[Briel]

I think one of the detrimental effects of the positivity movement is, it implies it's wrong and unnecessary to feel bad. Of course, if you feel bad for days on end, there's an ongoing clinical or situational issue. If certain external triggers consistently cause you to feel bad, you can dig deep to find the reason and start to address it.

But to feel bad as a short-lived (hours to a few days) reaction to an event at least partially within your control? Like getting a bad mark? Or screwing up a work project? It's completely normal and similar to the physical pain felt when you touch a burning stove. It's a stimulus "Oh this sucks! I don't want to feel like this again so I'm going to make X, Y or Z change to avoid it."

[projektir]

I don't think it's as simple as you state here.

There were exceptions, but when I was in school, people who were getting bad marks were getting a lot of bad marks, and kept getting them. People who got good marks mostly stuck with the good marks. People who were bullied kept getting bullied day in day out.

That's ongoing, but each individual event you would say is "normal". I think it's a question to ask whether getting a bad mark on some test that some people are obviously better suited for than others is actually a moral failing and not a happenstance? Is being a bullying target a moral failing? (I say moral failing because the emotional pain for such events is often of a "I really fundamentally suck" variety)

It seemed much more reminiscent of a system where the attributes of children somehow fell into place and defined how much suffering each of them was going to end up with. I find it difficult to say anything good about this.

Maybe it's the opposite: the side effects of the failure of the self-esteem movement is that we're back to saying suffering is great and builds character, completely ignoring that it's not given out proportionally in the slightest.

[marcosdumay]

Penalties do build character, and there's no potential for achieving anything if there's no potential for failing.

We should be teaching kids that they can improve, and show them how good they are with honesty.

[Bartweiss]

But - where are the penalties?

My dyslexic friend who got straight Ds in school until he could drop out never saw a penalty, just a steady stream of discouragement. The kids who got bullied got bullied every damn day, usually for reasons they couldn't control.

I agree that the self-esteem bit is frequently absurd - my childhood soccer team wasn't allowed to keep score, but was still expected to practice and 'improve'. But I do worry that no one on either side is actually talking about giving kids opportunities and feedback. They're just adjusting the tone of a zero-opportunity environment.

[marcosdumay]

I do agree, kids are not treated well overall. And the positivity trend was an improvement from the overall sadism that existed before.

I just pointed what I think are currently flaws. There are currently no penalties for bad behavior, and no honest assessment of kids abilities. There is also an incredible lack of optimism about the children capacity (they aren't told that they can improve), and (what I didn't post before) a lack of real-word anchoring of expectations - at a minimum, we should tell children that it's actually ok if they don't excel on everything, but they should work to excel on something (and some things are more important than others).

[TheOtherHobbes]

Someone once told me that their definition of happiness was setting themselves goals they weren't sure they could reach and then exceeding them.

Kids don't need bullying. They don't need constant reassurance that they are wonderful. They don't need severe abuse when they fail.

But they do need constant challenges which are mostly achievable, with a few that aren't. They also need limits on their behaviour - as long as they're reasonable, fair, adult limits, not capricious authoritarian limits.

I suspect the underlying problem is the emotionally brutal and insanely competitive environment in schools - not just in academics or sports, but in "popularity" and status.

Promoting self-esteem is the wrong answer to that problem. The culture itself has to become more cooperative and less emotionally violent, and that's hard to do when it's a fair reflection of much of the adult culture around it.

[accountyaccount]

In addition, there's also the high-achieving students that basically get ignored because they're not a problem. I had a ton of behavioral problems in elementary school because I did well and was bored out of my skull... I only got attention when I acted out, so of course that's what I did.

Things didn't really click for me until I had a series of teachers who recognized that I was doing well and treated me like a person who was actually interested in learning.

I wasn't even an extreme case in my school system. One kid, who was generally regarded as the smartest kid in the school, got caught basically turning an SAT scam into a business. Ended up getting multiple Ivy League acceptances reversed. He didn't even need the money, he was just bored and liked the popularity that came along with doing SATs for the cool kids.

[Bartweiss]

Yep, I think we agree. "Self-esteem good" and "self-esteem bad" are generally two sides of the same coin - they both treat children's happiness as some nebulous thing unrelated to their actual lives.

I got a bunch of participation ribbons as a kid, but I certainly don't think they were anything more than a symptom of actual problems. There was a weird, pervasive unwillingness among adults to admit that maybe I was good at some things, and at others, and capable of improvement. I might have benefitted a great deal from someone telling me things like "Your art is bad, and you could get better if you tried to. Also, you're best-in-school smart, not best-in-world smart, there's a difference and it's a good reason to work harder."

I did eventually get that from some outside-of-school competitions, but it's weird that school couldn't provide that. It feeds into my 'youth rights' bit, even - we treat kids like they're just little blobs of emotion who can be controlled without needing to help them interact with the real world.

[georgeecollins]

That is one of the points they make in Living with Prozac. Americans expect people to be happy and positive, and if they aren't it is a problem to be fixed.