Are children more traumatized now than in the past? Seems like the past was harder on children.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201120/ search for "Evidence for a Decline in Physical and Sexual Abuse"
(searched for that to post this, and they cite %60 since the 1990s).
Freud himself discovered a tremendous amount of horrible abuse in his patients; depending on the culture, most people just turn a blind eye. People that haven't experienced it and recovered from it a bit are really good at not believing how common it is.
Also, for people who have experienced it, it's often the last thing they'd ever want to talk about. With anyone, including people they are really close to.
There's a good chance you could have a close personal friend or even your partner and never know they had gone through something like that.
These kinds of things fester in darkness and loneliness. I think bringing them out into the light where we can find out we're not alone is helping.
'Get over it' is the most common response. That's why they shut up about it. People who are close to them are only close because of something positive that is being offered. Nobody wants to deal with anyone else's issues.
I knew someone that was abused as a child. Had trouble with drugs and went into rehab. He said that ALL the people he met in rehab had been abused.
His offhand theory is that the increase in the prevalence of restaurants and hyperpalatable foods gave people an outlet to feel safe (a third place in public where the whole family goes and acts their best) and the hyperpalatable food gave an easy and cheap dopamine boost during hard times leading to a spiral.
The earlier trauma happens, the more amplified the effect is. Sometime in the 1950s it became a common parenting approach in the US at least to "not coddle children". That creates trauma for a sensitive child to not have their emotional needs met (an insensitive child may be just fine). There are different degrees of trauma- others that fight wars may experience a much deeper trauma later in life. The trauma to the ignored baby is not as traumatic of an event, but the baby does not have any abilities to cope and the effects are amplified in early developmental stages.
There is less community today to help with the coping process and emotionally distant parenting styles also make coping harder. And there is less religion today- religion both provided community and sometimes specifically helps people deal with trauma.
Trauma can be generational- someone that suffers trauma is much more likely to have difficulties raising their children. Consider someone that survived war but lost their home and witnessed horrors. They may turn to drugs to cope with the psychological pain. Being drug dependent, they have difficulty raising their own children. Those children don't have their emotional needs met, and a cycle of trauma can continue.
From Mate's point of view addiction rates would probably be one way to measure the trauma of society. Drug addiction is a way of coping with severe psychological pain. Drug overdosing is becoming a leading killer in some age groups.
We generally have more resources and knowledge now. People tend to want to raise the bar when that becomes possible.
When kids suffered or died because humans lacked food security, reliable medical treatments etc, it was also generally not really the parent's fault. Knowing you could have been treated better and your parents/the world just didn't actually care about you is scarring in ways that "No one has enough." aren't.
Abuse of children is isolating for the child victim in a way that suffering hardship as a family unit or community isn't. There's no sense of "I'm as safe as it gets here, at home, with these people (even if that's not very safe)." There is no place of feeling even relative safety, no sense that anyone is even trying to care for or defend you.
Personally I think every child needs some sort of effective therapy to help heal the trauma of their formative years.
I use trauma freely here, there’s quite a big difference between someone who was bullied a couple of times and is naturally quite resilient vs someone who was mercilessly bullied for years on end pushing them to the brink of life.
I classify both as trauma, very different degrees though.
As well, people react very differently to similar events.
Like honestly, should we prevent suicides then continue treating people the way they were treated pre attempt?
Weird idea of empathy.
They work in mental health, but intentionally to a degree much higher than neglect, and over recent and long periods of time: kick people while they’re down, not limited to me.
My guess is that in the past child mortality was higher and children traumatised enough just didn't survived. And because of such high mortality no one cared to find out why.
That raises the question of why contemporary attention to trauma is so elevated, if the problem is actually smaller now than it used to be. There's an easy answer though: this is first moment in (recent) history where we finally have a chance to begin dealing with it.
In the past much more than today, kids had defined roles and work to do in families. The stronger sense of identity may have lessened the trauma. As may the knowledge that their peers in neighboring familes were going through the exact same things.
I organized a large group of trauma experts last week (church pastors), and although they were amazing and had clearly overcome trauma; residual selfishness and power grabbing meant a child got ignored
The same last night: a bible study with the homeless. A happy and peaceful place, though one member was throwing trauma bombs
There's not a simple switch, though having lived in war zones and done churches of, for instance Syrian refugees, unconditional love of God, and letting trauma be presented in the middle of that is deeply powerful
Not true that it's increasing. It peaked in the 70s and has decreased since.
[1] https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/lo...
"The share of children born outside of marriage has increased substantially in almost all OECD countries"
https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces
But you are right divorce rates vary, for instance decreasing post covid. I was thinking on the century scale. But also percentage of people entering stable commitment, and so even the possibility of divorce is much lower
This seems like it's unrelated to divorce.
I don't think it's fair to look at divorces on a century basis given that no fault divorce only became possible in the United States in 1969 - before that you needed to prove there was some sort of abuse or infidelity involved.
It certainly becomes more complicated to try and draw trends, and impossible to assume it was stronger family value that held them together before that point - in fact, the peak in the early 70s indicates that once it became possible it was used with gusto.
Under certain circumstances people can experiences horrible stuff with barely any ill effect while other times really trivial small things can totally break them.
Just having one stable positive relationship with an adult can make a child significantly more resilient while the child that lacks that relationship might break at a minor problem. There are many factors that determine resilience and it can vary greatly from person to person. And it is situational. Someone might be a hardened war veteran having seen it all but totally break when seeing a child getting a minor wound.
So children today might be objectively better off than in the past but it does not necessary mean their struggles are less valid, they are just different. So hard to say whether they are less traumatized or not, maybe a little bit but mostly probably just in different ways.
But yeah, the main thing is that we are much better at recognizing signs of trauma these days and people can be more open of their struggles so it might seem like there is more traumatized people when probably there is the same amount or less.
As with many things like this, getting hard numbers would be extremely difficult because it's the sort of thing where peoples' inclination to answer surveys honestly changes with social norms.