Well I believe this bad news. I see extraordinarily troubled teens and dysfunctional families.
I became concerned many years ago when I saw young kids on big time psych meds. My pediatrician and psych colleagues say it’s frightening how sick some of these kids are. My teacher friends say it has changed the nature of their work–they are required to devote a lot of time to unsociallized feral children.
This is a pretty decent review of the latest CDC assessment of teen suicides and suicide risk.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/sad_truths_about_teen_suicide.html
One must consider that the suicide rate or thoughts of suicide are symptomatic of a deeper and wider problem–we have a lot of kids who won’t ever be functional adults. A lot of parents who are clueless on how to make a child into an adult, because, they may be of that generation i saw many years ago that didn’t get it, and never grew up themselves.
It is terrible to see. Some families are completely torn up by mental illness, and have multiple members with serious mental problems.
It is no surprise it wipes out families–we are social animals, dependent on the family as a place of safety and succor.
Some families have multiple children with mental health problems at a very young age, already recieving for social security. Imagine your life as a parent if you have a child who has required hospitalization for a mental illness.
The oppositional defiant, ADHD, emotional disorder children have become a big problem that will overwhelm our schools and may create a major problem in our healthcare system.
Hey, Erica, you are young and you have a life to live.
The best way to approach that is to say–I put the negative and problem things behind me and I commit myself to living the right way today and tomorrow.
There is no way for me to reach out and make a difference, it is your life. You need to get a hold on what works to make your life better and keep doing it. Look forwaqrd and make it better, don’t look back, you can’t change the past.
I don’t hear this to often around friends wanting to suicide themselves, but I know that the people who want to commit suicide they need a lot of support , and to saves life’s. I say mostly bully has been the main one in school that has happen mostly. I know that my cousin has told me that he knew this girl in person from facebook, but what happens she never talk about her feeling deep down what was in her mind of suicide because after my cousin had the last talk with her, one week later they said she suicide herself. My cousin had told me that she was pretty, popular in school and all but I guess it was sufficient for her maybe she felt alone deep down in her, or something happened to her and she killed herself. In this article I could almost relate this to myself because when I was in 1st grade through my middle school I was always bully, in the other side I know I had good friends too. But I never had a mind where I said I wanted to suicide myself, I would just go home and cry and tell my mom how I felt. She has taught me that in this world theirs going to be bad people so don’t worry ignore what they tell you because that’s not true. She has a point when you ignore someone who said something bad they get more mad because you didn’t pay attention to them.
Fox Mulder had nothing on my dad.
“The Truth is Out There,” eh? I can get behind that.
Wait: Mulder & Scully were your parents?? Duuuuude.
^_~
No, haven’t seen much of a market for flexeril, some of the others.
People will use a lot of the things for a little high.
John Dale Dunn MD JD Consultant Emergency Services/Peer Review Civilian Faculty, Emergency Medicine Residency Carl R. Darnall Army Med Center Fort Hood, Texas Medical Officer, Sheriff Bobby Grubbs Brown County, Texas 325 784 6697 (h) 642 5073 (c)
Flexeril was a street drug, too? Wow, I am amazed at all the street drugs. I’ve had Flexeril–did nothing for me. Fortunately, or not, I am pretty much immune to all drugs that get people high–narcotics, etc. So I’m always surprised to find out things I found useless were such fun for others!
Soma is a muscle relaxer, a sort of sedative for people who claim muscle spasms yadayada.
I used it for a short time. A long time ago–became a street drug for the sedative recreational effects.
Similar to other muscle relaxants.
And I can’t help but wonder if the company made the choice to conjure of ideas of a smooth and easy time from a pill
Plenty of people with back problems that use drugs like Soma, which is still around.
Others are Flexeril, Parafon Forte, Robaxin, Norflex.
John Dale Dunn MD JD Consultant Emergency Services/Peer Review Civilian Faculty, Emergency Medicine Residency Carl R. Darnall Army Med Center Fort Hood, Texas Medical Officer, Sheriff Bobby Grubbs Brown County, Texas 325 784 6697 (h) 642 5073 (c)
Actually, there is a drug named Soma (carisoprodol). It’s a muscle relaxer. I always wondered if the name was chosen on purpose by someone with a warped sense of humor.
I’m also “too close”. I can’t describe the antipathy I feel towards my sons’ previous schools. Unfortunately, I fear that any viable solution would come too late to save the current generation. For the time being, if it is at all possible, I feel that homeschooling is the best option for the children that are the true victims of school system failure. It’s not as hard as many people believe. The internet has opened up a world of distance education opportunity. We are able to tailor our children’s education to their specific needs. In many states, teachers that have left the public school system are able to start up micro schools that are covered under homeschool legislation where they can put their expertise and experience to good use doing what they do best without the political drama they may face at the public school. Best of all, if students fall a bit behind in one area, we can spend extra time there without also holding them back in the subjects at which they excel. Also, I think it’s the purest and most effective form of protest against the public system and its cost per child policies. When a significant portion of parents take their children out and the standardized testing shows that homeschooling is more effective at the primary goal of education, then the higher ups will have to start paying better attention to our advice on teaching methods.
As for kids that remain trapped in the current system. Teachers such as your wife that are dedicated to muscling through for the sake of the children are the only hope they have. Thank her for me.
” Sometimes, when a balancing act is going bad, the best course of action is to let everything fall and then pick up the pieces.” I hear you. As a conservative (maybe even extreme conservative), I agree. It should have been policy with Wall Street/FannieMae/FreddieMac in 2008. However, I believe the consequences too great for that approach to this problem. The price is too high and it is the innocent who are paying. Maybe I’m too close to it but I can’t let it fail without a fight. I know I can’t save them all but I can save at least one and that has to be good enough.
I’ve moved around a lot so I know that different states can be very different, even different parts of the same city. I do tend to devolve into an”us vs. them” tone when writing, but please don’t mistake that for a belief that all public school teachers are part of the problem. Quite the opposite, I feel most of them are trying their hardest despite having their hands tied by administration. My brother is also a teacher, though at a private school, and many of my wife’s family were teachers. Most retired because they got too old to be able to deal with the pressure. They invariably talk well of the students and disparage the administrators, politicians, and union reps that prevented them from being as effective as they felt they could have been. My sister-in-law gave it up after two years and pursued a path that would allow her to assist learning disabled children more directly through social work. I think the biggest problem with the system is bad logistics and piss poor money management bordering (or often down right passing) fraud. It’s just not reasonable to expect one person to effectively educate a classroom of 30 or more children. Add to that the mad scramble of every special interest group trying to insinuate their own answer to the age-old question of what should we teach, and you have a recipe for failure. Sometimes, when a balancing act is going bad, the best course of action is to let everything fall and then pick up the pieces.
Unfortunately there is not a one-size-fits-all answer. Not only is my wife an educator, but 2 of my sisters, my mother and father-in-law, sister-in-law and numerous aunts, uncles etc are or were in education as well. So we have seen pretty much the spectrum and while I am very, very glad your homeschool is working, it doesn’t always. In general, homeschool works well through elementary school but it starts to break down as kids get into more advanced studies. Some parents are just not cut out to teach and sometimes it is a family thing. My wife is an outstanding teacher but for some reason my older son just could not learn from her (personality clashes). Homeschooling does not work for everyone, we have seen some disastrous results.
That leaves private schools which tend to be expensive so that leaves out most of the population. It is possible to get a good education from public schools but it requires a great deal of parental involvement. My boys are an example of that.
I do want to leave you with this. There are some successes which is why my sainted wife is still in the business. Every so often she gets the opportunity to change a child’s destiny which makes the daily struggle all worthwhile. We have plenty of “children” we have “adopted” over the years we still keep in touch with complete with pictures of graduations and (grand)children on our refrigerator.
Keep up the fight and keep the faith. We can make a difference.
For one, check the side effects list of all those prescription mind altering drugs and you’ll find some version of the phrase “suicidal ideations” I used to think it was a statistical fluke until my wife had an adverse reaction to a neurological drug. They really can make a perfectly happy normal person suicidal. Look further into the FDA info and you find something along the lines of “it is not known by what mechanism” x drug treats y symptoms. Also of note is the fact that the FDA doesn’t actually require long term studies on how these drugs affect developing brains as opposed to adults.
As I mentioned earlier, most of today’s parents were raised by the system. They’ve been taught all their lives that the educators, doctors, and scientists know better than they do. If a teacher and doctor are telling them that this is the right thing to do for their child, who are they to argue? It’s worse than just lazy parenting. It’s hopeless, impotent parenting. They firmly believe that they aren’t good enough to raise their own children. They do care and want what’s best for their child. They’ve just been convinced that the best they can do for their child is to let the government appointed educators, doctors, and scientists take over.
Lucky for me and my kids, I was raised by conspiracy theorists. A lot of what they taught me was, well, highly conjectural at best. But they also taught me that I had the power and intelligence to seek out the truth for myself and that taking someone else’s word makes you beholden to them. You won’t find that lesson in the common core curriculum. That’s why websites like this one are so important. People need to learn that you don’t need a specialized PhD to interpret raw data and determine the robustness of research. The internet gives us an opportunity our parents didn’t have. If our child asks us a question we don’t know the answer to, we learn the answer together. As far as my family is concerned, public school is obsolete.
Maybe they can come up with Soma so we can all be equal.
Seems to me that the collective is not better than the individual as the basic building block for the human social animal. 1) We’re replacing the role of the individual with the role of the institution. 2) Every shortcoming is addresses with more institution and less individual.
It also seems that there is plenty of room for a role of increased drug abuse – through Affordable Care and outside of institution-approved use in this malaise. They’re already learning that their problems are a matter of finding the right drug and they’re taking it from there. In teenage suburbia, its prescriptions and opiates and alcohol. — And no, I’m not saying that psychiatric prescriptions are unneeded. Just that they’re prescribed as final cures without any work on psychological and emotional issues that an individual has to be responsible for.
I’m a dinosaur. I’m 67, so back in the dark ages of the 1950’s and early 1960’s we didn’t have drugs to control kids nor were then needed in my small-town North Carolina school system. Seriously act up in school, and you were very likely to get paddled by the teacher or the dean of men. If you were really incorrigible, then you weren’t at school, because they were not babysitters. We all seemed to survive without all today’s problems.
My wife and I raised 4 kids who have all turned out to be fine outstanding adults. I wasn’t aware of drugging kids until I became a Scoutmaster and discovered that half my troop were popping ritalin or other pills and I was the pill meister on weekends. I’m not sure they needed the pills because they were very active and engaged on camp outs. I only had one problem scout and he ceased to be a problem when I called his parents one weekend and told them to come and get him because I was not a babysitter.
From what I hear from my daughter-in-law, a special ed teacher, it is worse now than it was 20 years ago. My son, a deputy sheriff get’s 911 calls from parents who want him to discipline their child. I’m not sure what has changed, but it seems a big part is parents don’t know how to be parents.
Depending on your state your wife may be able to get work leading a homeschool group. My mother-in-law was also a good teacher. She had to retire early because of all the crap the administration put her through. They deliberately try to get good teachers to quite so they can replace them with kids fresh out of college that won’t question their social agenda driven curriculum. Homeschooling our children has solved so many issues both with the quality of their education and the quality of their life. They learn twice as much in half the time and they don’t end the day looking like they’ve been beaten body and soul. Gone are the days that my 13 year-old locks himself in his room to rant to the walls and cry. Now he’s the same happy-go-lucky, exited-to-learn kid he used to be. Only when school gets mentioned again do I see the dark pall come over his eyes. It’s almost like the PTSD you see in people rescued from a cult.
There may be a sound responsible way to fix the public education system, but I’m not going to leave my children drowning in the swamp while all the engineers talk about the best form of drainage. I firmly believe that the problems will only get worse until a large enough group of people follow our lead. There’s just no substitute for actively involved parents. Unfortunately, most of today’s parents were all raised by the same system that’s raising their children. They’ve been taught from day one that you need a specialized college degree and years of training in developmental psych to be able to teach a child that 2+2=4. The system will never get fixed because, as far as the people in charge are concerned, it’s not broken. It’s doing exactly what they want it to do.
Both of the above are most eloquent posters. I can only concur with them as I’ve seen this in my own family. Family life, school life, and young adulthood have grown far more challenging. It can’t help that our leaders give us a stifling, stagnant economy that doesn’t offer much hope for the future to the younger folks entering full personhood.
That’s not a rant, damn it, that’s an eloquent personal story of the horror of what is happening. What can I say to your wife, except, cherish the small victories and hold your head up, teaching and caring is a high form of virtuous living.
People in our group of readers and commenters may or may not have personal contact with the decline, but that’s why I talk here in the first person and why I relate my stories and comments to what I know and what I know from talking to others.
I know teachers who tell stories just like your wife’s. Kids who start school already so screwed up that is is hard to see and not find very troubling, scary even. These kids will never be fully developed adults unless a miracle occurs. Schools are not miracle workers. Dedicated and concerned teachers are finding teaching too difficult to continue, and now the Holder DOJ is warning shools they will be prosecuted for too high a rate of disciplining black kids? Maybe Holder ought to just clean out the jails and prisons, since blacks are so highly represented there.
This one hits very close to home. My wife has been an educator for 30+ years and is currently a counselor in a Houston area high school. We have witnessed firsthand the degradation of the American family as successive generations of parents are further removed from directly raising their children. Today’s teens are children of children raised by “Bevis and Butthead” and similar cultural influences. Fewer and fewer parents are actually raising their children but simply keeping them entertained. We rely on the schools to educate but as my generation understands parents must instill the desire to learn long before they reach school.
As a result, my wife relates story after story of truly disturbing home situations for kids left to their own devices. Cutting (I mean physical self mutilation), drugs, sex, violence and suicide are the by-products (manifesting as early as 4th or 5th grade). As a nurturer by nature, she will have to retire early to save her sanity. She comes home to cry on a regular basis. While we spend $Bs on “climate change” our children suffer in dysfunctional homes.
Unfortunately I don’t have an answer, it just breaks my heart.
Sorry for the rant.