I was a latchkey kid with early onset major depression.
I developed my moral compass when in my thirties I realized I was ignorant and my father was defending extrajudicial detention and torture of POWs by the United States. (That was the sort of thing masterminds did in movies to show they were evil, so WTF, America?)
Since then, after considerable deep dives, I’ve come to the conclusion that no one is raise right, that the industrial age decimated the extended family in which kids were raised by a community of adults, and parents weren’t driven to exhaustion by work.
Mental illness and abuse in the developed world is intergenerational. My parents are mad as hatters, but they didn’t have a chance. And their parents (The Greatest Generation) were traumatized. One was a WWII sniper with 30+ kills and ghosts in his eyes.
The human species is flying by the seat of its pants. We’re in uncharted territory. It’s not possible to raise kids right so much as with more or less functionality, which is not the same as capacity to cope.
I was a latchkey kid with early onset major depression.
I developed my moral compass when in my thirties I realized I was ignorant and my father was defending extrajudicial detention and torture of POWs by the United States. (That was the sort of thing masterminds did in movies to show they were evil, so WTF, America?)
Since then, after considerable deep dives, I’ve come to the conclusion that no one is raise right, that the industrial age decimated the extended family in which kids were raised by a community of adults, and parents weren’t driven to exhaustion by work.
Mental illness and abuse in the developed world is intergenerational. My parents are mad as hatters, but they didn’t have a chance. And their parents (The Greatest Generation) were traumatized. One was a WWII sniper with 30+ kills and ghosts in his eyes.
The human species is flying by the seat of its pants. We’re in uncharted territory. It’s not possible to raise kids right so much as with more or less functionality, which is not the same as capacity to cope.