After the most recent mass shooting in North Carolina, and particularly after hearing that the shooter was only 15, I believe it’s important to consider what kids are going through today, and how we might be able to help. Understanding that I’m 30 and haven’t been a kid for some time (despite my continued immaturity), I think we start to address these problems by giving children a chance to be heard and have their opinions matter.
This article does an excellent job unpacking why so many young teens are struggling, and why it’s a mistake to lump it all together as one big “youth mental health crisis”.
America has become an increasingly difficult place to be a happy child, and it’s well past time to start treating that as an urgent political problem.
The concept of independence and autonomy plays an important role in developing what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”, the idea that your choices and actions affect your life and that they matter. Sadly this is exactly what today’s young people are missing. These kids are born and raised with an understanding of climate change and the disastrous human contributions to it, as well as the seemingly diminishing prospects in our society.
I wish I had more concrete answers or even suggestions for how to improve the mental and emotional health of young people, but the best I know is that we all feel valued when we feel heard. It’s not much, but it’s a place to start.
Side Items
Grocery Monopoly? We don’t often think about grocery stores being at risk of monopolizing, but that may soon change. Kroger, the grocery store giant that somehow still struggles to pay its workers a survivable wage, has agreed to purchase Albertsons, another massive grocery store chain, in a deal reportedly worth $24.6 billion. How this affects the employees remains to be seen, but thousands of workers will deal with the consequences. Kroger is the second-largest grocer by market share in the US, only behind Walmart, and Albertsons is fourth, after Costco. Together, Kroger and Albertsons make a MEGA-GROCER that will be a closer second to Walmart
The Brits Just Can’t Get it Right: Britain’s newest prime minister/punching bag, Liz Truss, suffered added embarrassment yesterday when the economic policy program that she advocated for and on which she was elected was struck down by the very politician she appointed to try to restore the country’s financial stability. “Trussonomics” as it’s been called, was a brief, ill-fated experiment in promising unfunded tax cuts theoretically paid for by anticipated economic growth generated by lower taxation rates and structural changes. Sounds like Liz Truss was just throwing words on a page and calling it economics, and I get it, I did the same in my freshman Econ 101 class 10 years ago
More Floundering from the World’s Richest Orca: After recently whining about not receiving government funding for providing internet access to a war-torn country, the world’s richest complainer seems to have changed his mind and announced that his company would continue to pay for Starlink satellite internet in Ukraine. Wowww, so benevolent Mr. Musk, you shouldn’t have
Correction: In yesterday’s edition I mistakenly stated that the soup attack on the van Gogh took place in Amsterdam when it actually went down in foggy London town. Shouts out to the reader diligent enough to point out my error!