Your Children Are Anxious And Depressed. Would You Like To Know Why?

Before I start, let me make a quick disclaimer. Anxiety and depression are by no means solely societally induced. Many studies, great deals of research, and other facts will tell you that anxiety and depression are both very chemically involved and rooted in the mind. However, societal variables can increase or decrease the influences of the issues.

With that said, those effects are what I will be talking about today. I am by no means a chemist, or a neurologist now would I ever pretend to be, but there are many cases of these disorders that are a direct result of outside pressures, and not inward chemical composition.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety affects one in eight children in America (disorders such as General Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Panic Disorder. Also on a less related note, there is a 2.5% increase of anxiety disorders in women as compared to men.). Also, according to Dr. Kalman Heller of PsychCentral noted that anywhere from 10-15% of children and teens (a broad estimate, but still notable) are chronically depressed as of any given time.

I would like to make some comments on these statistics, and the more obvious causes to these sort of steep numbers.

First off, I do believe that one of the more outstanding of contributions to this is the education system (or lack thereof) in America. This will be an important overarching note to remember throughout this writing.

You see, education is an extremely important product of the progress of the human race. We had a craving and desire to learn, to improve our survival. Then, once we had begun to learn enough to no longer only be able to communicate it through mouth, we had to write it down. Once we had it all written down, we had to make sure someone was reading it, and thus education was born.

Education, knowledge, and understanding give children, adults, and the entirety of people more purpose than anything else we could give them.

However, our modern education has failed, quite miserably, to teach children to understand and think. If the best teacher shows a child where to look but not what to see, then the modern K12 system has children blindfolded and left in an empty room. There is no desire to understand and explore, but instead children are stuffed with meaningless facts. 

Who invented cheese? The Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell! Although facts like these are important for very specific, very particular situations and people the average person does not need them.

Children are discouraged from reading widely, they are discouraged from independently learning, but instead they are told to remember key facts on a meaningless curriculum formed by a bureaucrat in a cubicle. Then, they are sent home with anywhere from 5-7 hours of homework a night, in some cases.

Also, there is a variety of double standards thrown at children in these days, the majority of that from schools. We are preached at day and night to eat healthily, but food provided by the school is nutritionless, and repulsive (a fact supported by the #ThanksMichelleObama occurrence, recently). Then, children are told they should get a bare minimum of 8 hours of sleep a night, but with unthinkable amounts of take-home work, household work such as chores, and limited time to breathe in between tasks, children lack social lives of any sort, cannot take time to learn independently, and also begin to lose sleep as consequence.

All other facts aside, keeping a human away from sleep alone will provide many panic attacks and mental breakdowns beyond comparison. Meanwhile, the entire time children of modern day are reminded daily that we will never live up to our predecessors, and that we are somehow inferior to the adults who currently run the world (This notably happens every generation, but the information age has made it a much larger weight to carry.).

This sort of bureaucratic, inexcusable nonsense is the exact sort of thing that causes children to become introverted, and angry. You can call it hormones, or you can blame it on the children themselves, but there is no doubt the influences are there.

That is all I have for today, but I'll be back tomorrow with another post.

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who only reads newspapers." -Thomas Jefferson