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Reviews Elsewhere – Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers
I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times. Kids are often vulnerable because they have no close adults to trust and lean on for support. No one is there modeling what a mature sense of self is, so they aren’t learning it. I don’t necessarily agree with everything Drs. Maté and Neufeld said in this interview that I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with everything in their book, but on this point, I agree. Kids need trusted adults who make them feel safe and loved.
Yet we keep creating a society that makes it harder to provide that for kids. We are paying a price for that.
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Are Active Shooter Drills Harming Kids Mental Health?
But what is the least harmful way to deal with that? What is the least harmful way to inform kids of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza? What is the least harmful way to prepare kids for the natural disasters that seem only to get worse each year?
I don’t know. What I do know is that dealing with all of this is hard and only part of the causes of increased needs for youth mental health. Our current mental health system failed many people for years when the need wasn’t this high. What we are doing isn’t working. Continuing to do the same thing won’t work. Fighting against increased funding and availability of resources won’t work. Hiding our heads in the sand and saying, “not my kid,” won’t work. This is a society-wide problem that will require societal change. I am not sure we are willing to make those changes, but an entire generation of kids will pay the price for that unwillingness.
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Sharing – 71% of UK men have experienced some form of sexual victimization by a woman
But then I got to thinking. I’ve talked about being a sexual abuse survivor and how it was a male who abused me. What I haven’t talked about and haven’t considered for myself because the incidents are overshadowed by the years of sexual abuse are the occasions when I was sexually victimized without my consent by women.
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I Need You To Go Read This Collection of Research about Teens and Social Media
More importantly, for those of us trying to advocate for mental health, we need to realize that there is no simple answer. Turning off all of social media is not going to cure the mental health crisis. It won’t change everything that is going on in all of our lives and across the world. Pretending that we’d all have much better mental health if we just killed off Instagram or TikTik isn’t going to make the county’s mental health problems go away.
So why aren’t we discussing the harder problems that have some proven research to show the negative effects on children’s lives? School shootings, violence, racism, oppression of LGTBQ and minorities, poverty, lack of access to mental health care, etc.
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