Now certainly we should find ways for kids to go to school, but hard assing it seems like a bad way. Once the kids become adults who have had little agency in their lives and an intense hatred of having been forced to go to school how is that going to turn out? Is the hope they'll look back at all the anxiety and go "You know what? that gave me character! Thanks Mom and Dad!"?
If we want an educated populace dragging children kicking and screaming through twelves grades seems like a bad plan. You need to instill a love of learning and education that continues after that point. Graduating high school should just be the beginning.
I have ADHD. It makes me so unbelievably upset when people use the fact that ADHD can bring academic problems as a get out of jail card when they have academic problems stemming from their own laziness. It makes it so much worse for people who actually have ADHD too, because they get lumped in with the group of children who don't want to do their work. That's what I mean about self-victimization - by proclaiming yourself as a victim of your circumstances, you are absolved of responsibility and consequences for your actions. Not that schools nowadays even have much of that - kids now get so much leniency with ideas like "50 is a minimum grade" that you can just move from grade to grade not having learned anything.
How do you instill a love of learning when your competition is social media and smartphones that are designed by the smartest people in the world to be appealing? You can only make so much of learning fun. At some point, you have to buckle down and actually learn the stuff. You can't always make learning something that you love and want to do. Sometimes you just gotta know how to do algebra, and schools can't make algebra preferable to TikTok in a classroom. It's just not possible. And maybe children need to learn they can't always do what appeals to them in the immediate.
It’s important for students to stop using avoidance as a coping strategy before it becomes their primary way of dealing with problems for the rest for their lives, Dalton said.
“I don’t treat anxiety. I don’t have to treat anxiety because anxiety is temporary and harmless,” Dalton said. “What I treat is avoidance, and avoidance ruin lives.”
In other words, the experts recommend hard-assing it.
I’m not trying to comment on your anxiety diagnosis, even though the “expert” from the article apparently thinks it’s BS. I’ve known people with similar, persistent problems, and disagree with the expert.
However, I suspect there are other, non-mental illness related reasons for the uptick. Schools in parts of US have gotten a lot worse in the last few decades (especially in California), and are often run like prisons, complete with arrests civil rights violations for the poor or minority kids and shooting incidents.
If school administrators admit that, they get in trouble. However, if they say “20% of our kids have made up mental illness du jour,” then they receive additional funding.
One thing that really pisses me off about our local schools is that they’ve replaced enrichment programs with behavioral remediation programs. The latter hand out prizes for misbehaving less, so the smart kids do their best to get into remedial class.
In the past, the enrichment programs were the things to game if you wanted fun stuff to do during the day.
Has probably been uttered by majority of school age kid once in their life.
It's not something new.
Kids are kids, they play by testing limits. How high they can jump, how fast they can run, how much lie they can get away with.
As a smash double album featuring hit singles such as "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", "Comfortably Numb", and "Run Like Hell".
There have been other studies where students who had to miss large amounts of school due to a natural disaster caught up within a few years and there was no measurable difference in adulthood.
That was a study done from almost a hundred years ago, its hard to imagine its exactly applicable today.
To me the article reads like we're witnessing an evolution in biology, but instead of exploring the new nature of this offspring, we insist on using the previous generation's standards to measure this new branch.
We may not know exactly what it is they need, but their biology is clearly telling us that this is not it (you can measure hormonal levels if you dont actually believe what the kid is saying).
Maybe they do. https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/41319.John_Taylor_Gatt...
We mostly went into the woods and smoked pot, fooled around with our boyfriends and girlfriends, and went for fast food burgers.
I barely graduated high school, but went on to get a BS in electrical engineering and managed to have a reasonably productive life.
Modern kids are under a constant microscope. No wonder they're anxious. Although it's 1/2 their own fault for the amount of time they spend lost in their own minds (people call it "on the phone", but it's really just an electronically enhanced form of "lost in inner space"). The other 1/2 is their parents, who are stiflingly overberaring.
When we walked out of the house, no one knew where the hell we went. The effect of loosing this sense of individual freedom is MASSIVELY underappreciated...
It's literally a glorified prison, this shouldn't surprise anyone. I won't be sending my children to school, it only exists so that parents can neglect their children in favor of feeding the machine.
We are in a constant cycle of rewarding children for saying they have a condition. It's very important to give reasonable accomodations to people who have mental issues. But when you are constantly excusing children from accountability if they say the magic words, if you are promoting a culture that celebrates self victimization, and if you frame every single decision in life as one that has no free agency, you create massive problems. You get an uneducated populace that has convinced themselves from the get go that their life is doomed to fail because of XYZ condition someone said they have.