2.1 Some Major Problems of Modern Cultures revised/edited 12/2017
2.1.1 Unhealthy developments: families and child rearing
2.1.2 Unhealthy developments: schools and institutions
2.1.3 Neglect and abuse of children an adolescents
2.1.4 Social and cultural changes: individualism and high expectations versus social support and resilience
2.1.1 Unhealthy developments: families and child rearing
Psychiatric problems appear to rather increase in modern civilizations, although people are generally freer and suffer much less physical pain, accidents, losses and human rights violations. In typical American child rearing and education, many new problems arose.
Naturally children tend to exercise freely, daydream and meditate in their own way, express themselves in some symbolic and artistic ways, and find social interactions, including much touch. All of these contribute to the children’s wellbeing. Mixed age children’s playgroups are valuable; in them older children teach games and social
skills to younger ones. In their games, children often imitate adults, and adults have a natural authority to guide, when needed. If adult village members enjoy watching the children, fights and serious bullying are rare.
Village communities and tight-knit extended families, even mixed-age children’s groups, essentially disappeared in modern societies. The parents’ authority to guide their children and set limits has been eroded in many ways. It appears that parents often compete with other parents in giving their children whatever they demand for fear that their child is ridiculed by peers, feels unloved, complains to other adults, etc. Children have been exposed to an
absurd amount of direct advertisement, because businesses rightly assume that children often direct their parents’ buying habits. Predictably, the by advertisements directed spare-time activities and habits are rarely healthy.
The combination of banks readily lending money, a vague optimism that salaries will generally increase and that there will not be unexpected expenses, and high expectations particularly concerning children’s clothes, toys, educational opportunities, etc. lead most families to become indebted (the assumed costs of raising a child has
increased disproportionately in recent decades). Families tend to live above their means, and both parents have to work. Ambitious, hardworking people usually shun apartments and houses that are cheap, thus aggravating the problems of unemployment and high crime rates in poor areas. However, debts and long work hours lead to stress and depression.
Most parents, particularly fathers, spend relatively little time with their children, for many children there is only one primary parental figure and children of same sex couples may have little meaningful contact with other adults. Small children are often left in the hands of lowly poorly paid female childcare workers. Children probably benefit from good relationships with parental figures of both sexes. Same-sex parental figures function often more in a critical and teaching role, opposite-sex parental figures may give more unconditional admiration and affirmation, helping the growing person to develop self-esteem1.
Consequences of modern child rearing patterns are not well understood, even if simplistic studies do not show negative outcomes.
2.1.2 Unhealthy developments: schools and institutions
Schools add to sedentary games in discouraging children’s healthy inclinations to move, to run, jump, and explore their environment. School recesses are often very short, physical play and games occupy very little time.
Exploring natural environments is hardly part of modern education. In the U.S. school system, rather than all older children pursuing different forms of sports, artistic endeavors, and scientific explorations, most children are channeled into one direction and compelled to neglect others. The in-one-area-outstanding children have
little time for a broad spectrum of social, scholastic and other endeavors that appear important for their development. And having hormone driven adolescent boys and girls in the same classrooms often discourages them from pursuing interests that are associated with the other sex or with homosexuality.
Inadequate physical exercise and horrible diets, with far too much salt2, sugar, unhealthy fats3, etc. are addicting (food/couch addictions). Consequences have included anxiety and mood disorders; hypertension and cardiovascular problems with heart attacks and strokes in ever younger patients; sleep apnea and other forms of sleep disturbances with day time sleepiness and consequent low functioning, falling asleep while driving, etc.; diabetes with all its complications, including cardiovascular problems, loss of eye sight, loss of limbs, kidney failure. The problem has previously been worst in the USA but in recent decades has become catastrophic in Third
World countries such as Mexico.
Healthy lifestyles are not only good for people’s health, particularly in advanced age, they are also vital for people’s mental health. Many types of exercise, yoga and similar techniques, meditation techniques, etc. greatly enhance people’s mental health and resilience.
Children’s natural propensity to daydream and experiment with relaxation, meditation, and contemplation are rarely nurtured, neither are children’s natural attempts to seek simple forms of artistic expression. Instead, children are to avoid ‘day dreaming’ and learn “correct” techniques of expression. Few children are able to use contemplation and artistic expression to deal with psychological conflicts, as might happen spontaneously when children experiment with minimal guidance.
Many modern cultures have stifled children’s opportunities to experience touch, although touch is necessary for infants to thrive and has important functions throughout life. A misguided fear of sexual feelings has gradually reduced games that include touch. The issue is often related to a fear of nudity that appears particularly extreme in some Muslim cultures. While sexual harassment and pedophilia are serious problems, non-sexual touching is healthy, and appreciating the beauty and attractiveness of a body or a friendly smile should not imply moves towards sexual activities. Furthermore, children and adults have sexual feelings even if there is hardly any opportunity to see, much less touch, people of the other sex.
2.1.3 Neglect and abuse of children an adolescents
There is still a very serious problem with child neglect and abuse, often with long-term consequences. Abuse of a spouse or of one child affects all family members. Most civilizations do poorly with respect to
primary and secondary prevention. There is widespread neglect of teenagers: schools do not adequately address their needs. Upper level schools are often large and impersonal, there is much unstructured time, there is much destructive influence by media, and many adolescents perceive little meaning in their day-to-day activities. Adolescents and young adults with apparent pathological developments are often treated with disciplinary measures and legal proceedings, rather than psychotherapy and psychiatric treatments. Even residential treatment centers tend to relay on punitive and behavioral techniques, which may change behaviors but hardly deal with the patients’ underlying problems. The lack of stable extended families and communities increases the likelihood of child abuse and consequent psychopathology. Children need stable attachments. Insecure primary attachments and other pathology in a child’s primary attachment have long term consequences. Multiple changes in primary attachment figures, e.g. when moved from foster home to foster home, is extremely damaging, particularly if a move occurs before the child has been well adjusted for some time and, after a time of regressing, has caught up in his/her psychosocial development. Sometimes moves are so frequent that the child gives up trying to trust any attachment figure.
Abuse behaviors and irresponsible risk taking tend to be rather encouraged in adolescents (supposedly responsible social drinking which is for many very dangerous; sexual acts that should be the very last step in the development of a relationship, considered as a form of experimenting and exploration; and casually overstepping meaningful cultural limits). Many young people need much more structure with meaningful activities than is generally offered. The teaching of ethics is in most places inadequate, particularly a focus on compassionate empathy towards others and recognition that all ‘abuse’ behaviors are, by definition, unethical. If pathological developments have progressed to a certain point, young people may need the structure of residential treatment
for years.
2.1.4 Social and cultural changes: individualism and high expectations versus social support and resilience
With the rapid changes in cultures and the footlooseness of modern societies, people are often torn away from their cultural heritage, and gaps between generations are aggravated. Old cultures, rather than developing gradually, tend to essentially collapse with new generations trying to start very different new cultures, often adopting from other cultures that young people may admire. Well functioning multicultural communities are rare. Modern civilizations, particularly the USA, stress individualism, self-fulfillment or realization of personal potential, often at the cost of human relationships to loved ones. Advertisements, emphasizing conveniences, self-sufficiency, and personal safety, indirectly promote people’s propensity to isolate themselves, as individuals and as nuclear families.
In modern cultures there has been an unhealthy dichotomy between learning and working versus entertainment and pleasures. Generally, people should learn what they are interested in and work in a field they enjoy. The separation between work, hobby, and relaxation should be subtle: people should not assume work and studying to be largely uncomfortable, stressful, “a necessary evil,” and they should not feel a need to compensate with expensive, often risk-taking entertainments and pleasures. This dichotomy probably contributes to abuse and addiction behaviors.
Cultures generally create expectations that its members always function according to a standard. Failures to fulfill the expectations usually lead to conflicts, with consequent shame, guilt, anger, etc. Today, people are taught to expect more from their institutions: there is a cultural assumption that things are “right” in accordance with laws and high technological and ethical standards, in governmental and private institutions. Expectations then interfere with healthy adapting, and people often respond with outrage, obsessing, anxiety, etc. when an institution appears to fail and/or when there are seemingly “injustices.”
While adjusting cultural expectations, we must also focus on teaching children resilience. People must learn to accept the past as remembered, the present as perceived and the future as anticipated; acceptance must be cognitive along with working on emotional acceptance. Traumas of any sort must become ‘normal’: something bad that, due to random occurrences coinciding has happened – passing judgments is fruitless (abusers are almost always themselves victims of severe abuse), but we may learn from occurrences that we want to prevent in the future. Specific forms of psychotherapy may help in the process of emotionally accepting past traumas.
In recent generations, old wisdoms about what contributes to happiness have been lost, but are re-detected and expanded by psychological research. However, it is important that happiness research and teachings are not part of religious teaching. Specific religious teachings divide people, and they often interfere with scientific progress and with science-based personal pursuits. Religious practices and rituals are meaningful as artistic cultural activities that may bond communities; but a sense of spirituality should be derived from nature, beauty in nature and the greatness of the universe, and also from human creations, such as classical symphonic music, visual arts and beautiful architecture.
_____
1 Girls usually receive much less attention from opposite gender parental figures. Father and male relatives usually get less involved and spend less time with children. Additionally, fathers are sometimes expected to punish children of both genders for misdeeds they have not even observed. This inequality may be a cause of the disproportionately high rate of depression in adolescent girls and women. (Obviously, other environmental-cultural factors are likely to contribute to the difference; the male-female ratio of anxiety and depression in young people varies between cultural groups; in some groups there is no difference.)
2 Modern man consumes much more sodium than any mammal; the sodium/potassium ratio in modern diets is particularly unnatural. I wonder whether the high sodium intake contributes to mood disorders since lithium, a mineral that competes with sodium on a cellular level, is an effective mood stabilizing medication, decreasing aggressive and suicidal behavior. Other mood stabilizing medication, e.g. carbamazepine and oxcarbazepine, tend to lower serum sodiumand they are potent blockers of the presynaptic Na(+) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17904592]..
3 Inadequate amounts of the essential omega 3 fatty acids in nutrition probably contribute to mood disorders. Trans fatty acids are not natural and their health hazards are not clearly understood. Saturated fatty acids contribute to cardiovascular diseases. last revised/edited 11/2010, 12/2017
2.1 Some Major Problems of Modern Cultures revised/edited 12/2017
2.1.1 Unhealthy developments: families and child rearing
2.1.2 Unhealthy developments: schools and institutions
2.1.3 Neglect and abuse of children an adolescents
2.1.4 Social and cultural changes: individualism and high expectations versus social support and resilience
2.1.1 Unhealthy developments: families and child rearing
Psychiatric problems appear to rather increase in modern civilizations, although people are generally freer and suffer much less physical pain, accidents, losses and human rights violations. In typical American child rearing and education, many new problems arose.
Naturally children tend to exercise freely, daydream and meditate in their own way, express themselves in some symbolic and artistic ways, and find social interactions, including much touch. All of these contribute to the children’s wellbeing. Mixed age children’s playgroups are valuable; in them older children teach games and social
skills to younger ones. In their games, children often imitate adults, and adults have a natural authority to guide, when needed. If adult village members enjoy watching the children, fights and serious bullying are rare.
Village communities and tight-knit extended families, even mixed-age children’s groups, essentially disappeared in modern societies. The parents’ authority to guide their children and set limits has been eroded in many ways. It appears that parents often compete with other parents in giving their children whatever they demand for fear that their child is ridiculed by peers, feels unloved, complains to other adults, etc. Children have been exposed to an
absurd amount of direct advertisement, because businesses rightly assume that children often direct their parents’ buying habits. Predictably, the by advertisements directed spare-time activities and habits are rarely healthy.
The combination of banks readily lending money, a vague optimism that salaries will generally increase and that there will not be unexpected expenses, and high expectations particularly concerning children’s clothes, toys, educational opportunities, etc. lead most families to become indebted (the assumed costs of raising a child has
increased disproportionately in recent decades). Families tend to live above their means, and both parents have to work. Ambitious, hardworking people usually shun apartments and houses that are cheap, thus aggravating the problems of unemployment and high crime rates in poor areas. However, debts and long work hours lead to stress and depression.
Most parents, particularly fathers, spend relatively little time with their children, for many children there is only one primary parental figure and children of same sex couples may have little meaningful contact with other adults. Small children are often left in the hands of lowly poorly paid female childcare workers. Children probably benefit from good relationships with parental figures of both sexes. Same-sex parental figures function often more in a critical and teaching role, opposite-sex parental figures may give more unconditional admiration and affirmation, helping the growing person to develop self-esteem1.
Consequences of modern child rearing patterns are not well understood, even if simplistic studies do not show negative outcomes.
2.1.2 Unhealthy developments: schools and institutions
Schools add to sedentary games in discouraging children’s healthy inclinations to move, to run, jump, and explore their environment. School recesses are often very short, physical play and games occupy very little time.
Exploring natural environments is hardly part of modern education. In the U.S. school system, rather than all older children pursuing different forms of sports, artistic endeavors, and scientific explorations, most children are channeled into one direction and compelled to neglect others. The in-one-area-outstanding children have
little time for a broad spectrum of social, scholastic and other endeavors that appear important for their development. And having hormone driven adolescent boys and girls in the same classrooms often discourages them from pursuing interests that are associated with the other sex or with homosexuality.
Inadequate physical exercise and horrible diets, with far too much salt2, sugar, unhealthy fats3, etc. are addicting (food/couch addictions). Consequences have included anxiety and mood disorders; hypertension and cardiovascular problems with heart attacks and strokes in ever younger patients; sleep apnea and other forms of sleep disturbances with day time sleepiness and consequent low functioning, falling asleep while driving, etc.; diabetes with all its complications, including cardiovascular problems, loss of eye sight, loss of limbs, kidney failure. The problem has previously been worst in the USA but in recent decades has become catastrophic in Third
World countries such as Mexico.
Healthy lifestyles are not only good for people’s health, particularly in advanced age, they are also vital for people’s mental health. Many types of exercise, yoga and similar techniques, meditation techniques, etc. greatly enhance people’s mental health and resilience.
Children’s natural propensity to daydream and experiment with relaxation, meditation, and contemplation are rarely nurtured, neither are children’s natural attempts to seek simple forms of artistic expression. Instead, children are to avoid ‘day dreaming’ and learn “correct” techniques of expression. Few children are able to use contemplation and artistic expression to deal with psychological conflicts, as might happen spontaneously when children experiment with minimal guidance.
Many modern cultures have stifled children’s opportunities to experience touch, although touch is necessary for infants to thrive and has important functions throughout life. A misguided fear of sexual feelings has gradually reduced games that include touch. The issue is often related to a fear of nudity that appears particularly extreme in some Muslim cultures. While sexual harassment and pedophilia are serious problems, non-sexual touching is healthy, and appreciating the beauty and attractiveness of a body or a friendly smile should not imply moves towards sexual activities. Furthermore, children and adults have sexual feelings even if there is hardly any opportunity to see, much less touch, people of the other sex.
2.1.3 Neglect and abuse of children an adolescents
There is still a very serious problem with child neglect and abuse, often with long-term consequences. Abuse of a spouse or of one child affects all family members. Most civilizations do poorly with respect to
primary and secondary prevention. There is widespread neglect of teenagers: schools do not adequately address their needs. Upper level schools are often large and impersonal, there is much unstructured time, there is much destructive influence by media, and many adolescents perceive little meaning in their day-to-day activities. Adolescents and young adults with apparent pathological developments are often treated with disciplinary measures and legal proceedings, rather than psychotherapy and psychiatric treatments. Even residential treatment centers tend to relay on punitive and behavioral techniques, which may change behaviors but hardly deal with the patients’ underlying problems. The lack of stable extended families and communities increases the likelihood of child abuse and consequent psychopathology. Children need stable attachments. Insecure primary attachments and other pathology in a child’s primary attachment have long term consequences. Multiple changes in primary attachment figures, e.g. when moved from foster home to foster home, is extremely damaging, particularly if a move occurs before the child has been well adjusted for some time and, after a time of regressing, has caught up in his/her psychosocial development. Sometimes moves are so frequent that the child gives up trying to trust any attachment figure.
Abuse behaviors and irresponsible risk taking tend to be rather encouraged in adolescents (supposedly responsible social drinking which is for many very dangerous; sexual acts that should be the very last step in the development of a relationship, considered as a form of experimenting and exploration; and casually overstepping meaningful cultural limits). Many young people need much more structure with meaningful activities than is generally offered. The teaching of ethics is in most places inadequate, particularly a focus on compassionate empathy towards others and recognition that all ‘abuse’ behaviors are, by definition, unethical. If pathological developments have progressed to a certain point, young people may need the structure of residential treatment
for years.
2.1.4 Social and cultural changes: individualism and high expectations versus social support and resilience
With the rapid changes in cultures and the footlooseness of modern societies, people are often torn away from their cultural heritage, and gaps between generations are aggravated. Old cultures, rather than developing gradually, tend to essentially collapse with new generations trying to start very different new cultures, often adopting from other cultures that young people may admire. Well functioning multicultural communities are rare. Modern civilizations, particularly the USA, stress individualism, self-fulfillment or realization of personal potential, often at the cost of human relationships to loved ones. Advertisements, emphasizing conveniences, self-sufficiency, and personal safety, indirectly promote people’s propensity to isolate themselves, as individuals and as nuclear families.
In modern cultures there has been an unhealthy dichotomy between learning and working versus entertainment and pleasures. Generally, people should learn what they are interested in and work in a field they enjoy. The separation between work, hobby, and relaxation should be subtle: people should not assume work and studying to be largely uncomfortable, stressful, “a necessary evil,” and they should not feel a need to compensate with expensive, often risk-taking entertainments and pleasures. This dichotomy probably contributes to abuse and addiction behaviors.
Cultures generally create expectations that its members always function according to a standard. Failures to fulfill the expectations usually lead to conflicts, with consequent shame, guilt, anger, etc. Today, people are taught to expect more from their institutions: there is a cultural assumption that things are “right” in accordance with laws and high technological and ethical standards, in governmental and private institutions. Expectations then interfere with healthy adapting, and people often respond with outrage, obsessing, anxiety, etc. when an institution appears to fail and/or when there are seemingly “injustices.”
While adjusting cultural expectations, we must also focus on teaching children resilience. People must learn to accept the past as remembered, the present as perceived and the future as anticipated; acceptance must be cognitive along with working on emotional acceptance. Traumas of any sort must become ‘normal’: something bad that, due to random occurrences coinciding has happened – passing judgments is fruitless (abusers are almost always themselves victims of severe abuse), but we may learn from occurrences that we want to prevent in the future. Specific forms of psychotherapy may help in the process of emotionally accepting past traumas.
In recent generations, old wisdoms about what contributes to happiness have been lost, but are re-detected and expanded by psychological research. However, it is important that happiness research and teachings are not part of religious teaching. Specific religious teachings divide people, and they often interfere with scientific progress and with science-based personal pursuits. Religious practices and rituals are meaningful as artistic cultural activities that may bond communities; but a sense of spirituality should be derived from nature, beauty in nature and the greatness of the universe, and also from human creations, such as classical symphonic music, visual arts and beautiful architecture.
_____
1 Girls usually receive much less attention from opposite gender parental figures. Father and male relatives usually get less involved and spend less time with children. Additionally, fathers are sometimes expected to punish children of both genders for misdeeds they have not even observed. This inequality may be a cause of the disproportionately high rate of depression in adolescent girls and women. (Obviously, other environmental-cultural factors are likely to contribute to the difference; the male-female ratio of anxiety and depression in young people varies between cultural groups; in some groups there is no difference.)
2 Modern man consumes much more sodium than any mammal; the sodium/potassium ratio in modern diets is particularly unnatural. I wonder whether the high sodium intake contributes to mood disorders since lithium, a mineral that competes with sodium on a cellular level, is an effective mood stabilizing medication, decreasing aggressive and suicidal behavior. Other mood stabilizing medication, e.g. carbamazepine and oxcarbazepine, tend to lower serum sodiumand they are potent blockers of the presynaptic Na(+) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17904592]..
3 Inadequate amounts of the essential omega 3 fatty acids in nutrition probably contribute to mood disorders. Trans fatty acids are not natural and their health hazards are not clearly understood. Saturated fatty acids contribute to cardiovascular diseases.