9 ms·

"long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic" As a parent, it seems strange to me to blame this situation on the

"long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic" As a parent, it seems strange to me to blame this situation on the pandemic when it's been, for all purposes, over in most parts of the country for more than a year. My kids have been back in school, sports, and being IRL with their friends for going on two years now. The inability of mental health professionals to clearly separate temporary factors like pandemic isolation from the pervasive root causes that remain unaddressed is pretty frustrating. The science, if you can even call it that, is distressingly thin here and it makes me angry.

twelve40 4y ago
it was a huge hit to the gut. the kids were sitting at home for like a year+. crappy zoom non-classes where everyone falls asleep. at my local high school even the newly built sports field was shut down and fenced off for the whole year. why??? sure, the pandemic, whatever, but it was brutal for the little people.
- NDizzle 4y ago
  It didn't have to be that way. I moved my family out of California in May 2020 to get away from the terrible decisions that were already happening. They were playing sports and doing normal stuff by June, 2020. Went to school in person that fall. All of the data was there. It's been there the whole time.
e12e 4y ago
The pandemic (isolation etc) might have formative/lasting effects though, similar to trauma? Perhaps especially for kids/youth who were a certain age/stage of growing up at the time? Ed: apparently the study uses data from 2021
EGreg 4y ago
Well, it is red meat thrown to the activists to avoid talking about issues that would make them shout down the article and its publisher. For example, if we talk about racial issues in this country, we don’t usually focus on the capitalist music industry using gangsta rap to export role models spewing misogynistic lyrics to Black kids many of whom identify with them, we don’t talk much about the breakdown in the nuclear family, the rise of divorces or out-of-wedlock births. (People used to — see the Moynihan report for instance.) We hardly talk about welfare traps or minimum wage laws (Milton Friedman used to etc.) We don’t talk about academic performance of Black kids being affected by stuff like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white Whenever Bill Cosby or Stephen A Smith or Deloris Tucker someone like that goes on a rant, they are shouted down. That is why it is far safer to attribute it all to slavery 150 years ago, and Jim Crow laws, even though the previous generations who had marriage and school uniforms and higher church attendance etc. are horrified at what many in the current generations have been doing, and the lyrics in Drill music or Gangsta Rap etc. People are starting to wake up — I have been in a clubhouse room with 2000 people about whether a lot of rap is leading to violence, and almost everyone on stage was Black and most were saying absolutely. Some people said it creates jobs in the music industry, others pointed out how many jobs are destroyed overall because the kids can’t pass an interview. And so on. It was really nice to see but only possible because Black people got together to honestly discuss what has been going on. Now we need to turn it into action, in our own lives, with our own kids, and what they are exposed to. Most parents work so much or are divorced and the kids are raised by the street or by the government!
- asdff 4y ago
  There's also the fact that things are getting worse in terms of the reproductive rights among females. If you are a teen girl growing up in a red state where you have the national culture celebrating how we have supposedly advanced past bigotry and hate, while you have your local state legislature making it impossible to get an abortion and general being cruel and corrupt, its hard not to get depressed about the situation.
  - arp242 4y ago
    This rise also seems present in e.g. The Netherlands; ~24% of women aged 12 to 25 in 2021; up from ~14% in 2020.[1] It's less than "3 in 5" from this article, but the age brackets are different and differences in the asked questions might influence things, so it can't be directly compared. [1]: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2022/22/mentale-gezondheid-jongeren-afgenomen https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2022/22/mentale-gezondheid-j...
- jessaustin 4y ago
  I think we're supposed to stop looking to Cosby for moral advice? Anyway, complicating an already contentious issue (parent stipulates that he is "angry") with one's own idiosyncratic take on "race in America" seems bad for reasoned discussion.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Who do you look to for moral advice? What is wrong with Deloris Tucker and Steven A Smith? And anyway, one does not need to be a paragon of virtue in every fact of their life to denounce current trends. Many people who were very loud turned out to do shady things in the background. Are we supposed to look to BLM leaders for advice, for example? NAACP has a far longer track record and their leaders seem to have acted with more integrity over the decades: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lives-matter-activists-accuse-executive-stealing-10-million-dono-rcna46481 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lives-matter-activ...
    - 4y ago

twelve40 4y ago

it was a huge hit to the gut. the kids were sitting at home for like a year+. crappy zoom non-classes where everyone falls asleep. at my local high school even the newly built sports field was shut down and fenced off for the whole year. why??? sure, the pandemic, whatever, but it was brutal for the little people.

NDizzle 4y ago
It didn't have to be that way. I moved my family out of California in May 2020 to get away from the terrible decisions that were already happening. They were playing sports and doing normal stuff by June, 2020. Went to school in person that fall. All of the data was there. It's been there the whole time.

e12e 4y ago

The pandemic (isolation etc) might have formative/lasting effects though, similar to trauma? Perhaps especially for kids/youth who were a certain age/stage of growing up at the time? Ed: apparently the study uses data from 2021

EGreg 4y ago

Well, it is red meat thrown to the activists to avoid talking about issues that would make them shout down the article and its publisher. For example, if we talk about racial issues in this country, we don’t usually focus on the capitalist music industry using gangsta rap to export role models spewing misogynistic lyrics to Black kids many of whom identify with them, we don’t talk much about the breakdown in the nuclear family, the rise of divorces or out-of-wedlock births. (People used to — see the Moynihan report for instance.) We hardly talk about welfare traps or minimum wage laws (Milton Friedman used to etc.) We don’t talk about academic performance of Black kids being affected by stuff like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white Whenever Bill Cosby or Stephen A Smith or Deloris Tucker someone like that goes on a rant, they are shouted down. That is why it is far safer to attribute it all to slavery 150 years ago, and Jim Crow laws, even though the previous generations who had marriage and school uniforms and higher church attendance etc. are horrified at what many in the current generations have been doing, and the lyrics in Drill music or Gangsta Rap etc. People are starting to wake up — I have been in a clubhouse room with 2000 people about whether a lot of rap is leading to violence, and almost everyone on stage was Black and most were saying absolutely. Some people said it creates jobs in the music industry, others pointed out how many jobs are destroyed overall because the kids can’t pass an interview. And so on. It was really nice to see but only possible because Black people got together to honestly discuss what has been going on. Now we need to turn it into action, in our own lives, with our own kids, and what they are exposed to. Most parents work so much or are divorced and the kids are raised by the street or by the government!

asdff 4y ago
There's also the fact that things are getting worse in terms of the reproductive rights among females. If you are a teen girl growing up in a red state where you have the national culture celebrating how we have supposedly advanced past bigotry and hate, while you have your local state legislature making it impossible to get an abortion and general being cruel and corrupt, its hard not to get depressed about the situation.
- arp242 4y ago
  This rise also seems present in e.g. The Netherlands; ~24% of women aged 12 to 25 in 2021; up from ~14% in 2020.[1] It's less than "3 in 5" from this article, but the age brackets are different and differences in the asked questions might influence things, so it can't be directly compared. [1]: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2022/22/mentale-gezondheid-jongeren-afgenomen https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2022/22/mentale-gezondheid-j...
jessaustin 4y ago
I think we're supposed to stop looking to Cosby for moral advice? Anyway, complicating an already contentious issue (parent stipulates that he is "angry") with one's own idiosyncratic take on "race in America" seems bad for reasoned discussion.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Who do you look to for moral advice? What is wrong with Deloris Tucker and Steven A Smith? And anyway, one does not need to be a paragon of virtue in every fact of their life to denounce current trends. Many people who were very loud turned out to do shady things in the background. Are we supposed to look to BLM leaders for advice, for example? NAACP has a far longer track record and their leaders seem to have acted with more integrity over the decades: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lives-matter-activists-accuse-executive-stealing-10-million-dono-rcna46481 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lives-matter-activ...
  - 4y ago