> But because they believe it's risk free they aren't exactly telling teens not to use it.
Citation, please. My personal experience as a teenager two and a half decades ago and as someone responsible for the care of teens and pre-teens now is quite the opposite of this. The teens/kids I observe are being told very stridently not to use it, in the same terms and even by some of the same organizations (D.A.R.E.) that we were in the '90s.
While there might be a (strong, IMO) argument that teens are disregarding real, serious risks because they find out some of the bogeymen presented by D.A.R.E and similar are overblown and assume all of us are over-articulating risks, I don't think kids are being told any less to "just say no." As if that helped in the first place.
That sort of "the kids aren't alright" sentiment of this piece is especially rich:
"On the one hand, I know she's safe, she's not out getting pregnant or smoking pot or drinking or doing all kinds of risky stuff that I can imagine would be age appropriate,"she said. But Haskew wonders whether her daughter is missing out on life lessons those behaviors can teach. "Is that stuff necessary for human development, do you have to be risk-taking as a teenager in order to succeed as an adult?"
So these articles and parents, after years if not decades of after school specials and anti-drug classroom crusades and rubber playgrounds and helicopter parenting and initiatives to make everything about childhood as safe and as convenient as possible, are now suddenly regretting their kids not experiencing teen pregnancies or youth drug abuse? After making the world a safer place- and a more scary place through relentless hysteria and moral panics- they now think their kids are too soft and coddled? Sponsor scouting organizations or summer camps or apprenticeship programs or study abroad if you think your kids aren't experiencing the real world enough. Don't romanticize the same risky behaviors that you lobbied to abolish in the first place.
Yes, and even more damning is the language used by DARE:
> D.A.R.E. America's Commitment to Prevention In its 35 year history, D.A.R.E. America has constantly improved its science and evidence based education programs to provide students with the knowledge and tools they need to resist drugs, alcohol, and other high risk behaviors.
Alcohol gets classified as separate from drugs. Wouldn't want kids telling their parents to not do drugs, right? And if their parents drink, that would just signal drugs are OK... etc etc
> There's a lot to be said for teaching experimentation and the scientific method, but I'm worried they're teaching a whole generation of kids that science is inherently dangerous.
I guarantee any teenager with a legitimate interest in science would consider some amount of danger the most exciting part.
> But this article makes me worry, especially for the kids. And, that you can't distinguish b/w a regular candy and one with marijuana in it.
There's still a minimum age (21 I believe) for purchasing. Same argument (irresponsible parents leaving things lying around for kids) applies for painkillers, anti-depressants, alcohol etc.
It was so long ago, but I though it was very detailed and informative. I think it's enough to keep curious kids uninterested in using. No amount of education will keep the hopeless person from using. And I mean hopeless as in they lack hope for their life and feel its over already, then they choose to use anyways knowing about the effects.
You are right in the second part, but the first part is unnecessarily defeatist. You could say the same about alcohol and smoking, "they will anyway try it with friends", yet it still makes sense to keep children away from it or postpone it.
While you cannot keep kids away from it forever, it makes a lot of difference when they are exposed to it and how well-equipped they are to deal with it.
Simply telling kids to stay away from drugs is a paternalistic approach that doesn't work, particularly when you consider that teenagers tend 'rebel' against advice from authority. Genuine education would inform without bias, and allow people to make informed, safe choices.
Not that I know. Bad wording from my side, I was only thinking about teens (like the case of the author). Some day research might tell us, until then, you better avoid a risk to your child.
There was another thread on a similar theme that is important ...
"... 'Risk-taking increases the resilience of children,' said one. 'It helps them make judgments,' said another. Some of those interviewed blamed the 'cotton wool' culture for the fact that today's children were playing it too safe ..." ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267048
I'd agree with that. One of the problems with not letting people try things is they have no real gauge on what is dangerous and what is not. So they tend to over react to things that are not dangerous and underestimate the danger when it really exists. I added more here ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268065
My conclusions still hold ... "There is a downside though. If you do make a mistake there is a pretty good chance you will get injured. If you don't, you will fail to build up the store of experiences that you can call on in the future" ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2730793708/
What? I absolutely would suggest with a straight face that we shouldn't tell are kids that. It's more complicated than that, and lumping all drugs together seems to do more harm than good, judging by the failure of the DARE program.
The article fails to realise that in most of the anecdotes retold; today the state would intervene at the behest of a neighbour and "I read it in the New York Times" will not really prevent the investigation into why you allowed your child to play with knives, live for 3 days at the top of a slag heap of rubble or hold a loaded handgun.
Also - teenage mortality has reduced drastically[1]. It's hard to argue that could be a bad thing.
It is probably because we don't let them (wherever possible) carry out activities that might kill themselves.
I am a parent of 3; I will happily take my children mountain climbing, skiing, snowboarding, trekking, wild swimming. In a few years we plan to trek to Everest Base Camp and they are coming with me to the Andes.
We engage in controlled risk. If they break a limb skiing then they break a limb skiing. They pushed beyond their abilities in some way. I don't need to give them wrappers of cocaine from a criminal and a handgun to be a better parent.
There is also a very real risk of the "Tom Sawyer" bias. Each generation thinks their generation took greater risks and had more vivid adventures than the one previous. The cognitive dissonance curiously avoids the higher levels of child abuse, abduction, injury, poisoning, asphyxiation, malnutrition and disease. My father used to have great adventures playing as a child in asbestos riddled houses. You can talk to his friends about it sometimes...well the few that have not died before 60.
Oh look here is a group of kids that used lethal asbestos as chalk. [2] They really learned a valuable lesson about ad-hoc citizenry there.
> For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
You say 86, but that was just the number of children reported to the AAPC. I think it'd be reasonable to assume that there were many more cases that were not reported (due to varied levels of ingestion/concern) or were reported elsewhere and so not included in AAPC stats.
Some of what you call "Moral Panic" and "Pearl-Clutching" in regard to the whole tide pod thing was also what I'd call "Education". It informed both parents and children that this was occurring and why it was a bad idea. I think it's also safe to assume this helped prevent a few cases.
Young children were and still are the primary concern when it comes to ingesting household poisons, and there have been active efforts and ongoing campaigns for ages warning both parents and children about that particular danger (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Yuk), but what made the tide-pod challenge remarkable and newsworthy is that very few people would have expected that so many teenagers would be stupid enough to do something like that.
All that isn't to say that the media didn't jump at the chance to generate clicks by exploiting parent's fear and exaggerating the phenomenon, but it wasn't simply something invented to panic parents the way the D&D scare was, and it was just one of several stupid dangerous things children were doing around that time motivated by internet points and social media attention.
In the case of this "Not Tourette’s", while I'm sure it has been being reported elsewhere and perhaps even irresponsibly, the source is an academic paper and no matter the actual prevalence of this behavior it's absolutely appropriate for something like this to be reported and discussed in that setting. Even if this does turn out to be nothing but a blip in referrals that never amounts to a larger trend of great concern and the fad of kids pretending to have Tourette’s dies off quickly, that's perfectly fine.
What matters is that there are records and reports so that all available evidence can be collected, compared, and studied in the event that it isn't simply a non-issue that dies off on its own. In the meantime, because it is happening, it seems like a good thing for healthcare providers to be aware of what's been observed so far and that researchers can look into the "Why" behind it.
I think the article is saying: instead of just telling kids to "just say no", it's better to give them good information about what it does to your brain. Also, try to give them alternative ways to relieve stress.
It sure does seem risky to give children something for which the long-term risks are unknown. I’d hate to think people have been doing that in recent years.
"but being overly alert on this is better than ignorant."
Please cite any evidence that this is true in practice.
Seriously.
The long-term cost to treating kids like this is probably vastly higher than any possible damage caused by the threats.
(IE i would even expect it causes more kids to die younger over time)
Humans are very good at significantly overestimating the risks they can easily reason about, and significantly underestimate the ones they can't.
Citation, please. My personal experience as a teenager two and a half decades ago and as someone responsible for the care of teens and pre-teens now is quite the opposite of this. The teens/kids I observe are being told very stridently not to use it, in the same terms and even by some of the same organizations (D.A.R.E.) that we were in the '90s.
While there might be a (strong, IMO) argument that teens are disregarding real, serious risks because they find out some of the bogeymen presented by D.A.R.E and similar are overblown and assume all of us are over-articulating risks, I don't think kids are being told any less to "just say no." As if that helped in the first place.
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