Posted on 03/19/2014 8:18:31 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
When Luke gets angry, he tries to remember to look at his bracelet. It reminds him of what he can do to calm himself: stop, take a deep breath, count to four, give yourself a hug and, if necessary, ask an adult for help.
Luke is 5 and he has been practicing these steps for half a year at school and at home, thanks to a program called Head Start Trauma Smart that currently serves some 3,300 children annually in 26 counties in Kansas and Missouri. “We used to have to do these steps four or five times a day,” said Connie, his grandmother (who requested that I change her grandson’s name and omit her surname). “Now we’re down to four or five times a week.”
Luke’s difficulties stem from his earliest experiences. Before and after his birth, his parents regularly used drugs. His mother was unable to attend to him and his father was sent to prison shortly after his first birthday. Now he lives with his grandparents.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
“Look at the flowers, Lizzie...”
clever...
Thanks to Carol, Lizzie is beyond calm now.
“Children... who experience neglect, severe stress or sudden separation at a young age can be traumatized...trauma can interfere with healthy brain development, inhibiting children’s ability to make good decisions, use memory or use sequential thought processes to work through problems.”
head Start is quick to point out this sensible data, which is stated as fact, and has, no doubt been scientifically studied and proven statistically. it would be. It’s a common sense theory which stands up to study.
Does Head Start, or the government lend this analytical data to families?
No. Why would they do that? It would be a conflict of interest.
The kids going through public school now, have been dropped at day care - separation at a young age, and are traumatized over it, resulting in developmental difficulties. They are to be pitied, not hated. their parents are misguided or senseless and ignorant. How can “Johnny will be just fine if I go to work” suffice for proper parental nurturing?
They are who will be running our country and taking care of our retirement.
“They are who will be running our country and taking care of our retirement.”
I always wonder why people don’t see this. Sooner thank most think these parents are going to be at the mercy of the kids they were so cavalier about.
It’s a mystery.
They are unwise.
They’re also very stupid; they really think that the kids they treat as a burden or ‘duty’ is suddenly going to turn around and then be loving caretakers and willingly put up with their demands.
Chances are, in reality, these kids are going to shrug their shoulders and hang up when their parents call, or dump them off at the hands of feral caretakers who will treat the elderly parents like the kids (now adults) were treated, like moneymaking targets for pent up frustrations.
A few kids will have miraculously witnessed caretaking, and then modeled it. Most will have an undeveloped nurturing ability.
They won’t have any foundation for caring about their parents, their own families, their country nor themselves.
Women in this country are following a social experiment led by questionable people behind the scenes. There are faces, such as the one woman religion, Oprah, who, it will turn out, is not a stable individual.
The thing is, that nurturing ability or not, kids do sense when they are a burden and I can tell you from experience, that after so many rounds of rejection, the nurturing ability tends to disappear. Not in favor of survival or selfishness, but a sense of wondering “Why try” when no one tried with them.
I read “Gone With the Wind” on a frequent basis (having already read straight through I like to flip through my favorite passages) and Rhett explained the reason he never fought for the South (until the last minute) is because he was cast out of the current social system like a pariah and left ot fend for himself. No friends and no family willing to take him in. He survived and was able to thrive, but he ended up resentful of the society that rejected him.
A lot of these rejected kids are not going to uphold the system that triggered their rejection, much less nurture the people who upheld it without a single independent thought of their own that maybe, rejecting a kid and leaving them to become entirely, autonomously self sufficient might end up with the kid feeling no obligation to contribute to the betterment or current good state of the very family that rejected them.
If people don’t start thinking for themselves and seeing that letting other people tell us how to raise our kids then realistically we will inevitably fail as a society. We’re becoming more and more like the old South in our thought processes (not seeing what is right in front of our faces and letting someone else do our thinking for us) and it’s not like we’re going to end up with any luck in the area of handling things if people we treat like complete rejects suddenly decide to walk away and no longer handle all the ‘unpleasant’ realities we increasingly dump on other people to face for us while deliberately remaining ignorant.
One day these kids who were rejected are going to walk away from helping sustain the current system and will pretty much shrug their shoulders and let it fall to pieces and then succeed in the up-building of a new and better civilization.
Just like in the years of Reconstruction, there were a lot of former outcasts of the old South that made a real success of their lives that couldn’t be made during the years when slavery and owning slaves (along with the size of the plantation you owned) determined your worth. There’s no way that someone like me is going to miss the old system that is currently disintegrating. I will take no pleasure in someone’s pain, but I sincerely think it’s good that things are no longer what they were.
These former rejects of society are going to end up doing better in the newer society that is developing and I don’t think the formerly rejected kids are going to feel charitable towards those who so cavalierly rejected them and then proceeded to stigmatize them. I don’t think they’ll tear down society so much as just walk away out from under the crowd and leave society to learn to sink or swim, just as they were taught.
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