Making Children Ill with Unrealistic Expectations: Monbiot

by **StarmanSkye** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 2:03 am

Something's going on here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? **** Tuesday June 27, 2006 The Guardian (UK) www.guardian.co.uk We are making our children ill with unrealisable expectations Young people are paying the price for an economy driven by dissatisfaction, in which social mobility is in sharp decline by George Monbiot If this were Iraq, or Somalia or Chechnya, the trend would not be difficult to understand. But this is Britain, during the longest period of domestic peace and prosperity in modern history. After 36 successive quarters of growth and low inflation, with high employment and a low chance of being murdered in your bed, we should be the happiest, calmest, least fearful people who have ever lived. But something has gone wrong. A report published last week by the British Medical Association suggests that there has been a steady increase in mental health disorders among children between five and 16 years old. Today, 9.6% of them - very nearly one in 10 - suffer from psychological problems that are "persistent, severe and affect functioning on a day-to-day basis". Roughly "1.1 million children under the age of 18 ... would benefit from specialist services". I don't think it would be an exaggeration to describe this as a social catastrophe. What is going on? The BMA isn't sure. It suggests that diet may be a factor, in particular a possible deficiency of Omega 3 fatty acids (an issue I discussed in last week's column). It notes that while there has been no increase in the number of 11- to 15-year-olds who drink alcohol, consumption among those who do has doubled in 14 years. It found that children living in poverty were much more likely to develop disorders than those with richer parents. But as child poverty is falling, you would expect this to mean that psychological problems were declining. The BMA also points to changing family lives. But another report on the same issue, published by the Nuffield Foundation in 2004, found that "marked changes in family type ... were not the main reason for rising trends in behaviour problems". The same study contains one of the most arresting statements I have ever read: "Rises in mental health problems seem to be associated with improvements in economic conditions." As our GDP increases, we become more disturbed. Among other possible causes, it blames rising pressures at school, changing relationships with other children, and a decline in the limits and rules set by parents. But all these, it admits, are "untested hypotheses". As anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's, I feel justified in hazarding one of my own. I accept that this a complex problem, and that there are doubtless many causes. But I propose that one of them is Willy Loman syndrome. Willy Loman is the hero of Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman. He is torn apart by the gulf between his expectations - the promise held out to everyone of fame and fortune - and reality. Even as his modest powers decline and his career falls apart, he believes that he can still be No 1. This used to be called the American dream. Now it is everyone's nightmare. A survey published in April by the economist Tom Hertz showed that the United States has one of the lowest levels of intergenerational mobility in the rich world. A child born into a poor family has a 1% chance of growing up to become one of the richest 5%, while a child born into a wealthy family has a 22% chance. Another study, published by Business Week, found that in 1978 23% of adult men whose fathers were in the bottom quartile made it into the top quartile. In 2004 the figure was 10%. But reality and public perceptions are travelling in opposite directions. A poll for the New York Times published in 2005 showed that 80% of respondents thought it was possible for poor people to become wealthy by working hard. In 1983 the figure was only 60%. Hertz noted that "among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States". In April the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published a study showing that UK citizens in their 30s today are twice as likely to be stuck in the same economic class as their parents than people born 10 years earlier. Here too, declining mobility is accompanied by rising expectations. In January the Learning and Skills Council found that 16% of the teenagers it interviewed believed they would become famous, probably by appearing on a show like Big Brother. Many of them saw this as a better prospect than obtaining qualifications; 11% of them, it found, were "sitting around 'waiting to be discovered' ". The council claimed that the probability of being chosen by Big Brother and of becoming rich and famous as a result is 30 million to one. But the promise held out to us is that it can happen to anyone. The teenagers seemed to believe it can happen to everyone. And this is surely how much of our economy now works. A vast industry is devoted to selling people images of themselves that bear no relation to reality. The most obvious of these (this is hardly an original point) is the celebration of extreme thinness just as childhood obesity becomes an epidemic. The headline on this month's edition of the girls' magazine Sugar is "Get this Bikini Body with no effort". Most pages are devoted to either bodies or celebrities. A feature on Theo Walcott's partner, Melanie Slade, shows how she is about to exchange her modest life for mansions, sports cars, health spas and shopping in Bond Street. Its drawing of a typical "celeb wedding" contains an enclosure for "ugly relatives". A fat woman is being hosed with fake tan by a makeup artist, who is "trying to make the uglies photogenic". A couple of readers seek to rebel against these impossible deams, but they are slapped down. "After reading 'How to be sexy by Christina Aguilera' ", one girl writes, "I realised: how can a girl say she's individual, but look plastic?" The letters editor replies: "She has an individual approach to fashion, image and attitude - which is why we think she's fab." Another letter asks: "Why is a celeb always on the cover of Sugar? People who aren't celebrities are people, too, and readers would respond better to seeing their mate's older sister than a star who they wish they were!" She's told: "We've done our research and most of you'd prefer to see a celeb on the cover." One of the conditions that is growing fastest, the British Medical Association says, is self-harm: cutting or burning yourself, pulling out your hair, swallowing poisons. It is commoner in girls than in boys: one survey found that 11.2% of girls had committed an act of this kind. If girls are attacking or seeking to erase their bodies, it is surely because they have been taught to hate them. The gulf between what we are told we should be and what we are is growing. As children's expectations lose contact with reality, they are torn between their inner lives of fame and fortune and the humdrum reality their minds no longer inhabit. Advertising (and the businesses supported by it) is not the clattering of the stick in the swill bucket that Orwell perceived as much as the carrot that keeps the donkey moving. You are never allowed to come close enough to eat, however hard you pull. An economy driven by dissatisfaction could scarcely fail to cultivate mental illness. www.monbiot.com <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1806790,00.html">www.guardian.co.uk/commen...90,00.html</a> **** Or. could an additional factor be the high levels of cognitive dissonance prevalent throughout western society, as the result of mixed-messages and numerous contradictions that underscore the hypocrisy and duplicity of our society, where we 'liberate' people by killing them, where the path to peace is via war, where the invasion of Iraq had NOTHING to do with oil, where material affluence is the end-all/be-all, and where the evident path to riches and 'success' is by being more ruthless and sneakier than everyone else, and by refusing to accept the relevance or authority of laws -- IOW, emulating the corrupt politicos and financial elites and socially-respectable famous criminals who have acheived distinction, and are rewarded for their great initiative and daring and savvy 'contacts'. Some 'model' of success for children to mimic and aspire to, eh? Starman

by **Dreams End** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 8:51 am

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>"She has an individual approach to fashion, image and attitude - which is why we think she's fab."<hr></blockquote> Her individual approach includes stylists, makeup and hair experts and a personal trainer. when my stepdaughter was younger, she used to cut out endless pictures of magazine models. Though she at one time was thinking of fashion design as a career, it seemed to be the women in the photos that interested her. Now, she is beautiful and also fairly slender, but always complains of being fat. She also has two (self-imposed) options for socializing...going to the mall or doing nothing. She's very materialistic, though some of the mall thing is that there aren't many other places around to hang out and run into her extended social network. Thanks for the interesting article.

by **blanc** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 9:09 am

Actually we don't seem to have allowed children a real childhood for some time now. The scary thing is that these children (this generation) are the GRAND children of those who played outside in vast elaborate socialising herd games of tag, got their cod liver oil and orange concentrate and school milk, but next to no sweets, soft drinks etc., and were pretty oblivious to fashion, fame, sex and body image while growing up.

by **wintler** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 8:17 pm

I'm surprised Monbiot is surprised, i thought he was smarter than that.. maybe its just for effect. Its a huge topic, my banal observations as a dad in a middle class Australian suburb would be.. -lack of exercise & 'being in their body' time - kids walk nowhere, nearly never play in the street, yards are smaller, screens too popular. I've met too many ten year olds who have never climbed a tree or a fence and couldn't outrun a kitten. -lack of 'other people' time - parents work alot more, kids visit other kids much less (cos their parents are frightened), and families are smaller. Less obviously, Deep Ecology suggests that on some level all of us can feel this sixth and largest great extinction event in the planets history, and its not nice. We're also each experiencing an accelerating decline in (average) per capita energy and resource availability, and thats not nice either.

by **smithtalk** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 11:04 pm

where does he suggest he is surprised? he is a careful writer and meticulous researcher who is not prone to wild statements or posturing, lets not get ahead of ourselves and question his mental faculties, despite the fact that he has completely ignored a lot of the deep political stories of the last ten years i still think he is brilliant and well worth reading, a lot of people on this board lament the fact that they read and quote someone who later turns out to be full of shit or working for nefarious groups, monbiot is not like that, you can stand safely by his stuff amen

by **StarmanSkye** » Wed Jun 28, 2006 1:56 am

Wow -- great insights re: lack of children being 'in the body' time, reduced family time, and reduced social interaction 'cuz people are too busy and frightened, and esp. the Deep Ecology perception of impending Great sixth extinction. Re: reduced socialization -- I read this a coupla days ago and debated posting, but as your comment really resonated with what this is all about, the trend of increasing social isolation in the US, it's esp. appropriate; Not hard to posit how this would benefit the PTB thru reducing interpersonal networking and confounding intimate relations -- thus discouraging organized resistance and strong community ties. Instead of only an incidental consequence of social changes and a declining middle class, might this have a deliberate, strategic cause also? Starman ***** Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says The Number of People Who Say They Have No One to Confide In Has Risen By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 23, 2006; A03 Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States. A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two. The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties -- once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits -- are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone. "That image of people on roofs after Katrina resonates with me, because those people did not know someone with a car," said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who helped conduct the study. "There really is less of a safety net of close friends and confidants." If close social relationships support people in the same way that beams hold up buildings, more and more Americans appear to be dependent on a single beam. Compared with 1985, nearly 50 percent more people in 2004 reported that their spouse is the only person they can confide in. But if people face trouble in that relationship, or if a spouse falls sick, that means these people have no one to turn to for help, Smith-Lovin said. "We know these close ties are what people depend on in bad times," she said. "We're not saying people are completely isolated. They may have 600 friends on Facebook.com [a popular networking Web site] and e-mail 25 people a day, but they are not discussing matters that are personally important." The new research is based on a high-quality random survey of nearly 1,500 Americans. Telephone surveys miss people who are not home, but the General Social Survey, funded by the National Science Foundation, has a high response rate and conducts detailed face-to-face interviews, in which respondents are pressed to confirm they mean what they say. Whereas nearly three-quarters of people in 1985 reported they had a friend in whom they could confide, only half in 2004 said they could count on such support. The number of people who said they counted a neighbor as a confidant dropped by more than half, from about 19 percent to about 8 percent. The results, being published today in the American Sociological Review, took researchers by surprise because they had not expected to see such a steep decline in close social ties. Smith-Lovin said increased professional responsibilities, including working two or more jobs to make ends meet, and long commutes leave many people too exhausted to seek social -- as well as family -- connections: "Maybe sitting around watching 'Desperate Housewives' . . . is what counts for family interaction." Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard and the author of "Bowling Alone," a book about increasing social isolation in the United States, said the new study supports what he has been saying for years to skeptical audiences in the academy. "For most of the 20th century, Americans were becoming more connected with family and friends, and there was more giving of blood and money, and all of those trend lines turn sharply in the middle '60s and have gone in the other direction ever since," he said. Americans go on 60 percent fewer picnics today and families eat dinner together 40 percent less often compared with 1965, he said. They are less likely to meet at clubs or go bowling in groups. Putnam has estimated that every 10-minute increase in commutes makes it 10 percent less likely that people will establish and maintain close social ties. Television is a big part of the problem, he contends. Whereas 5 percent of U.S. households in 1950 owned television sets, 95 percent did a decade later. But University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman questioned whether the study's focus on intimate ties means that social ties in general are fraying. He said people's overall ties are actually growing, compared with previous decades, thanks in part to the Internet. Wellman has calculated that the average person today has about 250 ties with friends and relatives. Wellman praised the quality of the new study and said its results are surprising, but he said it does not address how core ties change in the context of other relationships. "I don't see this as the end of the world but part of a larger puzzle," he said. "My guess is people only have so much energy, and right now they are switching around a number of networks. . . . We are getting a division of labor in relationships. Some people give emotional aid, some people give financial aid." Putnam and Smith-Lovin said Americans may be well advised to consciously build more relationships. But they also said social institutions and social-policy makers need to pay more attention. "The current structure of workplace regulations assumes everyone works from 9 to 5, five days a week," Putnam said. "If we gave people much more flexibility in their work life, they would use that time to spend more time with their aging mom or best friend." C 2006 The Washington Post Company

Making Children Ill with Unrealistic Expectations: Monbiot

Making Children Ill with Unrealistic Expectations: Monbiot

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