With respect, I think I have spent literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times as many hours around 10 year olds than you have. And you’re wrong. Your almost total inexperience with children is really shining through in this thread.
This has got to be the most bonkers misapplication of Spencerian evolutionary pseudoscience I’ve ever seen. First, #notallbabybirds, obv. Second, plenty of animals live in a society, and the fittest ones are the ones that help their subpopulation survive instead of just looking out for themselves. Third, humans are the quintessential social mammals (there are insects and corals that are more social than us, but other than naked mole rats we’re the supreme social mammals), and the humans who cooperate are the ones who thrive the best, whether militarily or communitarianily.
But most importantly, children aren’t horrible. They’re funny and creative and loving and passionate, and also angry and selfish and petulant and vicious. They’re complicated people, individuals and community members, and should be recognized as such.
You are mixing a lot of things together and calling it the same.
Reasonable parenting understands the difference between an infant, a toddler, a small child, a tween, a young teen, and an older teen. Reasonable parenting maintains a level of oversight and control relative to the developmental state of the child. Reasonable parenting works to create an autonomous individual that doesn’t need constant supervision.
The older the child, the more unsupervised or looser supervised time they will have. Our society has vascillated on this, from free-range childhoods to helicopter parents. Too little oversight and there is a higher child mortality and severe injuries. Too much oversight leads to non-self-sufficient adults.
Finding the fight balance is not always easy. But it is the challenge of parenthood.
I wanted a lot of things at ten I didn’t get, either. Didn’t make me abused.
Yes, being 10 should absolutely affect the responses to your behavior.
This is a curious position to take. Because there was a recent death in custody in the DFW area of a man who was arrested for violence while having a mental illness incident. His family certainly would have preferred his history of mental illness had been taken into account and he’d been put in a hospital, not a jail. The jailers didn’t take into account his mental state and treated him like any other detainee. Now he’s dead.
This is not an isolated incident. Police response to people having mental illness is often mishandled. Confrontation and excessive violence instead of deescalation and active listening.
Here you have a point. There is likely an excessive and lazy reliance on meds like Haldol to calm and control. This is prevalent in hospitals, jails and prisons, and nursing care centers. This is an issue we a a society need to tackle.
That’s a far cry from the extremist position you advocate in the op.
For what it’s worth, forced hospitalization requires “clear and convincing” evidence, which is a standard of proof between "more likely than not/preponderance of the evidence and beyond a reasonable doubt. That standard applies in every US state. There’s a lesser standard for a 72- hour hold.
I’m curious. Do you think there’s such a thing as mental competency or incompetency? If yes, then how should that work? If no, then what do you propose for the severely developmentally disabled, or people with dementia or major brain injuries?
There are advocates out there right now making the case that people with mental illnesses are not getting proper treatment because there are too few options/beds/facilities. Instead, they are going untreated until many of them end up committing a crime. (To be clear, violent crime perpetrated by a person with severe mental illness is rare. But theft, vagrancy, trespassing and other relatively minor crimes can be pretty common.). Then they get warehoused in jails and prisons, which is not the right place for them. Often, they can’t even make it to trial if they are deemed unable to aid and assist in their own defense.
You seem to be arguing the reverse. That no one should be put into any kind of treatment against their will, but that it’s preferred for them to go to jail with no consideration for any mental health issues.
What do you make of people who, when they are medicated, understand and agree that they have a mental disorder and need to take medication? Leaving aside people taking tranquilizing medications, what do you figure would account for that?
I don’t think this book is about what you think it’s about. Those children were taught violence, by the war raging on around them. And they aren’t really children. They are an allegory for a specific kind of dysfunction in human relationships.
This is like saying Orwell’s depictions of farm animals are disgusting.
While that may be true, Lord of the Flies has become shorthand for children behaving badly. Like if someone says, “There’s a sub in Ms. Smith’s room, and it’s real Lord of the Flies in there,” they’re not saying that the children have been taught violence; they’re saying that the kids are out of control and dangerous.
I appreciate @AHunter3’s point that in real life, children without adult supervision are often much better at peaceful conflict resolution than they are in that book.
I was pretty sure that was the current standard throughout the US, yes, thanks for confirming. In practice, unfortunately, the hearings aren’t even evidence-based, at least in most venues most of the time.
In psychiatric involuntary commitment hearings, judges may bar the patient from having their legal representative present (and it is rare that they have one other than state-provided mental hygiene legal services, the mental health equiv of a public defender; the judges quite often regard these as medical issues not legal issues and don’t consider anyone but the psychiatrist (themselves included) to be qualified to have an opinion. They tend to be conducted more like family court custody hearings than adversarial criminal law court cases, with informality leveraging a dismissal of patients’ (or patients’ advocates) attempts to challenge assertions or cross-examine witnesses.
In guardianship cases, it can be even worse: the allegedly incompetent person may not even have been informed and does not have to be present for the hearing, so you can find yourself placed under the authority of a guardian before you knew there was even any question of your ability to run your own life.
I think mental incompetency exists, yes. How it should work is that there should be an evaluation in the courtroom of the person’s mental condition. If it is not compellingly obvious that the individual lacks the ability to understand situations and make decisions, the default should be “competent”. Testimony about what the individual did at some other time or what exams showed should not be permissable evidence.
That is correct. Jails aren’t good places (among other things, you can be exposed to involuntary drugging in those settings as well) but I’d rather be in jail than in a locked psychiatric facility or an assisted living facility where I’m officially designated demented and my opinions and choices disregarded and the timeframe is entirely open-ended.
Sure they are, but that doesn’t mean they should be left to their own devices.
And using that book as a reference point is not setting the bar very high. Kids are often great, but they are also impulsive, prone to poor judgement, underdeveloped neurologically, and prone to cognitive distortions. They have higher rates of suicide and self-injury, a problem that has worsened dramatically in the last ten years. They often require direct intervention because that’s what you do for more vulnerable members of society. The idea that we should just leave them to injure themselves and die from mental disease is more appalling than anything Golding ever wrote.
I do agree with that. The truth is somewhere between Golding and AHunter on this one.
For the record, I do think kids deserve more autonomy than they currently get. The rise of helicopter parenting has done them no mental health favors.
In the case of a severe psychiatric disturbance, say self-injury and suicidal ideation in a ten year old, we give autonomy with limits. Here are the five counselors you can pick from, why don’t you meet them and decide which suits you best? Do you want to call the ER or shall we contact this intensive outpatient facility? Depending on the circumstances, if medication is indicated, which medication do you like best? Whether to receive intervention is not up for debate, but the nature of that intervention is open to input from the child. The onus is on the parents to make that choice and we all know ultimately they are the ones who will be held accountable for that choice. Our job also is to hold ground for our children when others try to encroach on what little autonomy they get in such a circumstance. The kid can’t make the decision about what medication he takes but as the guardian I can, and I can make the decision consistent with what he prefers.
That’s the best we can reasonably do. Doing nothing is not an acceptable option.
Yeah, one of my two kids used to be 10 and the other one is coming up on 10 and… at least my kids didn’t/don’t have the maturity to have full autonomy at age 10. At age 14, I can see my kid getting there, though she actually said to me the other day that sometimes I need to make her do things, because she knows she will be glad she did it in the long run but she really doesn’t want to do the thing in the short run. I was struck by her self-awareness! (These things I need to make her do generally relate to her social anxiety – the more she does them, the more she has good social experiences and gets past her anxiety so the next time it’s easier, and she’s noticed that pattern, but especially the first couple of times she’s doing a new social task, she reeeeeally does not want to do it in the moment.)
Here’s a different autonomy vs intervention debate that is playing out in my own family right now. My dad has been diagnosed with mild dementia. He absolutely refuses to stop driving his car. I think he is OK for right now, but at some point in the near future he is going to be dangerous enough that he will get in an accident, harming either himself or others.
If it were just a question of harming himself, I could see the viewpoint of just letting him go on with it, even though I would prefer not to. But what if it comes down to him harming others? He hasn’t harmed anyone else yet.
(In our case we may not have the choice to intervene, as my mom holds that power and she has said she also refuses to stop him driving at this time – and she’s of sound mind, so I don’t think we have much recourse. Hopefully at some point it will become clear to her, and that will be the point at which he stops. Crossing my fingers, anyway.)