The Danger of Safety-ism

If only experts would stop telling us how mentally ill we all are. 

"Mental Illness a Growing Threat Among Teens" is a headline we read daily. Apparently it's what readers and listeners want to hear; media outlets poll them to find out and then give them what they want. For hits and ratings, mental illness is rated highly, topic-wise. 

The "mental illness among teens" narrative feeds the reluctance of teens to grow up and be self-supporting -- it seems too dangerous. Did Covid lockdowns teach them to shun employment just as they reached adulthood and governments were pouring out free money to help people stay home? It was no training for independence.

Youths no longer drive (climate change), no longer find after-school jobs (prefer online gigs), nor if they go to college, find student housing (rents too high). Do they even become students? Apparently colleges might put them in range of "harm" due to hearing opinions in class that differ from their own. "Anxiety and depression" lurk in every lecture hall and library, where unwelcome ideas might be encountered, and discussion relabled as bullying ... 

(Check out Heterdox Academy for lots of current detail on that: https://heterodoxacademy.org/)

Young people refuse to put their security-blanket smartphones down. For them, if something can't be done by swiping, it won't be done. Scrolling is a soother, the contemporary version of the thing their mothers put into their mouths in toddler-hood. Are today's thirty-somethings still toddlers? Many seem to want the gender-fluidity of toddler-hood; take that away and you're "marginalizing" them. Maybe because you're a privileged white Boomer? 

As small children, these twenty- and thirty-somethings spent a lot of time in daycare centres; maybe the over-exposure to non-family "carers" in early childhood fed into a generational fear of adulthood? You learned in daycare to sing-along with a group, in preparation for singing in secondary school from the correctness song-sheet. Now you might be shamed and cancelled if you deviate from it. 

Better to stay home and watch Zoom (sounds like the childish noise you made with the toys in the daycare centre). The place you were banished from in early childhood (home) now seems your "safe place".

If you can't tolerate working and striving, you won't tolerate novel ideas or diverse thought. In their own day, the baby-boom generation despised the narrow-minded "establishment". Independence mattered, and they were lucky: it was easy to find jobs, afford rent, run an old beater of a car and leave home. They valued free thought, free verse, free love, they marched for Earth Day and Banning the Bomb, started communes, discovered pot, turned vegetarian. Now, they look upon the non-works of grandchildren and despair -- or shake their heads in puzzlement.

Not all youths are hiding in basement lairs of course. Some are excelling at STEM or becoming artists or studying History (learning to take the long view). Maybe it won't matter in the end because everything practical will be done by robots. The robots' intelligence may be artificial but they won't get anxious and depressed while they watch and monitor us through digital surveillance. 

Now that will be real danger.

Pre-School Early Learning Graduation Day

 

Pre-School Graduation Day

A Welcome From Early Learning Daycare

As the Team Leader of your children's Early Learning Daycare I'm thrilled to welcome parents, grand/step-parents and all other significant influencers to this celebration. Your five-year-olds have successfully graduated from the national Early Learning Program. They have had a wonderful first five years of life, transitioning seamlessly from the womb to our richly intersectional training environment.

You and your children may not have seen much of each other over the past five years, as they come and go from daycare and you come and go from work, meetings, Zoom calls, fitness regimes, therapy, and professional upgradng. Seeing them up here on this stage, about to receive their Childcare Graduation Certificates, you might hardly recognize your kids. You might be amazed at how big they have grown, how many tattoos they have, how much longer, or maybe shorter, their hair is, and how their eyes are still that deep colour that Grandma's were!

Maybe you have stayed in touch with your kids through the regular texts they have sent you (we encourage maintaining close ties between students and family), so you know how many acronyms and emojis they have learned at Daycare! 

They have learned to fit into a crowd and navigate time. That means they go online a lot, and rarely stray into time-wasting day-dreamy private introspection. Becoming fully absorbed into our inclusive and equitable shared learning environment is key to their social adjustment. They have had opportunities to play with blockchains, enjoy digital inclusivity games, and do real-time anti-bias role playing. 

They have practised performative allyship in non-racialized learning rooms, so you know they're prepared for primary school. It's hard to believe that that used to be the beginning of schooling, back in the unprogressive era of half-day kindergarten. It's amazing how far society has come since children once played in back yards and spent time at home for the first five empty unstructured years of their lives.

You will be proud of the graduation which takes place today, and there is of course nothing competitive about this Awards Day: every child will be the winner! Each child will take their place in the rainbow. So get out your smartphone camera, and in case some non-custodial parents aren't sure which child is theirs please refer to the display of selfies projected onto the wall behind the kids, with the name of each one displayed (with pronoun preferences) under their head-shots.