It's a very common reaction for people to assert that the solution to a deep societal problem is to "stop [group] from [doing action] to [another group]", as if that's an answer, rather than the beginning of a very long list of questions, most of which don't currently have answers, or at least not widely accepted ones (hence the problem continuing to be pervasive).
I spent a lot of my early adulthood thinking the depression/anxiety/dependency that afflicted me was the fault of others, including parents, peers who'd bullied me, former partners/friends who'd betrayed me, etc. And on one level there's truth to it, until you realise all those people were acting in reaction to abuse and trauma they'd suffered, so it's futile to scapegoat everything onto particular individuals or categories of people.
For what it's worth, I am personally trying to undertake work that over the long term would help society to be better at alleviating these trauma cycles and avert the patterns of abuse we see everywhere, but I'm under no illusion that it will be fast or easy, or even that it's likely that the approaches I've found to be effective would be embraced widely enough to have any impact at all. I'll keep trying, however.
One thing I've been thinking for the trauma cycle is how isolating childhood is for those who are in an abusive cycle (and in general). It takes a village to raise a child, but often the entire responsibility is put on 1-2 people, who themselves have been raised in isolation with a lack of serious external investment in preparing them for the responsibility. The education system spreads one adult's time across 20-30 children in a structured and unnatural environment, which limits engagement, limits visibility in to root causes for deviant behaviour, and creates a stressful environment that can (and does) cause negative reaction and thought patterns among the educators.
To go from zero positive role models to one for a child who is suffering would already be a life changing event. If the responsibility for child raising can be shared among more people in society I truly believe it would smooth out the negative actions of single individuals who are the only meaningful influence in a child's upbringing. Having engagement from one adult who demonstrates compassion, who can create a safe space, and who can act as a role model for how to positively integrate in to society, would provide the child with visibility of what exiting their situation looks like, illuminating a path that they are entirely blind to without this.
At least in my own anecdotal experience you are completely correct that externalising blame, even where warranted, is not the solution. Understanding why these external situations happen and acceptance of them only provides so much too. Engagement with the child from invested individuals may not solve the problem entirely, but it will shift us on to a corrective path that would have a massive impact on society a few generations from now.
Yeah just my own 2 cents on the problem. I wish you luck with your vision.
Abuse is very relative too. My parents don't feel like they abused me, in their reality all they do is love me, but in mine they're harming me repeatedly. To society it's probably in the gray area. They have emotional baggage from their childhood, causing failure and limits in understanding of others that is very hard to manage.
I used to think that abuse had to be conscious and with intent to be abuse but it most definitely doesn't. A parent can be doing their best, and loving in their eyes, and abusing/neglecting their kid.
Exactly. Parenting is a challenging mix of turning kids into functioning adults, letting them have fun, teaching them life skills, making them feel safe, and preventing them from accidentally causing serious injury.
Often these goals require conflicting choices. The solution, so far as there is one, is to do everything with love and humility. Then, even my mistakes are learning and bonding opportunities.
Shouting something like "stop" or "enough" or "go" at toddler wont cause him trauma. What will cause trauma to your kid is yelling at him something like "you stupid f**, good for nothing looser, I hate you ..."
There is literally zero dichotomy between preventing toddlers doing crazy stupid & dangerous things vs causing them trauma via words. Toddlers can be annoying and don't respect you are tired mentally or emotionally. People loose their emotional control, it happens, especially when there are other stresses. But, saying that it is about safety is simply not true.
Sometimes I wonder if the epidemic of abuse is in part a bad feedback loop from society raising expectations of parents. It wasn't so long ago letting your kids play alone at the park, walk themselves to school, or sit in the car for 5 minutes while you go in and buy some milk wasn't criminalized. Now parents practically aren't even allowed to leave their kids alone at all, meaning there's no relief for some parents. I wonder if this increased punishment of parents by society leads to increased abuse.
Afaik, we dont have raising rates of child abuse. The abuse is talked about more openly. But, a lot of abuse stories you read about is adults talking about what happened to them in 90ties or so. The acknowledgement of intra family abuse was much lower.
Having a strong social support system goes a long way. Help meet people’s basic medical needs, basic educational needs, have affordable housing, a minimum wage that people can survive upon. All of those are preferable (and well studied) methods of decreasing childhood trauma, without taking the kids away.
Where possible ensure that children are brought into the world by people in a position to emotionally and financially support them. Availability of contraception being one thing.
it is impossible to asses whether someone is emotionally able to care for children without observing them how they actually treat their own children. observing them with other children does not work either. i have seen wonderful teachers who were not so good at parenting.
requiring parents to be financially stable would cut out a way to large portion of society. you only want rich people to have kids?
how about building a society where raising children does not cost money? free schools, healthcare, financial support (basic income?) for having children, can go a long way.
same for emotional support. instead of attempting to weed out potentially bad parents, provide a support system where parents can get the help needed if they struggle with their kids.
I figured the parent comment had largely covered the societal aspect you mentioned. Public schools aren't far off free and healthcare where I live is inexpensive. Childcare is expensive but there are at least income-tested subsidies which are very helpful; free childcare seems like a good goal.
With the emotional and financial angle, I was getting at abortion as well as contraceptives and sex education. If an individual/couple get pregnant but they themselves don't feel they are emotionally or financially prepared, pushing them down that path (especially with poor support) immediately puts them and their child behind the eight ball. Obviously it's a particularly contentious topic in some countries.
I can't find the link now, but I was reading stats about foster children the other day which were quite incredible. Encouraging an environment where children are with parents who want them seems like something we should aim for.
I think most of the commenters here are probably more interested in talking about the middle ground between “taking kids away from parents” and “abortion”.
i agree that people who don't want children should get help to make it easier to not have children accidentally.
but wanting children and being emotionally fit to take care of them are not the same thing. and denying someone the right to have children is completely inappropriate, as is trying to convince them that they are not capable.
This furthers the huge amount of resources society puts into the positional good known as education. If you make X level of education free and universal the X+1 level will soon become mandatory for a decent job even if it's irrelevant to the work.
> healthcare
This is a bottomless pit. A gov can spend almost arbitrarily large amounts of money on this (easily orders of magnitude more than total GDP), so you'll need to put a limit on it in some way.
if you make X level of education free and universal the X+1 level will soon become mandatory for a decent job even if it's irrelevant to the work.
not true. the US is the fourth highest country in number of students with tertiary education. notably europe (eg germany which has always had free universities) has only half as many students (and those even include trade-schools, which are absolutely relevant for work)
what possibly drives irrelevant higher education is high unemployment. if there are lots of applicants to choose from, you may tend to choose the higher educated ones. reduce unemployment and demand for lesser educated people should rise.
healthcare: This is a bottomless pit
literally ever country in the world spends less on healthcare than the US.
the limit on spending comes from insurance and governments not allowing exploitation by healthcare providers.
If “education” is considered a “positional good” then it’s not an “education” in the sense I meant it above and in the sense that it’s meant when considering societal wellbeing.
To see it that way you’d either have to have too little or too much of it. I doubt you’ve had so little education that you see no real value in it. So I guess you’ve been privileged with so much of it that the marginal cost of more education for you doesn’t provide any further value. Fair enough - for you.
Education in the normal sense of the word is valuable in itself, regardless of the value other people place in it. If that’s not your experience you’re very much doing it wrong and should stop.
For every veteran with PTSD, there are hundreds of adults with (at least) CPTSD from childhood trauma.
You're completely right.
Let me respost this I saw the other day:
"What almost nobody realises is that prescribing "social interaction" is almost like prescribing homeopathy to someone with cancer.
The real cancer is trauma.
Trauma.
We live in an epidemic of emotional trauma and few people see it.
It is trauma that causes parents to neglect their kids, to have low empathy for their suffering and not be able to realise they are not ok. Parents, or whoever is taking care of the kids, with the "help" of "modern" society in fact, cause kids, through action or inaction, not to be ok. Do people think these kids just happened to be born with a "social isolation gene"? Or "generalised hatred" gene? Nobody is that way, they were made.
The person you're replying to is an outlier and very lucky to have found people that were supportive. But I'd say by far most won't. And there's a reason for that and it's not their fault. Traumatized people are not very popular. Trauma itself is not very popular and most people have no clue about it, or how to identify someone who is traumatized, because the very nature of trauma causes them to conceal they have it to fit in and be accepted. And the ones who don't fit in are just seem as "there's something wrong with them". Kinda reminds me of the state of medicine in the middle ages.
What these people need is not social interaction.
They need
Compassion
someone to listen to them, to hear them, to be with them with their pain.
to hear their story. Not to be asked "what's wrong with you?" but "what happened to you?"
be told there's nothing wrong with them. They are this way because it's one of the ways a healthy mind copes with extreme emotional neglect and maybe abuse.
to have a secure attachment. Someone they can count on. All the time. Unconditionally.
a sense of belonging. To a community. To a shared sense of purpose. That they are needed and wanted. That they are valued. Desired.
Unfortunately the way society is right now where we don't live on tribes with people that know us that care about us and are always there for us and can provide the above, like it happened for thousands of years, and like our brain is made to function with, now for many people there's only one that can do some of this and you have to pay them for it. Therapists. It's screwed up.
Things have changed so much and so quickly that we're totally unaware of how screwed up and how much we were not made for this "modern" lifestyle.
We were not made to live with only 2 adults who have to take the role of a village to single handedly rear a child.
We were not made to attach primarily with people of our age. First in kindergarden, then school, then college. There were always several people and of all ages who we humans attached deeply to, who we matured emotionally from, whose more mature behaviors we could emulate and learn from.
We were not made to, if those 2 people fail to provide us a sense of safety, have no backup. There would always be someone who we could chat. We would always be with company of other people in the tribe. There would always be a "loving grandma" or an "older brother" who we could go to.
We were not made to have to pay someone to give us a simulation of unconditional love, and safety that our group would provide. This person, who we know in the end does it for the money, and to help, but without money they wouldn't do it. How can we think this is OK and normal and that people are having their emotional needs met in these weird conditions?
How far have we gone the far end to find ourselves proud to conclude that social interaction increases lobgevity? Are we in the future going to be so dry that people will be proud to conclude that drinking water increases longevity too?
In the conditions we live now it is no wonder emotional neglect and abuse has been happening so much. The very way the social foundation is layed is lacking and so easy for trauma to happen and propagate.
The covid pandemic we hear about it. The trauma pandemic, which is equally transmissible from generation to generation and between romantic partners, very difficult to heal and causes unimaginable silent pain to millions of people... Nah. We blame people for being wounded. We call them lazy, and angry. We give them condescending names like "Karens" to make it seem like they're different and their own species and not that their extreme sense of entitlement actually comes from feeling worthless inside. Or accuse people of just being unempathetic angry and selfish as if all their life hadn't been nothing but an experience that would make anyone become that way. No shoulder to cry on. No motherly voice to comfort them. They can't be anything but unempathetic, angry and lonely. People are not mentally ill. People are mentally injured.
And I say pandemic because it is everywhere. In the politicians who seem to only care about themselves. In the influencers who seem so fixated in having people provide them validation in being seen highly by others and in feeling important. In the people who commit crimes. And I mean financial and ethical crimes too. How can they do that? Maybe crimes happened in their childhood and nobody cared. In the bosses at our jobs who seem to only care about maximising profit as a proof that they're being the best to compensate for how not good enough they always felt like. In the clerks who seem to enjoy the little power they have over people and exert it to the full extent to compensate for the powerlessness they felt all their lives since they were a kid.
We have been so conditioned in our society to accept trauma as a common and normal occurrence that we hardly pause to acknowledge it. It's no wonder many people suffer in silence.
And nobody seems to know about this and only talk about social interaction, making friends, focusing on the positive, being more out there and looking at traumatized people like they're some weirdos that came through a membrane from another universe.
Are we being so different from the people that in the 17th century burned "heretics" or in ancient Rome sheered for the blood spilled in arenas as criminals were slayed to death and who we now regard as barbarics?
Sorry about the long rant, but I needed to get this out of my chest."
Being tired and stressed and thus not modulating your voice tone or facial expression appropriately when responding to a child who is demanding attention while you are trying to do some other chore necessary for life, e.g., cooking dinner, etc is itself abuse if done repeatedly over many years.
If you are not immune to stress and fatigue changing how you respond to people and external stimuli then you will be an abusive parent, and you are an abusive partner.
