When I was in graduate school, a professor made a statement that forever changed how I looked at people. It was an abnormal psychology course that I had to take for course requirements. After several classes of how to identify various mental health issues, I asked where are all these mentally, unbalanced people kept. Looking at me with an understanding smile, he answered, “They are not kept anywhere. They are walking on the streets beside you, in the elevator, driving your cab, in the library, in the supermarket, and may even be teaching your children, or be on the local police force. Most of them may appear normal, like some functional alcoholics, until an emotional trigger, or chemical imbalance strips them of their social mask of “normal behavior”. Clear as day, as the years pass, mental health seems to be getting progressively worse in our country.
Speculating why, I am wondering if it is because the family unit is crumbling. The once strong family unit no longer exists. Children and teens pay more attention, and relate more to a screen than they relate to their parents or others. Unfortunately, the safety net of a healthy family unit is hanging by a thread. The structural unit and power of the family has been slowly weakened over the decades, ever since we completely went off the gold monetary standard in the early 1970s. Going completely off the monetary gold standard, and moving everyone into a debt base monetary system, where more and more debt, not savings, needs to be created each year in order for it to survive and was the foundational basis for how the powers-that-be weakened the family unit. Because of this financial change in our monetary system, our time needs were changed and had to be prioritized, and unfortunately the needs and emotional health of our children and our family were not on the top of the list. In the early seventies, after the monetary change, two full time jobs were now needed to make ends meet in order to support the family. The eliminating of a full time parent, at home, to supervise their children’s everyday life and needs aligning with their family’s values and concerns, eliminated the safety net of the very much needed emotional support of the developing child.
About twenty years ago there was a big push in the “self help” arena to get back to family dinners, where the family could bond, relax, socialize, learn about each other’s day while subtly, yet consistently reminding each other that they all look out for one other, that there was unconditional love for each other. The slogan was to have a family dinner every Sunday. I thought how strange. Why are families not having family dinners each evening like it was before our monetary system was changed in the early seventies? How did society change our personal lives so drastically that we no longer had time for family dinners each night? How was our time and choices stolen from us that American families were no longer having a family dinner each evening? Did that improve the quality of relationships?
There was a tragic school shooting in Florida. Some public officials are blaming the FBI for it. And since the FBI was told about this troubled teen and his intentions weeks ago, I too will blame the FBI. But then I hear the chanting of some people demanding it to be the fault of our Second Amendment. President Trump correctly identified it as a mental health issue, not a Second Amendment issue. There was a time when there weren’t school shootings. There was a time when teens would bring their rifles to school and leave them in the cloak room with their coats and boots. What has happened to society when at one time teens could bring their guns to school, and today, emotionally and unbalanced individuals do not have the safety net of a strong family unit that included nightly family dinners with loving adults, which help guard against such tragedies. It is well known that isolation, and loneliness that can contribute to, or even trigger emotional breakdowns, that can lead to tradegies.
I read that today’s generation will be known as the glass generation, where they grow up with a screen and pushing buttons, or an app, to learn about life and ease their emotional issues just as alcohol can sometimes temporarily ease someone’s feelings. The glass screen can give the illusion of having friends and social relationships, when in reality, the more one is on the screen, more and more isolation and loneliness takes over their lives. The glass screen then becomes their best friend, which can, among other not so good results, program violence into some people’s already unbalanced nature.
How many friends do you have? And I don’t mean the 500 friends on FaceBook because no real, normal, functional human being could socially and emotionally, in any effective or healthy way, interact that closely with that many people. How many friends do you really have that you could call when you needed a hand to move a chicken coop, or an ear to bounce your ideas of off, or bring you chicken soup when you are sick, or even notice if you are missing? How many times have human bodies been found dead in their house for days or even weeks or more because no one noticed that they were around any more?
Who is nurturing our children, our teens, our young adults…. FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, the latest shoot them up video game like Halo? Do you and your children actually have real friends and not just virtual friends?
It has been noted that people learn: about ten percent of what they read, about twenty percent of what they hear, about fifty percent of what they see and hear together, about eighty percent of what they discuss with others( hence the value of family conversations at the nightly dinner table), and ninety-five percent of what they teach. How is your child learning? How are you learning? What are you having your children teach others? What is your child learning so they have something of value to teach others? In larger families, the older children often taught skills or tutored something to their younger siblings. Church and community organizations often had helpers to teach others to garden, to shoot, to fish, to sew, to build a shed, or even play a musical instrument. What are you supervising your child to learn so they can have something of value to teach others, instead of being so emotionally isolated or insecure that they choose instead to hurt or bully others? How are you teaching your child to value life and relationships? How are you teaching and helping your child make real friends who are in alignment with healthy values? How are you contributing to the mental health of your family and your community?