[throw149102]

I think the problem denoted in the article is far larger than losing a trust in news media because of what people are seeing on a video. Thinking that CNN is full of crap doesn't make young and healthy people want to kill themselves, and that's where we are. Like the article said, we have a generation of people who are so lonely and depressed that 25% of them have thought seriously about suicide in the past 30 days. We're living in a death cult.

That's not to say that the loss of faith in institutions, especially the news, isn't a big deal, but personally I think this problem is 10 to 100 times bigger than that. It's an economic collapse, a pandemic, growing income inequality, climate change, the effect of technology on our minds, what we put into our bodies, and a thousand other things I can't even begin to name.

The more I read and think about the world today, the more I think that mental health is the problem of the 21st century, and that the previous list of issues is actually all secondary to the problem of mental health. There are enough resources and enough intelligence to solve all of those problems and more if we had the will.

[CapricornNoble]

>>>Like the article said, we have a generation of people who are so lonely and depressed that 25% of them have thought seriously about suicide in the past 30 days. We're living in a death cult.

Is that surprising when educators are pushing a deconstructionist approach to so many topics? Young people are just ending up confused and rudderless, and with the rise in single-parent households, kids aren't necessarily getting a comprehensive and emotionally-balanced upbringing either. I'd argue that a lot of this stuff will manifest as mental health issues, but those will be the symptoms, not the cause. The causes are failures to adequately train and mentor our youth, and that begins with how we are failing to train young adults to be parents.... partly because we're failing to hold them accountable for even basic "be an adult" responsibilities and an understanding of consequences to their actions.

[throw149102]

To be honest, I'm not particularly familiar with how a deconstructionist approach to education works, so I won't vouch for or against it.

I do see the rise in single-parent households being an issue, but there's something confusing about that. I would expect kids to "act out" more if there was more psychological pressure on them, but the rates of things like teenage pregnancy and underage drinking is down over the past decade. This is in contrast to rates of depression increasing dramatically, even by 50% (around 8% to 13% in about a decade) in that exact age group (12-17).

Finally, as a young person myself, my (relatively recent) experience of highschool and being a teenager was quite the opposite - it's not that adults aren't holding them accountable, it's that they are holding themselves hyper-accountable. Both in the fact that they are comparing themselves to world-class performers on social media, and that there is now a permanent record of their social interactions online which can lead to politically correct woke mobs going after them. Being young in the US feels like walking on a tightrope while there's an earthquake going on.

[xg15]

>The causes are failures to adequately train and mentor our youth, and that begins with how we are failing to train young adults to be parents.... partly because we're failing to hold them accountable for even basic "be an adult" responsibilities and an understanding of consequences to their actions.

I think this statement is a bit vague. Could you elaborate what you think those responsibilities that are not correctly communicated are and how an adequate training would look?

[CapricornNoble]

Re: incorrectly communicated responsibilities, I'd look at helicopter and snowplow parents[1][2], and failing to enforce boundaries[3]. I'd also look at the characteristics listed for Gen Y in Tables 3&4, from[4]. For adequate training solutions, I'm mostly extrapolating from the parenting methods of my peers. They are all current or former military and with children aged 8-18. The guy with a "helicopter wife" is frustrated with his feckless, irresponsible 15yo daughter. The other guys seem to be getting far better results from their training and discipline methods, which are roughly:

1. Do a joint task (typically some household chore) with your child, and instruct them in how to perform it.

2. Assign them the task to execute independently.

3. Most importantly, hold them accountable when they fail. "No, I'm not going to break my neck to clean your clothes at the last minute. You were tasked with doing the laundry. You didn't. So now you can go to school and get teased by the other students for being nasty. Actions have consequences. Next time fulfill your responsibilities and successfully execute the task you were assigned. I'll provide remedial training if you don't understand the task, but I'm not going to do your work for you."

4. Help your children understand that the world is dangerous, no one owes you anything, and reckless actions have life-destroying consequences. Teach them how to do proper risk assessments. If you go backpacking in the hills of Morocco, with no security plan, you might get your head cut off. How are pairs of young white women not anticipating that?[5] If you verbally or physically assault law enforcement....you might end up in handcuffs or arrested. Yet we see people having total mental breakdowns when put in cuffs, as if it never occurred to them that a reaction was even a possible consequence of their belligerence. That complete failure to assess risk is how we end up with 31&32yo LAWYERS throwing firebombs at police cars....and subsequently facing 5-20 years in jail.[6] I think this point needs to build up #3 above, because your kids first need to learn their own role in their success/failure or happiness/suffering before you can work through courses of action/decision trees/risk assessments in various other real-life scenarios they might face as young adults.

5. "Train the trainer" mentality. As I am teaching you how to DO, I'm also teaching you how to TEACH. Be cognizant that our mentorship of our children should also give them mental models, anecdotes, and body language cues for how to train their own offspring. This is mostly applicable for the >22yo adult offspring, hopefully we haven't screwed up so bad that our kids are popping out babies much younger than that.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/snowplow-parents-calling-emp...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200209211058/https://www.nytim...

[3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8516929/Pare...

[4] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325163313_FACING_TH...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Louisa_Vesterager_J...

[6] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/brooklyn-attorneys-grant...