9 ms·

Positive relationships with adults is shown to be means of counteracting adverse childhood experiences. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/ h

Positive relationships with adults is shown to be means of counteracting adverse childhood experiences. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/ I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Less kids in households that don't want them. This is a pipeline problem. Intentional children only. Hard topic to cover online, nuance and emotions on the topic. > I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change. You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.
- bumby 2y ago
  Related, and equally hard to cover online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39978774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39978774 ("HN: Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend the abortion-crime hypothesis") https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-levitt-and-john-donohue-defend-a-finding-made-famous-by-freakonomics https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-le... | https://archive.today/m3zl0 https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”")
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- throwway120385 2y ago
  It would also help if more people that are doing marginal work could receive a wage that they felt secure with. Money is one of the biggest stressors for couples and families.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    I do not disagree. But it will take years, if not decades, for labor rights and organizing to improve the situation you mention. Preventing unwanted children takes less time and effort, tragic as it is to type out.
  - bsimpson 2y ago
    I don't understand how to practically make this work. There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary. Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to participate in society and failing. That's truly heartbreaking. At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage" and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of second-order effects/unintended consequences without actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.
    - bjt 2y ago
      I don't think it works if we're narrowly focused just on wages, but I don't know why that has to be the only focus. If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers. I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while minimizing the disincentives for people to work. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-income-tax-credit https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-incom...
      - SkyBelow 2y ago
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - styxfrix 2y ago
    Presenting dire conclusions without providing a shred of substance?
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Are you suggesting that humanity will die out so long as only willing, intentional parents have children? That is an interesting thesis and conclusion to come to (total fertility rate = 0 vs somewhere between 0 and 2.1 [replacement rate]). We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement. But fertility is an exponential system. So a fertility rate of means that each following generation (~20 years) will be half as large as the one that came before it (the formula is simply a ratio of fertility_rate/2). So you won't see any problem at all until the first generation to have low fertility starts to die. At that point you suddenly start seeing a rapid exponential effect. Every ~20 years (the size of a generation) your population size will be decreasing by 50% !!! And this never stops until you go extinct (which won't take particularly long), or start having children again. It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them. Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
- smeej 2y ago
  You can change up the emotions on the topic pretty quickly if you change the framing to "intentional sex only" rather than "intentional children only," even though the former accomplishes the latter. It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as soon as you suggest they should only have sex when all parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the risk of pregnancy, you're a killjoy.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
causal 2y ago
You can select a dropdown at the end for "Parenting style" which divides the groups by number of parents involved. This seems to be the strongest correlator of any of the data shown.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  Parenting style is much more likely to not be causative though
  - drawkward 2y ago
    Citation, please?
    - naasking 2y ago
      Studies of identical twins raised apart, like MISTRA, show remarkable similarities in life outcomes and big five personality traits. There's a big genetic component, and the time spent with parents is dwarfed by time spent with others once they start school, so the role of parenting style on life outcomes would have to have a significant outsized effect compared to all other life experiences. If I recall correctly, absent neglect or abuse, parental influence doesn't matter as much as people think.
      - causal 2y ago
        This isn't really a citation, and your twins-study outcomes argument blaming genetics also undermines every other conclusion of TFA.
        naasking 2y ago
        MISTRA is a citation, it's a well-known name, just Google the study. Also: 1. TFA article talked only about correlations, because that's all they have. 2. Genetics influences all of TFA factors as well. 3. TFA discussed "adverse experiences", "parents involved" and "family risk scores". Guess what I said: parenting really only has a significant effect in cases of neglect and abuse. Sounds like we agree.
fzeindl 2y ago
This is old news. Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives. What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
- Jerrrry 2y ago
  ding ding ding! I call it "Bastard's Syndrome"
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  > What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault. This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my depression, which I've never really been able to do before despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that I see depression as a chronic condition I have (say perhaps analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as opposed to something that I am at my core, it makes it much, much less scary and threatening to me. In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very, very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good enough there either.
  - 2y ago
richardlblair 2y ago
> I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change Teachers and volunteers are how I was able to find a better life. What you're doing matters.
kulahan 2y ago
How do you volunteer at the local school? My wife and I are both passionate about and interested in improving children’s lives, but not super sure how best to do it outside of donations and big brother big sister-type programs. As an aside, maybe it’s because I’m inexperienced, but I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.??? Is it just me? I am clearly very ignorant about all this
- anotheruser13 2y ago
  I would like to volunteer as well, but it would have to be outside of home and school since I live in Texas. I would like to help young people learn to cope with being LGBTQ+, ADD, and other things, but I don't think parents would appreciate it.
  - valval 2y ago
    Yeah maybe you should reserve that stuff for your own kids. Which you probably don’t have.
    - fallingfrog 2y ago
      Why? Helping kids develop study skills would help with adhd, helping kids deal with bullying would help with lgbtq issues. I can’t see how that would be harmful.
- trogdor 2y ago
  >I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc. I recently started volunteering at my county’s animal shelter. The experience has been very rewarding.
- subpixel 2y ago
  Where I live the superintendent and local groups formed a task-force style intervention and looped in local volunteers. The scale of the problem is most visible through 'special ed' allocation. Once a program for kids with learning challenges, it now also encompasses what are essentially behavioral problems. Kids don't get kicked out of school for throwing raging tantrums or hitting teachers - they get placed into programs designed to keep them in school. (If that's what life is like at school, imagine what life is like at home.)
seb1204 2y ago
Thank you for volunteering.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Less kids in households that don't want them. This is a pipeline problem. Intentional children only. Hard topic to cover online, nuance and emotions on the topic. > I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change. You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.

bumby 2y ago
Related, and equally hard to cover online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39978774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39978774 ("HN: Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend the abortion-crime hypothesis") https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-levitt-and-john-donohue-defend-a-finding-made-famous-by-freakonomics https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-le... | https://archive.today/m3zl0 https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”")
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
throwway120385 2y ago
It would also help if more people that are doing marginal work could receive a wage that they felt secure with. Money is one of the biggest stressors for couples and families.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  I do not disagree. But it will take years, if not decades, for labor rights and organizing to improve the situation you mention. Preventing unwanted children takes less time and effort, tragic as it is to type out.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  I don't understand how to practically make this work. There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary. Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to participate in society and failing. That's truly heartbreaking. At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage" and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of second-order effects/unintended consequences without actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.
  - bjt 2y ago
    I don't think it works if we're narrowly focused just on wages, but I don't know why that has to be the only focus. If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers. I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while minimizing the disincentives for people to work. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-income-tax-credit https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-incom...
    - SkyBelow 2y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
[flagged]
- styxfrix 2y ago
  Presenting dire conclusions without providing a shred of substance?
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Are you suggesting that humanity will die out so long as only willing, intentional parents have children? That is an interesting thesis and conclusion to come to (total fertility rate = 0 vs somewhere between 0 and 2.1 [replacement rate]). We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement. But fertility is an exponential system. So a fertility rate of means that each following generation (~20 years) will be half as large as the one that came before it (the formula is simply a ratio of fertility_rate/2). So you won't see any problem at all until the first generation to have low fertility starts to die. At that point you suddenly start seeing a rapid exponential effect. Every ~20 years (the size of a generation) your population size will be decreasing by 50% !!! And this never stops until you go extinct (which won't take particularly long), or start having children again. It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them. Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
smeej 2y ago
You can change up the emotions on the topic pretty quickly if you change the framing to "intentional sex only" rather than "intentional children only," even though the former accomplishes the latter. It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as soon as you suggest they should only have sex when all parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the risk of pregnancy, you're a killjoy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

causal 2y ago

You can select a dropdown at the end for "Parenting style" which divides the groups by number of parents involved. This seems to be the strongest correlator of any of the data shown.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
Parenting style is much more likely to not be causative though
- drawkward 2y ago
  Citation, please?
  - naasking 2y ago
    Studies of identical twins raised apart, like MISTRA, show remarkable similarities in life outcomes and big five personality traits. There's a big genetic component, and the time spent with parents is dwarfed by time spent with others once they start school, so the role of parenting style on life outcomes would have to have a significant outsized effect compared to all other life experiences. If I recall correctly, absent neglect or abuse, parental influence doesn't matter as much as people think.
    - causal 2y ago
      This isn't really a citation, and your twins-study outcomes argument blaming genetics also undermines every other conclusion of TFA.
      - naasking 2y ago
        MISTRA is a citation, it's a well-known name, just Google the study. Also: 1. TFA article talked only about correlations, because that's all they have. 2. Genetics influences all of TFA factors as well. 3. TFA discussed "adverse experiences", "parents involved" and "family risk scores". Guess what I said: parenting really only has a significant effect in cases of neglect and abuse. Sounds like we agree.

fzeindl 2y ago

This is old news. Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives. What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.

Jerrrry 2y ago
ding ding ding! I call it "Bastard's Syndrome"
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault. This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my depression, which I've never really been able to do before despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that I see depression as a chronic condition I have (say perhaps analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as opposed to something that I am at my core, it makes it much, much less scary and threatening to me. In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very, very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good enough there either.
- 2y ago

richardlblair 2y ago

> I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change Teachers and volunteers are how I was able to find a better life. What you're doing matters.

kulahan 2y ago

How do you volunteer at the local school? My wife and I are both passionate about and interested in improving children’s lives, but not super sure how best to do it outside of donations and big brother big sister-type programs. As an aside, maybe it’s because I’m inexperienced, but I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.??? Is it just me? I am clearly very ignorant about all this

anotheruser13 2y ago
I would like to volunteer as well, but it would have to be outside of home and school since I live in Texas. I would like to help young people learn to cope with being LGBTQ+, ADD, and other things, but I don't think parents would appreciate it.
- valval 2y ago
  Yeah maybe you should reserve that stuff for your own kids. Which you probably don’t have.
  - fallingfrog 2y ago
    Why? Helping kids develop study skills would help with adhd, helping kids deal with bullying would help with lgbtq issues. I can’t see how that would be harmful.
trogdor 2y ago
>I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc. I recently started volunteering at my county’s animal shelter. The experience has been very rewarding.
subpixel 2y ago
Where I live the superintendent and local groups formed a task-force style intervention and looped in local volunteers. The scale of the problem is most visible through 'special ed' allocation. Once a program for kids with learning challenges, it now also encompasses what are essentially behavioral problems. Kids don't get kicked out of school for throwing raging tantrums or hitting teachers - they get placed into programs designed to keep them in school. (If that's what life is like at school, imagine what life is like at home.)

seb1204 2y ago

Thank you for volunteering.