[sbardle]

I went to a school where a number of friends were not academic in the slightest. They left as soon as they could often with no qualifications but gradually learnt trades.

Many now have their own businesses (one is a plasterer, another a builder) and they earn good money, own their own homes, and have no student debt.

The reason? They had supportive parents. Many of the people who are falling into despair tragically come from very broken families.

[emodendroket]

I'm guessing the successful people you're describing do not have severe learning disabilities. And I find it at least questionable that parenting has gotten markedly less supportive in the past few decades.

[will_brown]

>And I find it at least questionable that parenting has gotten markedly less supportive in the past few decades.

Look at the trends of the past few decades: divorce; single parent; and dual income households. There is in fact remarkedly less two parent, supported by single income households, meaning it's a rareity for a child to simply have a parent at home when they return from school to fix them a healthy snack, ask how their day was, or help with homework. Certainly it's not a single cause, but stability in the home is indisputably tied to mental well being of the child.

[curveship]

US divorce rate is lower than it's been for 40 years.

[will_brown]

HN never fails to disappoint in fundamentally unfair readings.

Yes if you ignore overall trends and use a simple snapshot today divorce rates are slightly lower than the alltime high in 1980. To my larger point, in 1960 9% of kids lived in single parent homes, that number today is 36% and as high as 72% in a certain demographic.

[jdmichal]

You're discussing the derivative (rate of change) of the actual issue. The issue isn't how fast divorced households are growing; the issue is that they exist at all. Even if the divorce rate was zero, there would still be existent divorced households. And broken households don't do any favors for children, even if the parents do their best to make it seem amicable.

[dragonwriter]

> You're discussing the derivative (rate of change) of the actual issue.

The rate of change is the rate of new divorces minus the rate at which divorcee households are ending (if the concern is divorced parents with children, by death of the parent, child, or the child leaving the household.)

> Even if the divorce rate was zero, there would still be existent divorced households.

A declining, eventually to zero, number of them.

[jdmichal]

Of course I'm not taking a stance that the rate of change is not important. And of course it would need to drop in order to reduce and eventually eliminate occurrence...

I was instead pointing out that simply bring up a reduced rate is not really a counterpoint. Especially when, as you accurately point out, the divorce rate is not even the entire picture for the rate-of-change of divorced households. See also Arizhel's sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150694

But hey, will_brown did a better job of making the same point and defending himself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150843

[Arizhel]

The marriage rate has also fallen greatly. People aren't getting married as much, and more and more people are just staying single.

[irrational]

Well, yeah, that's because fewer people are getting married. If you don't get married you can't get divorced! But that doesn't mean more kids aren't living in "broken" homes.

[emodendroket]

I'd argue the cause and effect relationship you're positing is backwards.

[will_brown]

As in you think the declines in mental health of children leads to an increase in divorce, dual income households and single parent homes?

[emodendroket]

What? No. I think it seems like the post I'm replying to wants to imply that the "crisis of despair" that is the topic of this discussion is caused by broken families, rather than broken families being caused by people not having any way to support a traditional family due to economic factors.

[posguy]

In a way, parents can support their kids less today. Wages have stagnated and stratified heavily, leaving the median home with less effective income, meanwhile the cost of college has gone from free (at public institutions) and nominal at private schools ($400/yr adjusted) to over $10k a year minimum.

Housing rising in cost is only dog piling on and exacerbating the issue.

[DamagedProperty]

I am an example of one of those people. I DID have a learning disability (officially tested for and documented). Failed high school and now I am middle aged, have my own business making mobile games for clients. Also went back to college late 2000's and 3.8 GPA. (I would have had a 4.0 for my BS like I did for my Associates but got struck with H1N1 virus).

[anigbrowl]

He didn't say that parenting had got less supportive, he said that many people with severe structural disadvantages come from badly broken families.

[emodendroket]

He said that in the context of a discussion of deteriorating conditions, so I think it's fair to bring it up.

[sbierwagen]

  Apraxia is a motor disorder caused by damage to the brain 
  (specifically the posterior parietal cortex), in which the 
  individual has difficulty with the motor planning to 
  perform tasks or movements when asked, provided that the 
  request or command is understood and he/she is willing to 
  perform the task.

I'm sure he would do great as a tradesman.

[sbardle]

I didn't appreciate the severity of the condition. My apologies if I come across as insensitive, I should have paid more attention to the original post.

[mustacheemperor]

There is such a vast difference between someone "not academic in the slightest" and someone who is actively limited by severe learning disabilities. I'm sure you mean well by this statement, but I feel like it leads to the attitude that even the disabled just aren't trying hard enough, and if they'd only pull themselves up by their bootstraps the problems in the article would go away.

I find it borderline condescending that so many comments below are just handwaving this as "he should just be a plumber!" as if plumbers don't need to take training classes or remember specific technical details. If you're reading this thread and wondering why manual trades are undervalued in the US and also suggesting gp's son become an electrician, you're part of the problem.

>despite putting forth his best effort because he simply can't remember anything

Acting like this person should apprentice as a programmer as some have suggested is wishing the problem away.

[sbardle]

I certainly don't think "the disabled just aren't trying hard enough", I think you are extrapolating quite wildly there and I find the implication quite offensive. The point I was trying to make is that having supportive parents can really help, and the poster is obviously very supportive of his son. Every situation is different though.

[anigbrowl]

I help to look after someone with developmental difficulties similar to what the gp describes, and while I don't want to project my knowledge of one person onto the other, I can tell you that my disabled friend is never going to make it any skilled trade.

Look all these 'you can make it other parts of the system, I know someone who had a disadvantage and went onto a great success' is nice, but it's also platitudinous. It's a way of saying 'I don't want to deal with your problems.' Yes, there are successful people who didn't finish school or had learning difficulties, but they often had other advantages or had the good luck to grow up in a time or region where there was greater economic opportunity and fewer barriers to entry.

Someone who can't handle very basic things like multiplication tables is structurally fucked, to put it bluntly. That's more than not being good at math or not being bookish, that's not being able to work out the relationship between the stuff in your grocery cart, the bill, and the amount of money left in your bank account. And not in a way that you can you screw up a few times and then get the hang of, but possibly permanently and unalterably barring major advances in our understanding of the brain, which I guarantee you will go to poor and disabled people last rather than first.

That level of disability falls far short of normal adult competence and raises serious questions about whether the individual will ever achieve economic independence. People who are not very competent or who are incapable of financial independence are systematically treated like shit in this society and generally forced into the humiliation of relying on charity, which is inherently unpredictable and unreliable and antithetical to any kind of long-term stability.

I apologize for putting this so bluntly as it will be painful to read for the gp, but we need to acknowledge the reality of these problems rather than wish them away with a fairy-tale about enterprise and a can-do attitude. Life outcomes are more than simply a matter of high or low expectations, and insisting that everything stems from the expectations one has of someone's potential is an implicit abdication of responsibility for dealing with tricky social problems through public policy.

All these examples of being a plumber, electrician, or similar skilled tradesperson - which are often trotted out on HN - are basically restatements of what the various posters would do if you told them they had to work some sort of manual job. How the hell is someone who can't do multiplication at age 15 and has trouble putting a sentence together going to succeed as a plumber or electrician? Would you trust your home's electrical wiring to someone who can't work out Ohm's law to figure out what sort of fuse you need, or trust your plumbing to someone who won't be able to remember what sort of pipe to use for what purpose? Of course you won't, you hire a tradesperson because you assume they're certified and competent to work with sometimes-dangerous tools and procedures.

A person like that described in the gp may have many qualities, but intellectual disabilities like that are going to bar them from any sort of safety-critical work that might pay well. The friend that I mentioned at the top of this post has the intellectual and emotional development of a 9 or 10 year old. She's already a legal adult and her capacities are unlikely to improve significantly. That doesn't mean the world is a closed book to her or that she will never be able to develop herself, but it does impose a pretty solid ceiling on her economic prospects because there ain't a whole lot of jobs for adult-sized 10 year olds with personality problems. She wants to be a videogame character artist and I give her help and encouragement with anything that might advance that goal, but we're talking about someone who can't handle a busy shift at a Taco Bell and spends several weeks of every year in a secure psychiatric unit. She's almost certainly not going to go on to enjoy the rewarding careers people are talking about here, but very likely to end up homeless or in jail.

These are problems that we need to start talking about instead of wishing away because there are a lot of people who have a lot of problems, nothing much to lose, and little motivation to keep trying in a society that treats them as dispensable or ignores their existence altogether.

[jdmichal]

I have a question for you, and it's a naive one and I apologize. But you have obviously spent a lot of time here and I value your viewpoint on it, so I want to ask anyway:

What do you think, realistically, are the options available here?

In full fairness, here's where I'm coming from with this question: You talk repeatedly of a "problem" that society needs to "talk about" instead of "wishing away". But I'm not sure what to even consider, if we are discussing people with disabilities severe enough that they cannot function independently. And if independent living is not a solution, then the only other solution I see is long-term supervised living. And, AFAIK, this is something already provided through disability-based Social Security and Medicare.

[morbidhawk]

Did you reply to the wrong thread? Your reply would make a whole lot more sense in a completely different context.