Kids being kids?
I think the young of today are pretty messed up, but it is at no fault of their own. Instead, they have been pushed into an environment that is not conducive to healthy outcomes for them in the present, nor in their future. It is a cluster of conditions, not a single point, with the major ones being the digital environment that has been used as a substitute carer, the food supply which has pushed unhealthy and addictive alternatives, and the parenting structures which has put convenience over skill development. Each of these have complexities and complications, as well as a wide variety of impacts depending on the individuals involved, but they are pretty much all negative.
Is it any wonder that children are behaving poorly?
In some areas in Finland, a quarter of 11-12 year old boys are on ADHD medication, despite the estimates of global prevalence cited being around 5-8 percent. That is between a 300 - 500% more diagnoses. However, as I suspect, the diagnoses are false, even if the children themselves exhibit some ADHD traits, because their conditioning has built ADHD-looking habits.
Now going on that headline of schools pushing ADHD medication, while this is conjecture currently, I could believe it. Not because teachers and schools want to drug kids, but because over the decades the conditions in schools have changed, driven largely by the parents. The authority of the teacher has decreased significantly because many parents want their kids to "do well" even if they are not acting well, which has also diminished respect for teachers.
Not only this, many parents have taken the "soft parenting" approach, because they want to be friends with their kids, which has meant that the children often behave poorly, but believe they are entitled to being treated as if they are angels. And, the soft parenting approach has also led to many children having almost zero resilience, unable to deal emotionally with any kind of resistance. While soft parenting has some pros, the human tendency for ease and convenience, means that the pros are lessened and the cons are emphasised in most situations. Most parents aren't consistent or committed enough to do much themselves, because they themselves are struggling to deal with the environment that has conditioned them also.
So with few options in classrooms where there multiple children are running about, screaming, throwing things, becoming violent, refusing to do work, disrupting others, attacking students and teachers; and with very few tools to deal with them, it is pretty natural that schools will push some form of medication to these kids. Whether it is in the best interest of the child or not, because having this much disruption in the class is not in the best interest of any of the other children participating.
Home life is missing structure, school life is missing structure, and a huge amount of time is now being spent in digital environments that offer reward incentives without having to do anything of consequence, so it is "natural" that children are behaving the way they are. And without consequence for their behaviours, they are essentially having poor behaviour reinforced, without the experience or foresight to understand they are hurting their own future by behaving as they do.
The children can't be blamed.
But those same children are growing into adults, and adults are held responsible. That means that the parents of these children are responsible for the behaviour of their children, whether it be at home, in the class on on the street. If the kids aren't going to face consequences, the parents should. It is a pity there isn't a medication to give adults to make them better parents. But those parents have also been conditioned by their environment, which was already changing toward worse outcomes.
And this is a problem, because once the ship has turned and is powering ahead, it is very difficult to turn it again, and it takes a lot of time. Generations. For a couple generations now, the parenting approach, and the tools available for parents and teachers to manage children's behaviours, have lessened to the point that it comes down to medication. We see spanking a child for poor behaviour as abuse now, but giving them medication to cope with the impacts of how they were raised in an environment that left them malformed and misaligned, as a healthy solution.
Pretty sick, right?
But when that is the only tool available to manage situations that used to be managed in far more analogue and person to person ways, that is the tool that will get used. It is the same with many aspects of culture today, where for a long time people were conditioned to become fat to drive consumerism, then told to love their fat body to keep consumerism going, and then given weight-loss products to try to lose weight, and most recently, drugs that mean all those people who were pretending to love their fat selves, could take a pill and become more (or less) of the person they wanted to be.
We are treating a lot of conditions that don't need to be created in the first place, but are created because of consumerism of some kind, which drives various trends in everything from education to parenting, to pharmaceutical treatments. None of what we do lives in a vacuum, so when society shifts its direction to what might have even been backed by healthy intention, it tends to be hijacked by the marketplace for profit. Because that is what the marketplace is designed to do -
Make profit from our behaviours.
While we are hurting their future, we are also doing our children a disservice in the moment, because we are reducing their potential experience right now. Kids are moving less, passive more, overweight and unhealthier more often, less dexterous, more anxious, and increasingly lonely and depressed. They can escape into a screen for a time, but the reality of who they are is always with them, whenever they emerge from that digital fantasy world.
Reality harms them, just by them being the way they are.
It is like we are no longer teaching kids how to fit into reality and instead training them for a life of fantasy, where they will constantly have to find ways to escape in order to cope. The kids at school who want to learn have to escape the disruption from the kids who don't, but they are all going to impact on each other now and into the future, and escape isn't permanent.
Until it is.
And I think that is where we are now headed, with people getting engaged to AI chatbots and spending their time immersed into digital environments that have no contact with reality. It isn't an evolution of humanity, it is a symptom of humanity's failure toward collapse.
We aren't becoming better humans, we are becoming lesser humans.
Medicate on it.
Taraz
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