Positive relationships with adults is shown to be means of counteracting adverse childhood experiences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/
I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/
I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives.
What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
I call it "Bastard's Syndrome"
This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my depression, which I've never really been able to do before despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that I see depression as a chronic condition I have (say perhaps analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as opposed to something that I am at my core, it makes it much, much less scary and threatening to me.
In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very, very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good enough there either.
Speculative. I rather think that it shows them that there are other ways of living and that they have agency to get there.
But they need somebody to make them understand that it’s not them who are destroying the relationship with their surroundings and their chance for being happy but the other way around.
Some children in bad situations understand that without guidance but they are rare.
My experience is it's the opposite and you need to overcome learned helplessness and understand that you can change your life.
Are there any good studies that could tell us which of us is correct?
In the wise words of the late child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell:
In order to develop – intellectually emotionally, socially and morally – a child requires participation in progressively more complex reciprocal activity on a regular basis over an extended period in the child's life, with one or more persons with whom the child develops a strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment and who is committed to the child's well-being and development, preferably for life. (Bronfenbrenner, 1991, p. 2)
Or paraphrased by him:
“Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”
If I recall correctly, absent neglect or abuse, parental influence doesn't matter as much as people think.
1. TFA article talked only about correlations, because that's all they have.
2. Genetics influences all of TFA factors as well.
3. TFA discussed "adverse experiences", "parents involved" and "family risk scores". Guess what I said: parenting really only has a significant effect in cases of neglect and abuse. Sounds like we agree.
The core assertion that parental involvement doesn't matter much as long as they're not abusive is pretty absurd regardless, but I'll leave the Googling of studies showing why as an exercise for you.
And these two books have good, if somewhat redundant surveys of the research:
- No Two Alike: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1099821
- Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10266902
The tl;dr is that if you fall into the cohort that could likely adopt a child, your parenting decisions aren’t going to make much of an impact, beyond affecting your kid’s memories of their childhood and their relationship with you. And that doesn’t mean parents should become apathetic, but that it’s better to care about expressing warmth and kindness instead of stressing about achievement.
Teachers and volunteers are how I was able to find a better life. What you're doing matters.
As an aside, maybe it’s because I’m inexperienced, but I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.??? Is it just me? I am clearly very ignorant about all this
I recently started volunteering at my county’s animal shelter. The experience has been very rewarding.
The scale of the problem is most visible through 'special ed' allocation. Once a program for kids with learning challenges, it now also encompasses what are essentially behavioral problems.
Kids don't get kicked out of school for throwing raging tantrums or hitting teachers - they get placed into programs designed to keep them in school. (If that's what life is like at school, imagine what life is like at home.)
> I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-le... | https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”")
There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary.
Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to participate in society and failing. That's truly heartbreaking.
At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage" and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of second-order effects/unintended consequences without actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.
I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while minimizing the disincentives for people to work. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-incom...
Baseline quality of life isn't decided just by pay. I find that society doesn't support people having a baseline quality of life when it comes to areas other than pay, so it makes me question the motives of society in the case of pay.
Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).
One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I'm curious to see an example scale that would continue to incentivize social behavior the whole way up the chain - avoiding the "oh I don't want to make $100 more dollars because I'm in a sweet spot now and bad things happen at $99."
You can certainly argue that many of the current disincentives are bugs in the bureaucracy. I'd like to see a proposal for the UBI tax scale you describe that doesn't have any bugs (that is, bumps in the distribution where people are afraid to reach for state C from state A, because the intermediary state B is worse than A).
It also becomes clearly tenable with households of more than 1. Supporting a family of 2-3 on $24k-36k is like, yep, I've met married international grad students. Of course they'll spring for supplemental income where available, but as a baseline it is tenuously "enough".
I remember this, the cash assistance gave people back their time to focus on starting their own businesses, pursuing self-education, taking care of their kids, etc. It was fully apparent to me that these low-wage jobs effectively trapped people by sucking up all the time they had for self-improvement.
Unwilling to work or temporarily not desperate to stay alive? How many receiving assistance were still working, just doing it less?
The only studies on outcomes I recall is that a lot of kids were no longer experiencing food insecurity.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2021/09/22/food-insecuritys-lo...
In any case, given how badly broken the current system is, surely it's at least worth a try?
1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income is less than X
2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X, depending on how this gets funded)
Expansion of the EITC program is fairly well-regarded among economists and has been historically quite popular! We should do more of it!
Now that program is gone and minimum wage for fast food is $20/hr. She simply cannot perform $20/hr worth of work, so she's unemployed (and living on government assistance).
The previous arrangement was fantastic because the work gave her a purpose and something to do all day, and she contributed to society while saving the government money. Now she stays home and watches TV endlessly.
This has informed my ideas - I think supplementing minimum wages could be a better alternative to UBI (with some exceptions).
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/39-14c-subminim...
This is the wrong model. You're using a worker's wage to describe their productivity, and a big reason for the mess we're in is that wages stopped increasing with productivity fifty years ago. (search "wages productivity graph")
Imagine someone's contribution to a business increases revenue by $1000 and the total cost to employ that person for the same period is $800. Do you think most businesses would go "nope, we only hire highly leveraged people who produce $2000 in revenue"?
There are inefficiencies in scale (like communication/bookkeeping overhead) that might disincentivize a business from growing, but generally speaking, I think it's fine to model decisions as rational cost/benefit ones.
Workers who are only "worth it" at some wage. Nobody is going to pay you a million dollars to go sell a hundred dollars worth of stuff. If the value you can earn on the market is sufficiently lower than what someone is allowed to pay, they simply won't hire you. That's bad for everyone.
$7.25 x 8 hours = $58 for the day. However what they create is based on output, which for most businesses, varies day by day along with their sales.
A McDonald's could sell 500 burgers in one day at one location, but only 300 at another. In this case the employee at the larger restaurant generates 2/5 more value than the employee at the smaller one, even if both can output at the same speed and quality. So, in reality, the employee at the larger restaurant is being exploited by 2/5 more than the employee at the smaller location. Which also means the employee at the smaller location is getting paid more for doing 2/5 less work than an equally capable employee.
Profits are multiplicative yet unpredictable, while labor is static and predictable.
For example, suppose janitors all make the minimum wage. If we increase it, there might be some company at the margin that will go without janitorial services, but most companies will pay their janitors the new wage, which (from the "a worker costs $X and produces $Y" model's perspective) will look a lot like the nation's janitors suddenly started producing more value. Ergo, it's not to say that that model is wrong, just that it's not useful in answering a question like should we increase the minimum wage.
In the short term it would make a lot of stuff less efficient, but when people talk about "efficiency" they really mean driving costs down and driving income up. So we really don't want an efficient capitalist economy, we want a capitalist economy that is just efficient enough to meet our needs while not being so efficient that a few people can exploit that efficiency and run away with our things.
It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as soon as you suggest they should only have sex when all parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the risk of pregnancy, you're a killjoy.