Cultural Survival Skills

Today we rightfully worry about conserving the earth’s energy supplies and finding more renewable energy resources for our future. Tragically, there is one precious source of renewable energy that is already “discovered”. But we have taken it for granted and squandered it shamelessly.

That renewable human energy resource is our America’s children. Nothing better can ever replace our intellectually, physically, and emotionally healthy children. No other source of pure and renewable energy will ever reduce America’s crippling high rates of psychologically disordered adults with socially damaging emotional and behavior problems as quickly, significantly and cost-effectively as having and raising increasing numbers of our own healthy developing children. It is appropriate that we think of damaged children and youth as “damaged cells” in the socio-cultural animal that we are. It is essential that we prevent damage to this, our precious renewable life-source, in every way we can.

An old saying is: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Prevention is the most efficient, certain and cost-effective way to ,over-time, increase the percent of mentally healthy and effective adults in America. Understand that a great many social and family “risk factors” for psychopathology in children are well identified. These are only associations, or correlations. However, the causal factors are likely to be found somewhere within these “risk factors”, or perhaps within the psychological or biological make-up of the children exposed to them.

For America to live long and well we must protect our children and youth from the many developmental risk-factors associated with the expensive and difficult-to-fix emotional harms they have suffered. Very often these psychological and behavioral problems continue into their adult years; creating more risk-factors for their own children and others with whom they interact.

I judge that all of this is one major source of America’s increasingly behaviorally debilitated population, society, and culture.

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D. 10/19/22

This entry was posted on October 19, 2022 at 12:05 PM and is filed under Boiling the American Frog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.