The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis is the Loss of Community
The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis is the Loss of Community
We've forgotten what community really means.
Note: their definition of "community" is quite problematic in many ways...
I feel it's unfair to be blaming phones, social media, and multiplayer video games for being the way teens get some peer socialization in a world that is so deeply unfriendly to teens having independence.
danah boyd spent a bunch of time studying teen use of earlier social media, and then for personal reasons moved on to help run teen crisis text hotline.
Her thought for why US teens are struggling are the lack of non-parent trusted adults in their lives.
"Struggling with a Moral Panic Once Again" https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2024/04/19/struggling-with-a-moral-panic-once-again.html
There's also some evidence that it's mostly teens on wealthy English speaking countries that are the most depressed.
"America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety: English-speaking teens are spreading their problems abroad." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/mental-health-crisis-anglosphere-depressed/678724/
I have long thought modern American kids have too little freedom to go places on their own.
"This article is more than 8 years old: The popsicle test: what makes a city good for children?" https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/21/city-good-children-popsicle-test-crime-property-play
Interesting article. I believe it makes sense what they are saying in the big picture. Certainly, people would benefit from creating and joining local non-online communities.
What in their definition of community do you find problematic?
Mainly the focus on authorities, religion and so on. I get that they mean stability, which is probably good for children, but it is a bit too much of a projection of the "good old times" that never really existed.
I agree. The study seems a bit biased. In the article (or the previous in the series, I forgot), a study claims that religious children say that they have trusted persons more often than secular children. I (don't) wonder how this might change if the child in question wasn't cisgender and/or heterosexual.
It is a very insightful article nonetheless. Thanks for sharing!
Yeah, I guess this is written from a more conservative standpoint.
I believe the principal ideas from the article apply to other people as well. Like progressive people could join a local sports club for example. Keeps them healthy and fit, and provides social contacts. Or then a book club, painting club, you name it.
And well, parents can create communities around their kindergarten or school classes, or maybe also some children's sports club.
I partially agree. The article does make the point and probably didn't want to project "good old times", but that's what happens when the author probably attended these communities themselves.
Now it would suffice to include other communities like the other commenter has mentioned, to make it less biased. But I wouldn't really call it problematic.
The root of the loss of community that everyone feels is capitalism's total emphasis on institutional logics of exit that make everything extremely transactional while completely ignoring the dual institutional logic of commitment, cooperation and voice. Community emphasizes the latter. We need communities based around shared property, mutual aid and collective action. Incidentally, having such communities could help solve some public goods problems in a non-state manner and be more egalitarian
Ehh, in anarchism there's a concept of nominated authority Vs compelled authority (not sure of the exact phrasing of either but you get the point). If a group of people voluntarily elect authority there isn't really a problem with it.
"Down with all authority, except on a both figurative and literal anarchist plane/boat where the passengers all make the conscious informed and democratic* decision under no duress and a freedom of association that it's in their best interests as a community to delegate decision making power for their community to the captain of said boat/plane as he has the knowledge and experience to navigate it." doesn't exactly roll off the tongue does it? Nor does it fit on a poster.
But the same is true in communities. Humans are in their initial state very atomized and individual we are not like ant colonies or bee colonies where by default the welfare of others is even a known subject to us, but as we seek to accomplish tasks, we voluntarily commit to some degree of communal benefit and to ensure this community lasts long enough to yield said benefit we learn to keep the peace and abide by some social norms within this community.
It sounds like conservative hell, but the nuanced position between that and hyper-individualistic self-expression is that as long as said communities aren't coercive and association is voluntary, it's kind of okay.
However one flaw in this take is something like the Amish. Is it ethical for say, Amish or some other community that willingly foregoes the benefits of modern technology to have children, who may find that growing up not surrounded by tech has reduced their development in some ways?
The answer to that one is obvious - to create free facilities and let communities form themselves. Right now youth centres have disappeared, teens are hurried out of any gathering space, play areas are regimented out of any joy or priced to prohibition and you end up with young people being left with the activity options of isolation, or group activities that are antisocial or involve substance abuse
Communities don't naturally form, they are a means to an end to a particular goal. Most people aren't interested in being with like-minded folks "just because" these days, and very few people understand and relate to each other in general, due to atomized cultural backgrounds.
This has nothing to do with literally anything I said
I don't think the definition of community is necessarily problematic. It centers on hierarchy and authority, yes. But even most anarchists recognize natural hierarchies. Parents have authority over children because children are not able to govern themselves. Community elders have authority within a community because of their age, experience, and the respect they've earned through longstanding ties to the community. When you need specialized information, about law, or medicine, or how to repair a car, or the difference between right and wrong, you go to a specialist who studied that field and you defer to their authority derived from their study and knowledge. And so on.
Everyone in a community is, or should be, equal as human beings. But not everyone has served the community equally or earned equal respect. Voluntary hierarchies based on duty and respect are not the same as involuntary hierarchies based on coercion. And it's those voluntary hierarchies that bind communities together.
Yes and no. There are people that earned respect and "natural authority" among their adult peers, but this does not apply to children/teenagers that did not yet have sufficient interactions with these people to agree.
It is thus hard to make this a fundamental basis of a community as you are basically imposing authority. Smaller children might accept this, but teenagers certainly don't.
Just because someone has more skills, experience or information doesn't mean that person has or should have authority over others. There are even situations where having more of those things can become a hindrance because it biases the person to doing things a certain way when someone from an outside perspective could handle the situation in a different, possibly better way.
It still should be on the individual to decide whether they want to defer to the experts depending on the situation. The reason why people can come to collective decisions and rely on other people's knowledge is because they have shared purpose and trust each other to be working to similar goals. That is what makes people's choices voluntary.
I don't believe we should uphold hierarchies in any form instead we should help teach people to reason through when to trust other people's judgements which doesn't rely on defaulting to an authority.
You should learn the difference between deference and delegation, and then learn to delegate choices and research to experts rather than deferring to them. Where doctors are concerned, it could literally save your life and those of your loved ones.
Children, too, should learn to delegate rather than defer. Deference maintains a gap in someone's understanding, and as soon as the parents stop providing that service the child becomes lost. A baby who cries when they feel uncomfortable is already choosing when to cry and when not to cry. They don't defer the maintenance of their body to their parents, they delegate it, and as soon as they are able to control those bodily functions they rescind that delegation.
Deference is always archist. "Natural hierarchies" were an archist lie when it referred to racist and sexist hierarchies and it's an archist lie when it refers to familial, professional, and social hierarchies. Respect is due to everyone, not just to the powerful or to your "natural superiors". Every infant deserves respect, every wife, every teenager, every mentally disabled person. What the fuck is wrong with you that you think otherwise?
Please don't make this a personal attack. They stated their opinion and it wasn't something outlandish or hateful. Feel free to disagree with them, but not in a "what the fuck is wrong with you" way.
As for "respect" specifically. Definitions of that word differ widely. Yours is one that is commonly used, but I personally would rather use "human rights" for that. Of course the default should be to be respectful to each other (which you were not), but it is also a common understanding that respect can and should be earned.
As we can see from this list, a community requires a commitment to a certain social order—and usually to a place—that, by definition, must constrain some choices. In return for security, support, and belonging, members surrender some of their freedom. This explains why creating community in America today is so difficult—few want to compromise their ability to make choices. This is especially true among those with the resources and/or capacity to relocate as soon as a better opportunity beckons—the very people whose leadership and role-modeling communities can ill afford to lose.
Quoting this because it's vital for anyone who wants to create or join any kind of intentional community. A lot of punks talk about starting intentional communities, because they want the kind of close community organization that this post talks about. But the problem is, when interpersonal relationships within the community get hard, and they will, inevitably, get hard, if people are free to leave, people will leave. And then your community collapses from lack of members.
You see a lot of anarchist organizational principles among mutual aid groups for homeless people and poor people in America. And I think that's because in those cases poverty itself supplies the coercion that keeps the group together - they make peace with one another because they can't afford to leave the group and live separately.
You also see anarchist organizational principles in organizations centered on shared religious, philosophical, or cultic beliefs. Same idea. People are unwilling to leave the group because they believe it's morally wrong to abandon the community of believers, or they fear being spiritually and culturally isolated among non-believers, so they work harder to solve interpersonal problems and keep the group together.
But if people are free to leave a community and suffer no consequences for it, and staying in the community does have a consequence - accepting abusive behavior by other community members, for instance - people will leave. It's normal, it's understandable, and it inevitably breaks down communities. And that's why I don't think the authors' understanding of community is at all wrong. In the long run everybody finds themselves in situations where they have to submit to their community's authority in order to remain in the community. And when people leave instead of submitting, that breaks community, and everyone, especially the children, suffer for it.
It's a balance. Communities are to some extend fluid. Creating coercive conditions that make people stay even if they don't want to is just as bad for a community as people abandoning them.
A community that is attractive to outside newcomers can manage a certain amount of attrition of their original members and it is probably healthy for the overall community to allow such replacement to happen.
I think your depiction of community requiring people to accept abuse from "the community's authority" comes from growing up in a legal and cultural framework where abusers are systematically protected and rewarded. Where being able to cheat colleagues out of their fair share because the contract is written in just the right way gets you more money than you can ever spend; where victims of rape aren't allowed to warn each other because the community will judge them for making accusations, or find them guilty of libel.
How could a community in a statist society end up with any other choice than between falling apart or accepting the abuse of the guy the police will protect? But that's not an inherent property of community, it's just an inherent property of statism.
That is not to say we have to wait for the end of states for communities to be more egalitarian. The bylaws of a community organization can do a lot of work towards making it more pleasant for its members, similarly to how the democratic Separation of Powers doesn't solve tyranny but does make it a lot more mild. Ultimately sufficiently dogged abusers will find a gap, but it's nice for the time that it lasts.
For the more general insight that a community needs some pressure to prevent it from falling apart under internal forces even if those internal forces are neither assisted by outside forces nor empowered through crappy internal bylaws, you're conflating coersion and incentive. Coersion is typically violent and based on positive punishment. But there are also negative punishment, positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement. Poor people cooperating to survive is an example of negative reinforcement: their cooperation allows them to use their resources more effectively to avoid harm.
In short, when an authority is abusive: you have three options. Leave, submit, or remove them from power. It is not the fault of communities that states make this last option difficult.
But community is community-ism.