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Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

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Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#411

Post by solatic »

Parents, educators, clergy, everyone lines up to tell children that they need to study hard, go to university, get an economically worthwhile degree, get a good job, get married, get a mortgage.

Questions over whether children have the independence to ride the subway on their own, these questions are red herrings. How do you expect children to make their own decisions when all the messaging tells them that if they don't make the decisions that their parents are making, that they'll be failures, disgraces, shamed, poor?

Nobody's is telling these kids that it's OK to make mistakes, and it's OK for other people to make mistakes. Of course kids are anxious if they're not allowed to make mistakes. How couldn't you be, if you were led to believe that you were going to screw up your whole life otherwise?

The screws started to tighten after the No Child Left Behind Act. The academic path is NOT correct for all children, and children should not be forced onto that path if it's not right for them. The result, apart from declining mental health, is an enormous waste of human capital, enormous waste in higher education (supporting the educations of people who do not want or benefit from them), and enormous levels of student debt to prop up the lie.

Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#412

Post by tnel77 »

ipaddr wrote: post #249
tnel77 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related: I went to a private school and they required you to live on campus until you were a senior. Also: the namesake of the college owned the student housing so he was making serious money from all that forced rental income.

Sounds like you got a really good education

It was actually a solid education, but, in hindsight, I should have went to a more affordable college.

Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#413

Post by solatic »

cpsns wrote: post #153
Lanz wrote: post #48

The infantilization of an entire generation and the extension of adolescence into the 20s is a disaster for mental health. It's hard to find meaning if you remain immature. Without meaning, what's the point in living?

Find meaning? A whole lot of younger people (myself included) don't believe there is such a thing at all. As I enter my 30s I'm more convinced than ever "meaning" is a nonsense concept. I am sure one could accuse me of being immature because of my view on this, but that simply isn't the case. My adolescence was unfortunately cut short, not extended. > what's the point in living? I've been trying to answer this for ye…

To answer without using the word "meaning":

Life satisfaction comes from devoting yourself to the pursuit of something that you feel is important. Because it's important, you can see and feel the effort that you're putting into it, therefore your effort is important, therefore you are important. Different people consider different things to be important.

Youth is about experiencing many different things so that you can figure out what is important to you. Growing up is making the decision to shut the door on everything that isn't important so that you can focus your time and effort on what is important.

Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#414

Post by [deleted] »

mindslight wrote: post #394
jdpigeon wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the Fox News are you talking about?

By uncritically repeating the nonsense that sensationalist mass media spews, OP does illustrate two of the main dynamics ultimately causing this. Parents are gobbling up this malevolent nonsense and then hovering over their kids to protect them from their own delusions, and the kids themselves are also being blasted with the apocalyptic media fire hose.

[deleted]

Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#415

Post by ChuckMcM »

leonhard wrote: post #358
ChuckMcM wrote: post #235

I worry about generalizations in this regard, but consistently my daughter's peers in college who had helicopter parents were less functional. May simply be correlation of course so drawing conclusions would be bad. That said, it's super hard to experiment on kids without getting in trouble :-). As a parent unfortunately you have to pick a path. My eldest had the tendency to only learn through experiencing the negati…

How did you improve your conflict management skills and do you have any particular lessons to share?

I suspect it is different for different people. In our case it really helped to sit down with a third party (a counselor) while we "conflicted." That gave the counselor an opportunity to stop us in the middle of a sentence and explore where our head was and what we were thinking. It took doing this once a week for a bit more than a year to both unravel the core knot and to develop and practice the skills of listening and reflecting and not assuming.

Again, in our case it seems like it wasn't "one" conflict, but dozens that colored everything we said to or heard from, each other. In hindsight it is easy to recognize this is where you get to after years of "go along to get along" kind of thinking. And resolving one doesn't resolve the others. So we had to practice getting to the bottom of things and that takes trust and understanding.

Bottom line was we needed someone to teach us the tools for dealing with conflict so that we could teach them to our kids. Neither of our parents had taught them to us so no help there. We also recognized that the third party really helped us because there is a level of sharing and exposure during our sessions that we didn't want to share with our friends.

And no, I don't have a magic bullet for finding a good counselor. You'll know it when they are good, and with some honest evaluation will also know when they are not working out for you. We went through the family health center at Stanford, but there seems to be resources like this in the US at least and possibly elsewhere.

Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#416

Post by [deleted] »

horns4lyfe wrote: post #191
jim-jim-jim wrote: post #43

This is mostly about parenting, but the point about conflict struck me. I've found that lots of people out there seemingly can't handle disagreement at all, and attribute a fundamental moral failure to their conversation partner if they don't see eye to eye. And most of these people are incredibly unhappy. I would be too if I couldn't trust anybody other than my perfect clone. It's an antiquated idea, but explicit cl…

You’re right, but you’re going to get a lot of dorks here saying “but my side is right! And the other side is evil! You can’t argue facts!”

[deleted]

Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#417

Post by seneca »

theshrike79 wrote: post #368
giantg2 wrote: post #363

“Students talk about conflict like it’s this terrible thing,” Mallon said in an interview. “Is it that they’re afraid of [conflict], or are they lacking in experience?" It might also be that school and society has conditioned them to be this way. They've been told what feel about this subject. When I went to school, fights were fairly rare, but they did happen. Usually they were minor without any serious injuries. Yo…

"Calling the cops on an unattended child" is so very HOA-cul-de-sac American that it's hard to even fathom for a non-American. Over here (in the Nordics) kids walk/bike to school every day. In Finland the limit is 5km IIRC, after that you get a taxi or bus ride. Kids travel alone to their hobbies, again by walking, biking or public transport. I do use Apple's Find My on my offspring, but only to see how much of a war…

> Calling the cops on an unattended child" is so very HOA-cul-de-sac American that it's hard to even fathom for a non-American.

It's really not. It's not something that really happens anywhere with frequency, and suburbs are the places you're most likely to see kids roaming around on their own. It's rarer than it was a generation ago, but it's still there.

Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#418

Post by odessacubbage »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #280
rychco wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stereotypical American helicopter-parent/soccer-mom can be viewed as a direct result of poor zoning practices & the resulting suburban sprawl. A typical child is completely incapable of going anywhere without the guidance of a car-driving parent. It is unlikely, either on foot or bike, that they are able to get to school, get to/from sports practice, meet with friends, shop at local stores, run errands, have a pa…

> The stereotypical American helicopter-parent/soccer-mom can be viewed as a direct result of poor zoning practices & the resulting suburban sprawl. Is there any evidence for that? Because, every new HN thread seems to attack suburban "sprawl". The reasoning seems plausible but I can also present plausible reasoning that goes the other way.

it is highly specious reasoning at best especially when you consider that the advent of helicopter parenting and the boom of suburban development/white flight/etc are separated by decades. i would say the stranger danger panic of the 80s, 90s crime wave and columbine all served as cumulative frog boiling for children's autonomy.

Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#419

Post by odessacubbage »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #409
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have 7-9 lane roads in a suburb? That’s called a highway. Where I live, people cross highways on overpasses dedicated to pedestrians. Sorry you have to cross 9 lanes regularly. Sounds like you live next to a highway!

Lots of US suburbs have roads with 3 lanes in each direction. Then you add one or two left turn lanes at the intersection and a shoulder/bike lane, and you get to an 80ft+ crossing easily. All the infrastructure is built for cars and cars only. All the businesses and places for kids to go will be along these huge roads. This is an example of what is commonly built: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wpdBbQJggYrpjeNz8?g_st=ic Th…

i'm not sure many people would describe phoenix or tampa as suburban

Re: Young adults and mental health: Is more childhood independence the answer?

#420

Post by kazinator »

mindslight wrote: post #394
jdpigeon wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the Fox News are you talking about?

By uncritically repeating the nonsense that sensationalist mass media spews, OP does illustrate two of the main dynamics ultimately causing this. Parents are gobbling up this malevolent nonsense and then hovering over their kids to protect them from their own delusions, and the kids themselves are also being blasted with the apocalyptic media fire hose.

I've not watched television since around 1990. I don't read papers. I don't visit news sites. Never had a Twitter account though I'm on Mastodon now. Never had a Facebook account. I mostly use the Internet in connection with some very specific interests of mine.

I do observe that your opinion that the mass media is all garbage and wrong isn't very original. You just repeating that from somebody. I suspect it's a common sentiment in far right circles. This is because the media in fact often reports the truth, and it's quite balanced and responsible, which upsets some people.

The news does naturally like bad news. The observation that a crime didn't happen in such and such a district over the past week will not make the news. That's just the way it is. It's the nature of the game.

For almost exactly the same basic reason you will only find bugs in a bug database. Nobody opens a ticket to tell you that your code works amazingly well.

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