Found on the book of faces:
- 1 in 5 children has mental health problems
- A 43% increase in ADHD has been noticed
- A 37% increase in teenage depression has been noticed
- A 200% increase in the suicide rate in children aged 10 to 14 has been noticed
- Emotionally available parents
- Clearly Defined Boundaries
- Responsibilities
- Balanced nutrition and adequate sleep
- Movement in general but especially outdoors
- Creative play, social interaction, unstructured play opportunities and spaces for boredom
- Digitally Distracted Parents
- Forgiving and permissive parents who let children “rule the world” and be the ones who make the rules
- A sense of entitlement, of deserving everything without earning it or being responsible for getting it
- Poor sleep and unbalanced nutrition
- A sedentary lifestyle
- Endless stimulation, technological nannies, instant gratification and absence of dull moments
- Set limits and remember that you are the captain of the ship. Your kids will feel safer knowing you have the control of the helm.
- Offer children a balanced lifestyle full of what children NEED, not just what they WANT. Don’t be afraid to say “no” to your kids if what they want isn’t what they need.
- Provide nutritious food and limit junk food.
- Spend at least one hour a day outdoors doing activities such as: cycling, hiking, fishing, bird/insect watching
- Enjoy a daily family dinner without smartphones or technology distracting them.
- Play board games as a family or if the children are too young for board games, let them lead their interests and let them be the ones who rule the game
- Involve your children in some task or household chores according to their age (folding clothes, sorting toys, hanging clothes, unpacking groceries, setting the table, feeding the dog, etc. )
- Implement a consistent sleep routine to ensure your child gets enough sleep. The timetables will be even more important for school-age children.
- Teach responsibility and independence. Don’t overprotect them against any frustration or any mistake. Making mistakes will help you develop resilience and learn to overcome life’s challenges,
- Do not carry your children’s backpack, do not take their backpacks, do not take them the homework they forgot, do not peel their bananas or oranges if they can do it by themselves (4-5 years). Instead of giving them the fish, teach them how to fish.
- Teach them to wait and delay gratification.
- Provide opportunities for “boredom”, because boredom is the moment when creativity awakens. Doesn’t feel responsible for always keeping the kids entertained.
- Do not use technology as a cure for boredom, nor offer it to the first second of inactivity.
- Avoid the use of technology during meals, in cars, restaurants, shopping centers. Use these moments as opportunities to socialize by training the brains to know how to function when they are in the mood: “boredom”
- Help them create a “jar of boredom” with activity ideas for when they are bored.
- Be emotionally available to connect with children and teach them self-regulation and social skills:
- Turn off phones at night when kids have to go to bed to avoid digital distraction.
- Become an emotional regulator or coach for your children. Teach them to acknowledge and manage their own frustrations and anger.
- Teach them to greet, to take turns, to share without anything, to say thank you and please, to acknowledge the mistake and apologize (don’t force them), be a model of all those values you instill.
- Connect emotionally – smile, hug, kiss, tickle, read, dance, jump, play or crawl with them.
We’ve all seen what happens when anyone gets too involved in social media. It results very quickly in raised blood pressure, increased anxiety, decreased brain activity, “doomscrolling”… the list of issues that result from it are huge. For adults, it’s life threatening… but for kids? It’s devastating.
My kids grew up, at least during their “formative years” (6 or 7 until 12 or 13), at various forms of reenacting events. There, they had no social media, because there’s not a lot of signal in the middle of a cow field. Phones, while permitted to be carried for emergencies, were essentially there to take pictures with. I did allow one of the kids to use their phone to download the text of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” because that seemed a good use of screens. I found all the “rennie kids” up on the Queen’s Stage (the largest in the fair) at 10pm, acting out Shakespeare with great seriousness. What’s a mother to do? I couldn’t yell at them for reading literature and acting…
While they had phones, the phones weren’t the center of their lives, at least when they were with me. Phones were a tool, not a feature. I’m not so sure that lesson stuck, but I do know I see my now-adult kids with their noses in their phones MUCH less than I see their peers that way. They were part of swim team, did various outdoor activities, and for a good portion of their younger lives, we had a small farm. That meant animals, both to love and to care for, and eventually to slaughter in some cases. They didn’t learn it by watching YouTube; they learned it by living it.
If you dropped my kids in a forest with nothing but a jug of water and a tarp, they’d make it out safely. They know how to survive. They know how to make a shelter, how to purify water, how to tell what direction they’re traveling in, and how to sleep safely in the forest (although one will freak out if a spider touches her, but that’s another story). I can excuse it because she can also start a fire in just about any weather with what she normally carries in her wallet.
They know what to do with themselves if there’s no internet. One will read, the other might ask to play bridge or another card game, and they both know how to stay safe. Losing the internet is an inconvenience, one that they had to put up with about every couple of weeks when we lived in the boonies and trees hit the lines more often than we liked. How many of today’s kids can entertain themselves for more than five minutes without a screen of some kind?
I am a huge proponent of kids being bored. If a kid is never bored, they never learn to self-soothe (as infants) or to entertain themselves (as slightly older children). I miss the days of tossing your kids out the door after school (or in the morning during the summer) and telling them that coming home for anything other than food and water (which they could have at the hose) would result in a chore list. Let them go out and reenact Shakespeare’s plays. Let them write their own music, have tea parties in the nearby forest, discover the joys of the library.
As they get older, they should slowly be allowed the freedom to fuck up. There’s a local mom that notoriously made certain she was in charge of her teen son 24/7. She knew what he ate, when he pee’d, what subjects he did at school, and she thought she knew what college he’d be going to and who (and when) he’d get married to. Turns out she was wrong about some of that. When he turned 18, he moved out. He’d never had a chance to be a kid… but more importantly, he’d never had a chance to fail *safely*.
My kids have been trying and failing since they were little. At 6 and 7, they failed at climbing trees and cutting up cucumbers for canning. In their early teens, they failed at taking care of pets and livestock, parallel parking, and replicating my goulash recipe. As older teens, they failed at saving money, planning for college, and making some early big life decisions. And because we let them fail, we were able to stand there and be their safety net. They KNEW they could fall down, and the parents would always be there to pick them up, dust them off, and set them on the path again. They’d go on their way, perhaps embarrassed or with a bruised ego, but whole and hale and ready to learn some more. When they went off to college, we were normal worried parents, but we weren’t terrified. We knew they’d do fine… and if they failed at anything, we’d be there to help them learn from those failures, stand them back up again, and give them the courage to continue on their paths.
Tech… is like a firearm. It can be a really useful tool! It allows us to have unprecedented information at our fingertips, on demand. I have more computing power in my old cell phone than our astronauts had when they flew to the moon. But like a firearm, tech is also dangerous. It is very easy to misuse. It’s very easy to OVERuse. It can hinder you in learning to do things for yourself. A great example is that neither one of my kids has any idea how to use a paper map. To them it’s an ancient artifact, these static pictures that don’t tell them when to turn left. But at least I know they have the ability to learn, should they have to.
I often say, one of the best things that could happen to the world is if someone shot an EMP at the sky and disabled all the satellites. Losing the internet, cell connectivity, more than half of the computing power of the world… I think it would help. Remember the phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors,” attributed to Robert Frost? The net removed ALL the fences. It lets Karens into our virtual yards. Strangers can read our words whenever they want. Hell, our kids can choose to become “influencers” as a job title, which is ridiculous. Get rid of all that, and I bet you’d see some major changes in all our personalities. We’d be less sedentary, and more likely to go for a walk in the evenings. We’d have to go to the library again to look stuff up. We’d have to read, again.
Let’s learn to carry (tech) responsibly.
Solid column, Ally.
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One thing that I would like to ask of Dr. Luis Rojas Marcos, if I ever had the chance is…
“Are the increases in childhood mental issues/illnesses a result of a mass change in children nationwide, or is it just as likely an increase in diagnosis?”
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I remember school as a kid. There was the “odd” kid that acted just a bit “weird” but no one really thought anything of it. Today, that odd/weird kid would likely be diagnosed on some spectrum of some mental illness. Did anyone else notice that instances of colon cancer have gone up significantly, starting almost to the day ColoGuard started getting wide use.
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The rest, I totally agree with. Get outside, do something other than stare at screens. Moms and Dads, participate in your child’s lives. But, not too much, let them learn, explore, and most importantly fail on their own.
I remember those “odd” kids in school, too. And yes, these days they’d be labeled with some kind of “spectrum” or learning disability and possibly medicated, rather than learn to cope on their own like they did in our time. And I maintain, the rush to “label” is just as dangerous as the rush to medicate; when you spend years telling a kid they’re not normal and can’t be expected to succeed normally, the kid stops trying. Every. Single. Time. Why wouldn’t they?
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But have the numbers of kids with spectrum disorders and learning disabilities actually gone up? Or has the number of available diagnoses increased and the criteria for diagnosis been loosened so a lot more kids fall under the label? For example, ADD and ADHD used to be simple learning disorders, but in recent years the definitions have expanded AND they’ve been reclassified as Autism Spectrum Disorders, and in some cases actual learning and/or behavioral disabilities. Suddenly a lot more kids are labeled as “on the spectrum” than in previous years.
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I wonder how much of it is about money, too. School districts get federal funding, of course, but “special education” funding gets them a LOT more money per qualifying kid, so there’s a perverse incentive to attract or diagnose and label as many learning-disabled and “special education” kids as possible — especially ones who can carry the label but function “sorta-okay-ish” in a normal, non-special-education classroom and thus not consume all that sweet lucre they bring in.
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As an aside, I’m reminded of something I read about blood pressure medications: for decades, a blood pressure reading of 130/90 was considered normal, but Big Pharma came out with new lines of medications for high blood pressure, the AMA quietly changed “normal” BP to 120/80, and now instead of 20-30% of the population having “high blood pressure”, it’s suddenly more like 60-70% … and Big Pharma profits skyrocket off the new drugs.
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It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn that something similar was happening with our children.
I can’t answer for the good doctor, but I can give you my own response to your question. I think that there’s a bit of BOTH increase in diagnoses and more illness. I know that Chris wasn’t diagnosed with autism as a kid, but I can tell you he’s autistic just by looking at him and listening to him. You don’t have to live with him to figure it out pretty quick. Yeah, the odd kid is probably on the spectrum, and probably was back then, too.
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The difference, I think, is that back then the odd kid was left to flounder often, and didn’t get help when they asked for it… but also wasn’t labeled and made to stand out even more because of that label. A bit of pro and con. Today, we label them early, and it’s not always easy to tell if they’ve grown into the diagnosis or if they just got caught early.
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One of the most amazing things I’ve seen is Chris’s youngest son. He’s autistic, and we all knew it when he was very little. But he functioned and continues to function very well, so beyond getting him diagnosed officially (because if we needed it, the only way to grab it quickly was if we had it done early), we didn’t really do much. Throughout school, his major “interventions” were that he got a bit extra time on tests, and he was allowed to type notes instead of hand writing them. When he was doing the “going into middle school” tests with the local psyche, she noted that he had incredible coping skills, and that was because he’d learned “how to be an autistic growing kid” by watching “an autistic grown man” (Chris). Most autistic kids have to learn how to cope through trial and error, constantly reinventing the wheel because there’s no one to teach them the natural way. Chris’s kids have had him as a mentor. It’s amazing how much more functional they are (even the one who is more severely disabled) than others in their situations. They know what to do in the same way a “normal” kid knows what to do… they watched their parent(s) do and succeed or fail.
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As to cologuard, you might also note that the number of *fatal* colon cancers has gone down exponentially. That’s because instead of getting caught at Stage 4 when they were impossible to treat, they’re getting caught at Stage 1 or even earlier, and dealt with. But we’re also probably dealing with all the crap in our “food” (I use that term lightly). If you can’t easily read all the ingredients in something, eat something else. *sigh*
One of the greatest decisions we ever made as parents was to remove the tablet computers from the kids’ daily lives (and eventually remove them entirely). We had noticed that the kids were not-so-slowly turning into zombies with serious addiction issues. The first week or two without the screens was hard — with a LOT of screaming, tears, and begging (which looked WAY too much like hard-drug withdrawals for comfort; “addiction issues” isn’t a phrase I use lightly) — but once we got past it, the kids calmed down, opened up, and started behaving like normal children again.
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Probably the second-greatest decision we ever made was to make “I’m bored” a dangerous thing to say in our home. We’re parents, not clowns, and while there are times we’re available to play, we are NOT full-time live-in entertainment. If you’re bored, you find something to do. If you come to us because you want US to find you something to do, rest assured we WILL find you something, and you probably won’t like it; there’s ALWAYS more chores to be done. And so the kids got much better at entertaining themselves, learning, creating, playing outside, and generally self-soothing.
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Yes, tech is a tool, and a powerful one, but it is shockingly easy to misuse. I’m reminded of the old saying, “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Today’s society and culture are so inundated and infatuated with technology that it really has become the proverbial hammer; every problem is approached as if there’s a tech-based solution, when real, practical solutions have been there for years (if not decades or centuries) and never left. That’s not to say that tech has no place, because it certainly does, just like when the problem is a raised nail, the right tool really is the hammer. It just must be used responsibly, in the right time and place.
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Having the combined knowledge and history of the entire human race — and instant communications across the globe — at one’s fingertips is a powerful thing indeed, but society wants to treat it like the solution to every problem, and it’s just not.
I’m very grateful that my hobby removes me from my tech on a regular basis. Most weekends, I look at my phone for 5 minutes in the morning, and a half hour in the evening before going to sleep. I check the news, my email, and upload photos, and that’s about it. During the week I write for the blog obviously, but I am also trying new recipes (tech free), hand sewing (tech free), researching history (definitely tech related, but not centric, if that makes sense). 🙂 I am very aware that getting away from the book of faces makes me feel a lot better. I try to make sure to take advantage of that.
rampant stupidity is a large contributor to the stateof things these days..
young people aren’t being taught basic life skills anymore.
no home ec no shop class..
what are uneducated entitled adult sized toddlers going to do when all us skilled old people aint around any more?
They’re going to die off, curby. And my kids, who know how to do (or know how to find the information to allow them to do) All The Things, will soar like the eagles they are. 😉
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For a long time, I worried about all those other kids. I still do, but in a much more passing fashion. If they want to be stupid, there’s nothing I can do to fix that. I’ve taught my kids that it’s not their job to take care of stupid people. So what those stupid people do with their lives is up to them. Maybe they’ll serve burgers and fries to my kids as they pass through the drive through in their fancy cars.
exactly.
we can’t fix stupid and numbin it with a hammer just makes you tired..