Another school shooting...more children dead.

[Dill]

(03-28-2023, 01:03 PM)KillerGoose Wrote: The question becomes "how do we facilitate that?" and I think we are currently heading in the wrong direction. Economic factors, healthcare and education are all major factors that I think are failing right now. Economically, costs have been on the rise for decades and wages haven't kept up. People have less disposable money, which leads to distress and feelings of hopelessness. I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up relating to more detached parenting on an aggregate level. I have no idea if it does, I am just spitballing thoughts here. Anecdotally, I grew up poor and so did several of my friends. My friends in this case, more often than not, had exhausted parents who just wanted quiet time because they got off their second job or some other, similar reason. 

Healthcare is exorbitantly expensive and relates back to economic factors. A person is sick and needs treatment, only to find out that the treatment isn't covered by their insurance/don't have insurance which means they need to go into severe debt to treat it. Another anecdote, but a woman I dated in college required brain surgery several years before we met. Her family owned their own business but didn't have health insurance. After her surgery and treatment, they were over $1.5MM in debt. Several years after we broke up, she required surgery again, and was then diagnosed with cancer. It's not only a soulcrushing story in general, but the monetary investment to just overcome something like that is debilitating. 

Education is pretty straightforward. Higher education is very expensive and even high-school curriculums aren't up to snuff in many areas of the country. At my high-school, I had an advanced placement statistics course I took and the professor said "if you keep your mouth shut and don't cause trouble, I'll give all of you an A."  I learned nothing from that class and received an A. Thankfully, my college classes were much better but across the board, education quality needs attention. 

A lot of nuance on this topic, but I think my general idea is that well regulated, compensated and educated individuals make happy individuals. Happy individuals, on an aggregate, make better parents. We are seeing the opposite. Many people my age are waiting to have children or declining to altogether due to education and economic concerns. 

To all this I would add that in our country, people move around a lot. Extended families, which used to support children along with parents, have been broken or reduced because of that. 

In many families, both parents need to work outside the home, and there are not grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins around to babysit or otherwise support the parents. Electronics began taking over the babysitter role in my generation; now it's much worse. 

Discipline has eroded as well--parents, and especially teachers, are reduced to various, often changing carrots and no sticks. 

I understand the healthcare story very well, having lived under the German system for a decade and then faced once again with the U.S. I think about that difference every time I hear of people crowd funding or whatever they call it when families go on line to beg for help. 

There is an added problem when it comes to mental health care though, and that is it is very difficult to "force" treatment on anyone.