Route246
Full time employment: Posting here.
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2023
- Messages
- 765
Been musing about the mental health crisis hitting baby boomers' grandchildrens' generation. As a young baby boomer I don't recall teen suicide, depression, ADHD and other mental conditions being so visible or common when I was growing up. I only know personally of one suicide during my K-12 years and none in my collegiate years. Next to where I grew up it was a common occurrence for Gunn HS (Palo Alto) to have students jumping in front of a CalTrain commuter train on the other side of town.
Did we just "suck it up" and deal with it or did some generational change happen? It is easy to say the helicopter parenting, overindulgent and privileged upbringing with little or no life adversity presented to these children is a root cause but is it?
I had a talk with my nephew a few months ago and he and his sister are two that went through therapy, took meds and lived a privileged life (compared to how our family lived). He told me his son is not going to have anything easy, he will have to work and earn his own money and will not be able to participate in sports the way that his father and auntie did just because his parents can afford it. If he wants to play golf he is going to have to earn money for clubs, range buckets and green fees. If he wants to play hockey, tennis or baseball he is going to have to earn money to at least pay for his equipment. He won't have the benefit of a country club membership, either.
On a side note, an engineer on my team grew up tough on the streets, had brothers who were shot and did prison time. Somehow he avoided all of that, avoided getting arrested and managed to make a nice white-collar career for himself without distancing or taking the street cred from himself. He was pretty good at baseball but not good enough for the pros. We were talking about the depression, teen suicide and all of the mental health issues happening today. He shook his head and pointed blame squarely on the parents, claiming that the kids who group in rough neighborhoods are no different physiologically from those who grew up privileged in the suburbs. He said where he grew up you just learned to survive or not, no real choices other than those two. He said nobody in his neighborhood had time to be depressed, did not have access to great mental health care and if you did show any kind of mental weakness the environment would take care of fixing that. Tough life but he said the concept of mental health issues among his friends is really not there, he believed much of it is contrived and a product of over-protecting a child which he understands is a human instinct, but it just was not available in the low-income environment he grew up in. Harsh words but it made sense.
My nephew seems to realize this and is making an attempt with his son to make sure he sees some adversity, to see that life is not so easy and to work and earn money to be able to afford things. I hold out hope that the next generations will do better in this regard.
Did we just "suck it up" and deal with it or did some generational change happen? It is easy to say the helicopter parenting, overindulgent and privileged upbringing with little or no life adversity presented to these children is a root cause but is it?
I had a talk with my nephew a few months ago and he and his sister are two that went through therapy, took meds and lived a privileged life (compared to how our family lived). He told me his son is not going to have anything easy, he will have to work and earn his own money and will not be able to participate in sports the way that his father and auntie did just because his parents can afford it. If he wants to play golf he is going to have to earn money for clubs, range buckets and green fees. If he wants to play hockey, tennis or baseball he is going to have to earn money to at least pay for his equipment. He won't have the benefit of a country club membership, either.
On a side note, an engineer on my team grew up tough on the streets, had brothers who were shot and did prison time. Somehow he avoided all of that, avoided getting arrested and managed to make a nice white-collar career for himself without distancing or taking the street cred from himself. He was pretty good at baseball but not good enough for the pros. We were talking about the depression, teen suicide and all of the mental health issues happening today. He shook his head and pointed blame squarely on the parents, claiming that the kids who group in rough neighborhoods are no different physiologically from those who grew up privileged in the suburbs. He said where he grew up you just learned to survive or not, no real choices other than those two. He said nobody in his neighborhood had time to be depressed, did not have access to great mental health care and if you did show any kind of mental weakness the environment would take care of fixing that. Tough life but he said the concept of mental health issues among his friends is really not there, he believed much of it is contrived and a product of over-protecting a child which he understands is a human instinct, but it just was not available in the low-income environment he grew up in. Harsh words but it made sense.
My nephew seems to realize this and is making an attempt with his son to make sure he sees some adversity, to see that life is not so easy and to work and earn money to be able to afford things. I hold out hope that the next generations will do better in this regard.