news, this and that, hobbies and interests that are fueled by easy access to information on the internet, social networking, friends, internet friends, real life friends that I only really see on the internet these days. Now compound all of that into a teenager's mind along with high school pressures, school work, trying to find themselves, hormones and being awkward, the opposite sex (or even harder yet, maybe the same sex), etc.
100 years ago, our main concerns were food, shelter, and family. These are second thoughts for many these days. I recently quit social networking for half a year and it was one of the best things I've ever done for myself.
How does this make you FEEL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see; when you give kids a trophy for just showing up to the game, and high school kids make 'A' grades for minimal effort... kids today are conditioned to believe that life is easy, and they are 'super-duper'. This is the post accomplishment era we live in. Their actual test scores are among the lowest of civilized nations, yet their confidence levels are among the highest. What does this tell us? They don't know anything but they FEEL really good about it. This is what we get when the school system focuses on the importance of feeling rather than the importance of achieving. When kids discover that the real world doesn't care how you FEEL, it is rather anxiety inducing. The employer stance has necessarily become one of: I DON'T CARE how you feel, can you do the job or not?" Pay is based upon accomplishment and achievement, not on feelings.
Re:Children haven't changed much in Thirty Years! (Score:5, Insightful)
Kids these days (hell, my 17 year old cousin is like this) are told that EVERYONE is a winner and a unique and beautiful snowflake, that everyone can be whatever they want to be, and that we all can have whatever we want. These kids have no exposure to failure...and have a meltdown when they meet it for the first time.
My wife and I have had this discussion (and its gone interesting since she is Swedish and was not raised around corporal punishment - while I got whippings if I deserved it) and we are going to raise our kids to not bullshit them about the reality of life. That there is always going to be someone better at them at something - but that its ok. Life goes on and there is no reason to freak if you get a B- when you did your best, get picked last at kick ball because you dont run as fast as some of the other kids, or the girl/boy of you have been having wet dreams about is not interested in you.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe it's just diagnosed more (Score:5, Insightful)
When poorer kids in the 1930's started having problems in school, they were labeled as "stupid" or "lazy", given D's and F's, and that was it. Now, a school counselor is brought in and a much more specific and medically accurate label for their problem and recommend a treatment for them.
For wealthier kids, it seems to be partially a way of ensuring that their kid does well in school and other activities. A lot of these parents are going to start thinking something is medically wrong if the kid's grades start slipping into the B-/C range, and will find a counselor who will tell them just that and create a treatment. A diagnosed mental illness can turn a C student into a B+/A student due to extra time on exams, special help on projects, and so forth, as well as drugs that improve concentration (among other things).
The upside of this pattern is that more kids who do have real mental illnesses are getting treated properly and are able to handle their schoolwork better, rather than being simply dismissed as bad students. The downside is that you now have a large population of kids (and adults for that matter) who are wandering around drugged and a much narrower understanding of what behavior is "normal" enough to be *not* indicative of a mental illness.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe you should have read his post a little closer. Personally I'd consider Cancer a Major Physical condition and I agree with the OP that kids are way over medicated. Beyond that "kids today" are way to well informed, constantly being bombarded with school shootings, people being blown up and all the craziness in the world. IMHO the OP is also correct that too many parents are over protective and won't allow their children to have the opportunity to make mistakes that could lead to physical harm, which teaches them valuable lessons about life and acceptable social behaviors. I remember being seriously hurt falling out of a tree when I was young, I learned a valuable lesson pain hurts and it, along with things that cause it, should be avoided.
I also have several friends who have kids where each kid is diagnosed with some kind of mental disability or disorder. The one that makes me laugh the most is a little girl that's "shy" and was diagnosed as Autistic. She was on medication for it and after two years a psychiatrist told her parents the medication was effective and there daughter was becoming much more "normal" in her development later her parents found out that out she had been spitting the pills out, throwing them away and hiding them in a compartment of her jewelry box.
yes, sir... (Score:5, Insightful)
The title should have read:
US Adults Have Serious Mental Health Issues and Poor Parenting Skills
Every generation thinks the kids are nuts (Score:3, Insightful)
previous generations (Score:4, Insightful)
dealt with things like world war i, world war ii, the bubonic plague, the american revolution... etc.
all with less media resources, lower quality nutrition (we don't have lower quality nutrition these days, we have TOO MUCH nutrition), a worse set of ideologies, lower socioeconomic status, etc.
whatever stresses today's youth are going through, its fucking easy in comparison stresses previous generations have faced
get over it, grow the fuck up. sorry you're daily video game hours or facebook/ twitter diddling hours has been reduced. i think you'll find the ability to deal somewhere deep in your rich bounty of character. pffffffft
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:2, Insightful)
The teachers wanted to drug me up. My mom took me to see a shrink to get an opinion that actually matters the dr said I was board in class.
I had a substitute teacher once say "when I was your age we didn't have Ritalin, we had a switch and the switch worked a whole lot better."
Yes ADHD does exist, but chances are the acting out kid doesn't actually have ADHD.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, the obligatory, "I see things in black and white AC". They're popular in Slashdot.
I don't think the OP was saying ADHD doesn't exist. He was referring to the massive amount of misdiagnosed children on medication in this world. I'm my experience, most children on ADHD medication don't need the medication, they are acting out for other reasons that the parent don't want to deal with.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:1, Insightful)
He didn't say that it didn't exist, he suggested that it was over-diagnosed by under-qualified individuals.
ADHD is very real, and can be very debilitating.
It's also commonly misdiagnosed in children who are simply harder to control or focus than the adults around them would prefer.
Re:Too much input (Score:5, Insightful)
Now of course like most people, once my cable and internet showed up, my tv was always on, I was checking my email and working in the evenings. Long story short, I think the mind really does need some time to relax.
Re:previous generations (Score:4, Insightful)
I have wondered if less "real" problems (such as not having to struggle to sustain your existence) manifests itself in more depression, anxiety, etc.
When you are busy just surviving you have less time to dwell on your problems.
Just a theory. Not that mental issues didn't exist in the past.
I know from my own experience and of some close to me, when you are sitting around thinking and are prone to these issues that's not a good thing.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:1, Insightful)
Seriously, kids today have to wear helmets just to ride a bike,
Ignoring the rest of your comment, which may have some elements of truth, but is primarily over the top in my view, I found this bugged me specifically.
My mother, when she was around 10 years old or so, had a friend that died after crashing his bike, and hitting his head on a pole. An injury which would most likely would not have been fatal had he been wearing a helmet. This would have been in the '70s, so I have no clue how common bike helmets were then, but the point still remains.
Do you honestly think the extremely minor inconvenience of wearing a helmet outweighs the significantly reduced chance of serious injury, brain damage and death?
I agree in part to some aspects of some of your other points, (I overall disagree with the tone, but don't really have enough knowledge of the subjects to write anything) but that one about the bike helmet just outright seemed silly.
Re:unrealistic optimism (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think so, to me the "unrealistic optimism" speaks more to the sense of "entitlement" that people seem to have these days. Which is in contrast to what the "American Dream" was to me "Yes anything is possible but there will be a lot of work"
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:5, Insightful)
ADHD is aneurodevelopmental disorder.
Yes it is. It is also very rare and extremely overdiagnosed. As is the case with Aspergers and clinical depression, this trivializes the condition and ultimately hurts those who do have a real problem.
You get what you pay for. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd agree, although the excessive narcissism is probably the more significant root cause.
Since the 1960s (Surprised? No.) the emphasis on social promotion, 'feeling good about yourself', rewards for non-achievement, and a slippery sort of moral relativism all have combined to leave our children emotionally retarded, and frankly incapable of dealing with reality.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and evolution is fucking painful. Deadly, in fact. Remove the pain from growing up, and you end up with emotionally undeveloped people, with no ability to cope with hardship, no capacity to comprehend the shitty things life is going to inevitably hand them, and (seemingly) very little resilience to survive.
Go back and read Generation X. His book describes the glimmerings of the future. I'm 42 - a real GenX'er (turned 13 in 1980, graduated from college in 1990), and I see the beginnings of it in myself and my demographic. Lack of ambition, ennui, a juvenile inability to focus, as well as a difficulty being happy with much of anything. I'd attribute it in myself to a lack of hardship and challenge, and believe me it's a bastard to cope with on a day to day basis.
And yes, I'm aware that I'm essentially yelling "Get off my lawn!" but when I look at teens today, it's terrifying how basically ignorant they are, and how amazingly short their attention spans are. They have a facility with electronics that amazes me, and I thought myself a fairly gadget-oriented guy. I regard them as "ignorant" because they don't know basic facts of geography, history, or culture - but then if one is permanently connected (as this twittering generation pretty much assumes) does one really need to store facts in their wetware? I think its necessary to have a basis of knowledge to understand the things going on around us, and to be usefully participatory adults, but then I'm old, I guess.
Oh, by the way, ROCK THE VOTE!! Ha ha ha /cry. And we thought we're screwed already....
Re:American youth have it easy. (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet those horrid stews were probably more nutritious than the food substitute served at Burger King.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:4, Insightful)
A kid shouldn't be taking medication for anything less than a serious physical problem.
Profane MuthaFucka:
That's what I said when the doctor said my boy had cancer!
Sounds like a serious physical problem.
Re:Children haven't changed much in Thirty Years! (Score:5, Insightful)
Life goes on and there is no reason to freak if you get a B- when you did your best
You know who whines about their best.
In all seriousness though, it's very easy to make the statement "This is how we will raise our kids" and point fingers at parents who have even the slightest difficulty raising their children. I think that is unfair. If there was some magic formula that you could follow and end up with perfect children and no problems, we would have figured it out millenia ago. Reality is never so simple that you can say with any confidence that you will raise your children the 'correct' way, as there are so many things that can cause things to go off the rails.
Even if I had 100% of my time to devote to my children, there is no guarantee that they will turn out the way we expect them to, and while bad parenting may be the root cause for a lot of issues that we see in children, it isn't some blame catch-all for every problem we see.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, the world is much smaller than it used to be. Eighty years ago, you'd have found kids largely unaffected (at least knowledgeably) by corrupt politicians, overbearing advertising, and media scares. Nowadays, with the fear that gets put into kids, it's sort of a wonder they aren't filled with more disorders. "Hey kids, SARS is going to KILL you, and if it doesn't, then Avian flu/mad cow/swine flu/zombie flu will! Better come get our vaccine." "We're going to sell you sex, but then 30 seconds later, you'll see a PSA talking about how if you hold hands with a member of the opposite sex, you'll get AIDS and die. Buy Trojan Condoms!" "This stuff must be making you pretty stressed huh? Stay away from drugs, they'll kill you the first time you use them, 100% guaranteed." The kids aren't even presented with the opportunity to be kids and enjoy being oblivious and immersed in their imaginations where they belong due to the fact that they have to be taught at a young age to treat everything with skepticism based on the fact that absolutely everything and everyone is looking to milk money from them. The youth is the cash cow of the media and industry, and with the ubiquity of tv, radio, and in-store advertising, it's impossible to shield them from it. You can always turn your kid into a shut-in, but that causes just as many issues in other ways. I remember growing up and meeting kids like that who were "released into the wild" at the high school age, and they had the social skills of a pile of bricks. Of course, I also remember riding a bike without a helmet, being a kid, and also later sex, occasional drugs, alcohol, and good times.
Re:The Criticisms as Outlined in the Article (Score:5, Insightful)
In a psychology class I took in college, the instructor said "there isn't a psychologist alive that doesn't have another psychologist calling him a gold plated liar."
I suspect many if not most psycologists study psychology to find an answer to their own mental health problems.
Hypomania and mania are not "happy" (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people here seem to be of the opinion that mental illness is something that is simply being overdiagnosed; people can "get over it," that medications are evil, and that kids should be kids. Obviously, these people have never been mentally ill.
Sure, it is true that today's kids' lives are nothing like the brutal, short, backbreaking existences that were lived by our predecessors, who in 1850 worked over 60 hours a week and barely managed to stay alive for 30 or 40 years. On the other hand, if you've ever had a manic or hypomanic episode, you will know that mania is not a positive state of mind. Mania is one of the worst possible states of existing, only barely better than death and far worse than depression. Imagine not being able to keep a thought in your head for more than 1 second at a time. Imagine how, one day you can go from being considered for a promotion at your office to being fired a month later because you can no longer comprehend programming concepts or remember what was going on a few minutes ago. Imagine it becoming impossible to function with people because you have lost the ability to determine what is the appropriate thing to say in social situations, and so as a result you say nothing.
Most importantly of all, imagine that nobody believes that anything is wrong, that doctor after doctor can't come up with any diagnosis for years, and when you try to get help for yourself people hang up on you because you can't follow the conversation to understand what's being talked about. Imagine that sometimes you are so unable to think that you have trouble determining whether someone is speaking to you or not. Imagine that the rest of the world just keeps going on while you see no reason to keep living through such hell if nobody can figure out what's wrong with you. So you just sit in front of the TV night after night while the images go by too fast to process. Mania is perhaps the most depressing thing that one can experience. This explanation of mania being a sense of extreme well-being is wrong and needs to be better communicated in the mainstream sources, who tend to simplify these diseases as some kind of "excess happiness." There is no happiness in mania.
Of course there is an increase in the incidence of these diseases among people living today. In the past, why would someone want to continue living if their new life was as a stupid and uncontrollable shell of their former selves? The only solution back then was suicide. While suicide is not a good choice today because there are many treatments available, it may be shocking to hear that death certainly would be better than living like that with no hope for a cure. Is it so far-fetched to say that the diseases were less widespread because people culled themselves?
Stating that kids should go off drugs because of the "evil pharmaceutical companies" is naive. The scientific literature does not adequately describe these diseases, and probably never could. Everyone has felt pain, so it's easy to describe the treatment for a headache. But while there are some very smart people here, those who are not ill are simply not able to comprehend what mental illness really is, and should not be offering comments about whether suffers should undergo treatment.
Re:American youth have it easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why findings like this are so interesting. Maybe having it easy and being happy aren't synonymous after all?
Re:American youth have it easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right, social pressure means nothing when you are barely surviving.
I had it a "little easier" growing up in the America in the 80s, at least in terms of food. My father would hunt anything in season, and poach anything out of season so we had meat. My family would go out in the fields after the combine harvesters and gather the vegetables that were missed. My family would buy cheap hogs feed at the farm store and mill it for bread. We had food, even if it was green beans for breakfast, green beans and bread for lunch, green beans and antelope for dinner for six months strait. And that was the good part. After my parents divorced (my father was a brutal, violent sociopath) I got to live on "welfare" while my mother struggled to get an education. I was served inedible food at school, red grease on a slice of bread and a scoop of grey spoiled vegetables. The foodstamp budget had to be split 5 ways, so I got at most one decent meal a day at home.
Kids today get emo and suicidal because they have been given everything, never had to earn anything, never been hungry, never had anything real to fear, never been punished for their behavior and are bored with having to much entertainment. I wouldn't wish my childhood on my worst enemy, but from what I see for other people, completely pampering children is at least as destructive as the brutal abuse, crushing poverty and neglect that I endured.
Re:unrealistic optimism? (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, I graduated in '91 and never felt that way at all back then. The Japan fears were over by the late 80s, computers were just starting to come on the scene in a big way. And given that I going to school for computers (which would never be outsourced like those lousy manufacturing jobs), I felt that my future was relatively secure. Twenty years later, I'm thinking it would be wise to have a healthy supply of food in hand, just in case of a sudden dollar collapse, and I'm taking side jobs to keep my options open. Make no mistake, we're not out of this by a long shot and the next 10 years will be substantially worse than the previous 10. Wait until our debt has grown so large that the world simply can't afford to keep buying it up anymore. That's when the real fireworks will start and you won't have to wait long to see it. The 90s were a freakin' golden age by comparison.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. There is being tough and then there is just being stupid. There is a huge difference between "just rub some dirt in it, you'll be fine" and "Oh my god, he split his head open and is going to be fucking jacked up the rest of his life, assuming he lives through the surgeries."
Re:Therapies other than drugs exist (Score:3, Insightful)
"able to read what the teacher is writing on the whiteboard."
How 'bout a touch of humor and nostalgia mixed together? When I was in school, we had blackboards. Mostly, they really were black - but sometimes they were a dark green, or a dark blue. But, we wrote on those blackboards with chalk - not some newfangled dry-wipe markers.
Anyway - at some point, I remember learning that we no longer had "blackboards", but "chalkboards". "Huh?" says I. "It's the same old blackboard it's always been!"
But, no, with the civil rights movement, it was somehow derogatory toward black PEOPLE to notice that a black BOARD was black.
Oh-key - here's the humor. I'm gonna sue people for calling a white board a white board.
I'm not even really white, but most people assume I'm white when they meet me, so that's close enough for my discrimination lawsuit!
Re:American youth have it easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
American youth today have it very easy.
In America we have obese kids with rickets because they are starving for nutrients while gorging on cheap processed food. Some Americans have it easy. Some are dying from false-wisdom and false-plenty.
Re:Greater Knowledge (Score:1, Insightful)
The writeup and headline just reminded me of my grandmother's husband
You mean your grandfather? You have basically 'demonized' him by calling him something else. As someone once put it to me you can pick your friends but you rarely get to pick your family.
Perhaps you need to see it from his point of view instead of just assuming that whatever you were taught/thought up is THE RIGHT WAY. Maybe he is wrong. But you belittle him and treat him like a child. When in fact it is you who are acting as the know-it-all brat. In fact you go out of your way to make sure you do not show any sort of respect for him. Maybe he is deserving of this but you play into it and only make matters worse. In fact you are doing exactly what you hate him for. That is 'classifying' him as something else. If you do not change this it will only get worse.
I have known many homosexuals. There are the flaming queens, and the conservatives. The flaming queens are just trying to draw attention to themselves. Most queens are rude and in your face only for one reason. That is to offend. It is not about their orientation or whatever. They like the attention (good or bad) they get from it. They will tell you this (Ive asked many).
Let me also show you something. Your first encounter with me and I already think you are an arrogant jerk. Is that really the way you present yourself to others? People with real knowledge share it when others need it to help them at the right moment. You need this because even when someone does you wrong in some way you should still treat those around you with respect. You will find others respect you when you give respect away. If you show up and act like you have a chip on your shoulder people for some reason instinctively want to knock it off. Why do I tell you this? You showed up and started ranting about "old people" and your "grandmother's husband". You are showing just as much intolerance as they do to others.
Re:American youth have it easy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Agent Smith:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost...I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you honestly think the extremely minor inconvenience of wearing a helmet outweighs the significantly reduced chance of serious injury, brain damage and death?
Yes.
Sort of anyway. The problem is that often, and maybe even in the case of bicycle helmets, the actual dangers are grossly overblown. You have people thinking that peddling a few meters on a bike without a helmet is some huge risk when, statistically, it isn't. Here [topfoto.co.uk] is Marco Pantani in the Tour in 2002, no helmet. I'm guessing he is well aware of the risk.
Everywhere you look there are similar fractions of a percent chance of getting hurt that you'll need to guard against. So the bike helmet, in this instance, is just a convenient scapegoat.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sarcasm aside, the world has always been a crazy place, and to say that kids today have to deal with terrorism and all that is really no different from past generations.
not really what I'm saying, I wasn't clear. It's not that kids have to deal with craziness past generations didn't have to, it's that they hear more about the craziness and it seems much closer. I remember during 9/11 standing in line at Canadian Tire while the planes were flying into the trade centers. I thought it was a movie trailer until I got home and my neighbor pulled me aside. If that sort of thing had of happened when my Dad was my age he might not have herd of it at all, but I can't say for sure because 1) that was a pretty big event and 2) I didn't grow up in that time. I commonly hear the phase "Are things really getting worse in the world, or do we just hear more about the bad things?"
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you honestly think the extremely minor inconvenience of wearing a helmet outweighs the significantly reduced chance of serious injury, brain damage and death?
Yep. It's totally worth it. Ballpark estimate of the number of bike riders in the US: 80,000,000. Ballpark estimate of the number of serious injuries to bike riders: 30,000. (Both based on some quasi-legitimate internet stats.) That's roughly a 0.04% chance of being hospitalized for a serious injury due to bike riding. That's 4/10,000 riders. 90% of those are hit by cars, as well.
If you can get your kid riding somewhere where they aren't likely to be hit by a car, fuck a helmet. If you're riding on busy streets, wear one. Panicking about a freak accident that happened to the friend of your mother is really a major issue in the US today. Just as important an anecdote, my mother did NOT have a friend who died after riding their bike into a pole.
There are plenty of pretty important things to worry about in the world. If we worry every last unlikely thing, we become neurotic, overprotective, and totally unable to function. That's what the parent poster was saying.
When I rode ATVs and snowmobiles, I wore a helmet. When I rode in cars, I wore a seatbelt. Those are places where you're far, far more likely to get hurt than riding a bike. It's hard (not impossible, but hard) to kill yourself doing 20 mph on a bike. If you're around cars, wear a helmet. If you're not, don't. Pick up some scars, get some stitches, cry washing gravel out of road rash, and live life.
You're far more likely to come out of that emotionally healthy than if you are treated like a precious china cup all your life. If that's how you grow up, at the first nick or crack, you're broken.
Re:I blame women (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though, I'd like to see what type of lifestyle changes people think contributed to this.
Culture of fear.
I grew up in the cold war and its very politically correct and proper to say we were all scared shitless about nuclear war, but lets me honest here, most of us never cared about it, or only thought about it for about 2 hours per decade, like while watching the movie "the day after" or being indoctrinated about it in school. I suppose children living on a missile base or in D.C. might have had a different outlook, but I'd say I'm pretty much correct on average. Remember you only hear the LOUD ones whom claim they cared, not the majority.
Now all "news" is nothing but terrorism. Be scared of this, be scared of that. All adults are out to molest all children. Everything causes cancer. Anyone you don't know is a criminal, and all family members are merely latent abusers. All "dual use" inanimate objects like guns, knives, etc, are inherently in and of themselves evil like its in their chemical makeup. If you don't understand it (and our education system will make certain of that) you must fear it. The TV says, that all forms of childhood recreation (other than watching TV, suspiciously) are too dangerous for kids. Ask for a slogan and you'll hear the words that we're not supposed to be cowards, look at the actions which are all the opposite.
Add in some strange cultural values about entertainment (violence is great, sex is evil) mix that with most peoples actual lifestyles (vaguely pacifist, sex all the time)...
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:5, Insightful)
What REALLY gets me is that these people think that they can get away with purchasing things to fix the problem when kids require a LOT of TIME and ENERGY. Something that you have to work for. The stepson issue was one of those things that you don't want to come across, but I knew that if I didn't step in, who would? We got him into athletics, and he has a 3.9/4.0 GPA at an esteemed private school now. A little discipline from the sports (in moderation!) along with success in academia and a good social life (youth group and other "real" social life) make quite a good balance for a kid.
Re:American youth have it easy. (Score:3, Insightful)
I know you may find this hard to believe, but just because you and the people you know are more successful than the people you knew when you were a kid, doesn't mean that tens of millions don't still live in dire poverty.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're comparing a fit, adult professional cyclist to a fragile uncoordinated child? And suggesting they take the same safety measures?
Re:You get what you pay for. (Score:2, Insightful)
I also agree it's related to having it too easy when they (we) were young. Many were born into a high standard of living and nothing was hard until they moved out of their parents home. Life was good then suddenly gets dramatically worse (Not bad, in any objective way of measuring it, but worse than they are used to.)
Compare this to their parents, who grew up from the 40s to the 80s. From the hardships of life in the 40s to the luxury of the 80s they managed to increase their quality of life little by little throughout their entire lives ending up with houses, fine cars, big salaries and stable employment. To see this progress year by year is motivating and makes people happy.
People today often struggle to reach the same standard they had when they were living at home, let alone seeing some consistent improvement. They are fighting to get "back to even", basically. You work for years in order to pay down on a house half the size of the one you grew up in, if you can even dream of affording a house at all. You save for years to go to some exotic place you already visited several times with your parents. Having a stable job in the area where you grew up and all your childhood friends still live is a fantasy, most of your co-workers are basically strangers and so on. All the things the world has to offer - you did most of them already and watched the rest in Cinemascope. The experiences are clichés before you even get there.
There are other factors as well of course, general lack of honest interaction with people, information overload, companies so large that you become anonymous, etc etc, but I think this is a big part of it. Simply put, there are many more rich people having to deal with becoming poorer today than it used to be. People are reaching goals lower than their expectations. This has always been depressing, so a certain percentage of people will be depressed by it, for a while.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm the evil old man (well, 22 isn't old) when I tell a kid to learn some manners after he/she just told me to ST*F*U even though their parents are right there and they're like 6 years old. Parents need to take responsibility and learn that a child is a 20+ year commitment and if you're not willing to invest in the first place you should just keep it in your pants.
Re:Stop projecting.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Atheist: someone who denies the existence of god
I noticed a couple of things, first off you didn't write "a god", you wrote "god" in a way that implies that you assume there is a specific god.
Secondly, an atheist is generally considered "one who believes that there is no deity" (from my dictionary and from what I can tell most dictionaries seem to agree with that definition) which would basically make fanatic atheism some form of fanatic disbelief.
/Mikael
Re:American youth have it easy. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:American youth have it easy. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why findings like this are so interesting. Maybe having it easy and being happy aren't synonymous after all?
The problem is that easy is subjective. If you have nothing to compare it to, easy doesn't register as "easy", it registers as "normal". If you've encountered a large problem, others seem smaller by comparison. If you only ever encounter small problems they seem larger than they are.
My leg was crushed in an accident; I never appreciated being able to walk until I couldn't because up to that point, it was normal. Now I have a hard time seeing people drive to the store instead of walking across the street when they're in the mood for a snack. I imagine having experienced starvation or homelessness would cause the same effect hearing people complain about the doneness of their steak or the color of the paint in their house.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:2, Insightful)
Problem solved.
ADHD is something Big Pharma made up to sell drugs.
Overpopulation (Score:3, Insightful)
> Old Piotr did not have enough food to feed his entire family!
Gee, I wonder why. Maybe having five children when he couldn't even afford to feed himself had something to do with that. The poor with a brood of children have no one to blame for their poverty except their penises.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, the roads on the Tour are closed. I wear a helmet when I ride my bicycle because I don't trust the moron drivers of America to not hit me with their vehicles.
Re:American youth have it easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Kids today get emo and suicidal because they have been given everything"
No kids to day get emo and suicidal because the demands on them are OVERWHELMING, in our hyper competitive world the pressure on them is unreal, while they are not perfect or any better then previous generations, they feel they exist in a world of mutual hostility and financial insecurity. Not only that but most kids get the message at home "go to university to find a securejob or you will be poor!"
So kids go to university rack up a bunch of debt, figure out that job security is rare, and they may not have the lifestyle their parents had and have to work longer hours for less pay with lots of debt and in shitty long hours work culture.
You'd have to be out of your effin mind to say kids have it easy today.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:3, Insightful)
So you traded medication for physical abuse? It may work well while he is a child but he's probably going to need those meds when he's older now.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who grew up in a time when it was ok to be hit as a child I gotta disagree with you. Of everyone I grew up with the most stable and well adjusted of my friends were the ones who were not hit as children. I would have agreed with you when I was an adolescent because I was hit when I was a child and I thought I was fine for the longest time. As it turns out childhood abuse and neglect can rear its head much later in life. My personal opinion now is that if you have to hit a child to discipline them then you lack real parenting and problem solving skills. Resorting to violence is just a symptom of these deficiencies.
Re:You get what you pay for. (Score:2, Insightful)
There is nothing inherently limiting about age. Nobody asked me to read what I read. People are too keen to give teenagers a pass, and it dilutes the development of the whole society. Each person can choose, regardless of their age, to spend their time enriching themselves and becoming informed or to spend their time watching the latest 'reality' TV shows or IMing all their idiot peers about what idiot peer A said to idiot peer B during class yesterday. Who needs history and culture when you have idle gossip?
Trying to use the capacity of technology as an excuse for personal laziness doesn't work. Yeah, I can look up nearly any important data in human experience, but if I don't at least understand the framework, I won't even know what question to ask, let alone how to answer it. More than anything else, 'kids these days' don't ask meaningful questions. It is said there are no such things as stupid questions, but I beg to differ. Understanding is a reduction. You start with what you know, think about what is most important in that knowledge, and ask questions about the origins of those conditions, and when you get that information, you ask questions about the new data, until you have a satisfactory foundation you can do real work from. If all you have as a baseline is TV and gossip, you'll never have anything meaningful to reduce, no pathway to follow to real insights, real applications of ideas that enrich and improve. It is as has been said elsewhere in comments on this topic, GIGO.
Re:Some really desolate lawns (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree, generally. I'm writing this while taking a break from going over my stepson's high school applications. The applications for high schools are more complex and difficult than the applications for colleges I remember in the late 80s.
Another thing that's concerned me for some time is the near-complete absence of a positive vision of the future. Such a vision can help one overcome any tribulation; the absence of one can make any tribulation seem crushing. In the late 1930s, there were many such visions in play: the democratic republic were still a new idea in much of the world; that science could lead rapidly and directly to practical improvements in daily life was a new phenomenon; the labor movement was broadening its base and establishing its legitimacy; the several varieties of socialism were attracting mass followings; and, hideous as most now recognize it to be, fascism and totalitarianism were seen as visions for a future.
Now, most visions of the future seem to be nothing more than the belief that if we overcome various threats, to the global environment in particular, we may continue to live as we do now, except maybe with better web browsers. Even radicals seem to have very circumscribed visions of what may be accomplished. So, the kids I meet seem to look forward to individual prosperity, or to helping forestall various potential crises, and that's it. It's not much to lean on in times of trouble.
Re:TFA backs up parent.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It works just fine. My wife and I don't hit our kids, except for the very young ones who understand nothing else. They behave better than I did at their age, and my parents whacked my behind with a wooden spoon or a paddle all of the time.
Or to look at it another way, watch a dog trainer. Some of the best ones out there don't need to hit the dogs at all. My dog is a big Rottweiler mix, and I've never had to hit him. If he gets in trouble, I just yell at him to get into his crate, and he walks in on his own. I lock the door, and he's stuck in there for an hour.
It's normal to get very defensive when the discipline techniques your own parents used are criticized. I was a big defender of spanking for years. But just because you didn't grow up with anxiety problems, depression, or alcoholism doesn't change the fact that statistically, kids who are hit are more likely to grow up with those problems.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:3, Insightful)
But there's always a chance, and it might just be you who draws the unlucky ticket next... and if a helmet helps with that, then why not?
Because you are creating a culture of fear of any harm instead of accepting a certain degree of risk (yes, even of death!) as a part of living a full and satisfying life. There are risks in almost every activity of life (driving a car, walking on a sidewalk, hiking, swimming) that could be partially mitigated with greater safety equipment (floaties for swimming, football pads for a walk down the street) or abstaining from the activity altogether.
The key is to not be caught up in the fear caused by anecdotes and evaluate the risk with proper perspective. A 3-year-old who has just learned the basics of swimming may have 25% likelihood of drowning when unwatched in the pool for more than a couple minutes, a 12-year-old with 9 years swimming experience may have 0.00001% likelihood of drowning when left unwatched for a couple minutes. I know parents who have that "might be you who draws the unlucky ticket next" mentality regarding their 12-year-olds swimming - and have made them wear floaties their entire life. These kids have an irrational fear about the dangers of water/swimming that decreases their enjoyment of the activity. I would argue that this decrease in enjoyment due to incorrectly perceived risk is true for many kids of parents who do not have the ability to properly assess risk vs. enjoyment.
And yes, for every 1 million 12-year-olds whose parents make them wear floaties every time they swim - one of them is saved from a tragic death. The other 999,999 have, for their entire life, lost a great deal of happiness and enjoyment they would have had with a rational awareness of the risks of swimming.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:1, Insightful)
[...] (well, 22 isn't old) [..] Parents need to take responsibility and learn that a child is a 20+ year commitment[...]
I take it your parents have been telling you to move out for some time?
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:2, Insightful)
Taking your idea to the next level:
Children have lived through wars and turned out fine. Therefore, children should be raised in war zones?
Where does this stop? Should we disregard the research which demonstrates actual harm in harmful practices? Should a parent with a well-adjusted and well-behaved child ignore their lyin' eyes and start beating the child?
Re:American youth have it easy - even though... (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider that the Piotr in question was apparently an impoverished resident of 1950s Hungary (i.e. just-post-WW2 europe, near to poland and austria)... and that of his five offspring, which one cannot assume he had simultaneously, one died in infancy and another drowned in childhood. Consider also the links between subsistence living, mortality and birth rates, etcetera. Do I need to explain further?
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, it's more than a bit far, its absurd.
It was an illustration, through the use of absurdity, of the fallacious logic of the post I was responding to.
Just because children can have good outcomes from a specific situation doesn't mean that situation is a desirable one. There may be other situations which may be better, or worse, than the situation argued for.
The detrimental effects may indeed have been overstated, but the beneficial effects may also be overstated. How do you compare them?
You compare them through multiple studies which in the past have indicated fairly conclusively that a nonviolent upbringing is better than a violent upbringing, and that less violent upbringing is better than a more violent upbringing. That last part is why lightly abused children generally fare much better than heavily abused children. It's not a black-and-white situation.
Re:In the words of the great Ken Titus... (Score:2, Insightful)
That the problem is a lack of spanking seems like a false attribution. The data backs me up on that one.
That the problem is proper treatment for brain disorders/mental illnesses/behavioral problems/etc. seems like a false attribution. The data backs me up on that one too.
The theory that kids are not facing quite enough of the consequences of their actions might not be a false attribution.
Unlike some of the brainiacs in this thread, I know that blurting out some wild-eyed half-political theory about "kids these days", declaring it to be the true answer, is actually pretty stupid, so I will be happy to wait for the data to come in.