Josh you’re spot on. Those troubled young people are the products of really mentally unbalanced adults. Now we have society piling on. That 15 year old boy still wearing a mask or asking for sexual reassignment surgery has a very dark, sad and short future. And the parents will claim it was something like white supremacy that did it.
Kids tend not to lash out with weapons when parents are loving, warm, attentive and impose limits when necessary. It would make sense that this child is experiencing abuse/neglect at home. A little digging of different news stories seems to confirm your theory. HIs mother is a piece of work - drug abuse, locking the kids out of the house, screaming at them in public, criminal record for 17 years.
I see his actions as a big cry for help by a completely desensitized child who has given up on authorities to keep him safe. Nothing like shooting up classmates to get some attention from the real authorities. He'll have a life in prison away from his parents and a consistent routine. It's madness that his murdering rampage is giving him a marginally better life.
I ran away from home multiple times to escape our mother for exactly this reason; anything would be better.. even the group homes and facilities the bounced me to for 3 1/2 years. It took me much longer than Josh to work through it as a teen.
A little scary to comtemplate but today if instead the teacher wasn't compassionate but an activist and identified you as trans because you simulated lipstick with crayon and started you on a surgical path.
We neef teachers with actual basic therapy training based on cbt to identify kids needed real psychological help not activists.
I came from a very abusive household as well and also see how this might have been me, bullied in school. I also was raised to be a man, the man of the house, in most ways men fulfill male roles in the home. I liked wearing masculine clothes and role models like Annie Lennox who wore masculine clothes and men’s trousers. If what was around now was around then, I might have been medicated and transitioned. Thankfully, I am a conservative mom in a happy marriage with two kids who I am learning to parent better than I was parented. These are strange times.
"Yet for all that attention, nothing has changed. The rates of child abuse are not better; they’re probably worse."
What would that change look like? How would it be effected? We already have child protective services, but they're notoriously staffed by idiots and they often make things worse. We remove kids from abusive homes and put them in the foster system, where they're likely to be abused again.
What would have stopped your mother? Who could have intervened? How could she be held responsible? Prison? Then you'd have been put into the system, shuffled from house to house, and likely mistreated.
I ask because I look at the situation and I despair. Cluster B abuse is self-perpetuating. On the other hand, none of my siblings became NPD despite having an NPD father. My nieces and nephews weren't abused.
We had a lot of mediating influences: my mom's side of the family wasn't abusive, and we saw them more often. And the father of our friends next door was the most gentle, tender-hearted, sweet soul I've ever met. He did lots of fun stuff with the neighborhood kids. Our whole neighborhood was filled with functional adults. We also had a strong church community with ethics that most people lived by.
Maybe when abused kids are identified we need to make sure they have ample access to normal kids and normal adults. Places to go. Decent people to hang out with.
Unfortunately, sane people don't live in the neighborhoods where the abuse often is.
I’ve been watching as more and more people become aware of the gender Borg, and by extension the rampant paedophilia associated with it. My prediction is that the internet will now make it much easier to respond to abusive situations. Spreading awareness is one thing that just got a whole lot easier.
A few weeks ago, I saw a video of a black WWII veteran giving a lecture to a group of college aged black kids. He told them that their success does not, and should not, depend on the failure of white people. That’s just one example; I’ve also seen self confident men responding to men’s dating issues, and of course I spend a lot of time chatting with young conservative men, helping them figure out women and dating. We “noticers/helpers” just DO that, apparently.
Now that the population is becoming aware of the problem, the right people for the job will just automatically respond, and that will change the culture.
Our planet harbors at least one large culture (1.2 bn) where strict religious codes about sexuality share space with rampant child sexual abuse. The boys in those cultures grow up homicidally enraged; the girls trauma-bond with the system.
I have no idea how that cycle of abuse gets broken, either. Makes Noah's flood look more like mercy than wrath.
I remember when we were able to discuss this issue in the context of national awareness. Do you remember billboards where sad kids in a shadowy type background had hotline numbers to call for help? Well maybe it really is just too unpleasant for 'regular' people to have it in their face.. so instead it festers under the surface of a hypnotized populace. Hiding the underbelly of dysfunctional families doesn't heal them and the big game of pretend where it's merely a need for equity and childcare is polishing a turd. The fact is that as soon as they started denigrating the importance of the nuclear family, or secularizing the communities, they handily validated that broken families are fine. They aren't, we weren't, and now?
The bubble people....are most frustrating and they are the reason we still have this problem. They shut down any type of REAL discussion abut these things as too dark and depressing. They love their oblivion more than their fellow man. Do not desecrate their happy happy joy joy with reality. They are....polished turds who live in lala land
Josh, your ability to persevere against such a terrible start is so commendable to me. I appreciate your insight into the common thread that binds together the kids who lash out. I am so sad for kids who lack parents strong and caring enough to help their offspring learn to manage their impulses. A family is truly an economy of love. Parents pay into the future for us all, or otherwise default.
I never met my father. When I was nine, my alcoholic mother left me alone for a week. From there, I went into foster home and had several very nice foster parents.Years later, my wife and I considered adopting a foster child. We had to go through a year of training and evaluation. We attended a large group session where we got a brochure with anonymous profiles of young foster children. A third of the kids had a physical problem because their parents did drugs when they were born or badly abused them. Another third of the kids had severe mental problems because of the kind of horrible parents Josh described. There are all kinds of safety precautions that we had to comply with. For example, we had a swimming pool in a fenced back yard. Not good enough. We were required to put yet another fence around the pool that was already fenced. Even though we had to comply with all manner of training to make sure that we were worthy, we learned that the parents of those kids had all manner of rights to come into our home, blah blah blah. Yes, drug addict types were gonna be able to come into our home, but the foster system was worried about fences. In the Big group session after the presentation of what we have to do to qualify to take one of these foster kids, the people in the audience started asking questions. Typical question was how many kids can we have in a single bed room? I’m surprised there aren’t more school shootings.
What.....? Do you think those adults eager to foster multiple kids without adequate space are doing it for the money? I'm trying to make that make sense. (There are plenty of poor people who'd rather foster than work for $. After all, being a parent (foster or otherwise) isn't as hard if you're not doing it right. I grew up poor, and for a while an obese lesbian couple rented next door, collecting money for their foster kids, and they also had taken in a veteran and received money for that. One of the women told my mother that she would let the severely handicapped one (physically and mentally, from horrific parental abuse) lie in bed with her and touch her naked body, since he seemed "so curious" now that he's 11. It speaks volumes to me that my own piece of work mother told US that story, but not the authorities.
Susan, my impression was that the too many would be foster parents were setting up foster kid businesses. I was lucky. All of my foster parents took in kids to love them. Sadly, those types of people are likely discouraged by the over-zealous and worthless bureaucracy that heaps rules on foster parents and yet allows the biological parents to have no rules.
Hi Josh ….. two siblings, same crazy family. It can feel like a mystery sometimes, but on a gut level I think the ones that come thru it understand that maybe, just maybe, we are made of stronger stuff .
I've often contemplated the "why" I was " different" too. I watched as most of my cousins went the same route as our cluster B parents. Im hardly special, I am in fact a mess of a wreck like them, having come up in the same environment. The only real difference I can see is that I look on how we were brought up with revulsion, but they look back on our childhoods with fondness?
They laugh and joke about getting drunk and high as kids with their parents, they call their neglect, freedom to run the streets at all hours of the night as a child. Ive seen this same delusional thinking process in the adult children of middle class white collar families who were abusive behind closed doors and seemingly the perfect family in public. One instance, the parents were seen as overprotective because of their great love, the truth was the parents were highly controlling of their children to protect the family secret. Couldn't risk the truth going public.
Start with a thought that might seem trite and unrelated, but even so...
This weekend, I plan to make enchiladas. It is, by far, my favorite meal. But an impossible question is "Why do I love enchiladas so much?" Reality is, of course, too complicated, too impossible, to untangle everything in my life that contributed to the reason I love my favorite food. Genetics, environment, choices, etc., we're looking at a decades-long interaction of hundreds upon hundreds of events--some out of my control, others in my control--that made me the enchilada fan that I am.
If we can't reasonably untangle something as simple as a favorite food, it should be clear that it is probably even harder to pin down why this 14-year-old shooter chose to murder.
There are no easy answers because the decision, the opportunity to commit the murders, and the moral and emotional state necessary to carry them out--they're borne out of a life of these kind of influences. Some innate. Some environmental. Some borne of choices that took him to where he is now.
We all wish the cause could be easy to understand, because then the solution would be easy to implement (and bonus points if we can find an easy cause and solution that fits our ideological preferences).
Was this boy treated cruelly by peers at times? Probably. Teenagers are REALLY good at being cruel. Was he also treated well at times? Almost certainly. Was his home filled with abuse and chaos? We don't know, but if we honestly look at the odds, there's a really good chance. Were drugs involved? I don't know, but I know they often are in these kinds of situations.
I think the most clear thing to say is that in a nation that nurtures chaos and dysfunction--moral chaos, emotional chaos, mental chaos, societal chaos, family chaos, etc.--we are sadly going to see terrible events and outcomes. And many victims will become perpetrators of the future.
It is a very good song. If you look it up on song facts, there’s some interesting details about how they wrote it. They did a great job with it, there are a few songs like it.
I will. I suspect Pat Benatar knows what she's talking about from personal experience. No, I'm not saying I know it to be straight autobiography; I don't know that.
But the opening of the video "Love is a Battlefield" always made me suspect.
When people used to ask me why I was so into true crime and serial killers, I would sometimes say it was like examining a different “me.” The me that could have emerged if things were a little different. I actually spooked a therapist with that one.
You have to look them in the eye and ask them why they're so sure that you're not a serial killer, preferably while slowly closing the door to the room behind you. Hold eye contact until you see real doubt start to creep into their expression.
Not all jokes have to be fun for everyone. Sometimes you have to put yourself first.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Bless you 🙏
Josh you’re spot on. Those troubled young people are the products of really mentally unbalanced adults. Now we have society piling on. That 15 year old boy still wearing a mask or asking for sexual reassignment surgery has a very dark, sad and short future. And the parents will claim it was something like white supremacy that did it.
Kids tend not to lash out with weapons when parents are loving, warm, attentive and impose limits when necessary. It would make sense that this child is experiencing abuse/neglect at home. A little digging of different news stories seems to confirm your theory. HIs mother is a piece of work - drug abuse, locking the kids out of the house, screaming at them in public, criminal record for 17 years.
I see his actions as a big cry for help by a completely desensitized child who has given up on authorities to keep him safe. Nothing like shooting up classmates to get some attention from the real authorities. He'll have a life in prison away from his parents and a consistent routine. It's madness that his murdering rampage is giving him a marginally better life.
You're a living miracle Josh.
I ran away from home multiple times to escape our mother for exactly this reason; anything would be better.. even the group homes and facilities the bounced me to for 3 1/2 years. It took me much longer than Josh to work through it as a teen.
His aunt reported that he’d been asking for mental health help for months. So very sad that plea was answered only by the gift of a weapon.
Sad but true.
A little scary to comtemplate but today if instead the teacher wasn't compassionate but an activist and identified you as trans because you simulated lipstick with crayon and started you on a surgical path.
We neef teachers with actual basic therapy training based on cbt to identify kids needed real psychological help not activists.
I came from a very abusive household as well and also see how this might have been me, bullied in school. I also was raised to be a man, the man of the house, in most ways men fulfill male roles in the home. I liked wearing masculine clothes and role models like Annie Lennox who wore masculine clothes and men’s trousers. If what was around now was around then, I might have been medicated and transitioned. Thankfully, I am a conservative mom in a happy marriage with two kids who I am learning to parent better than I was parented. These are strange times.
"Yet for all that attention, nothing has changed. The rates of child abuse are not better; they’re probably worse."
What would that change look like? How would it be effected? We already have child protective services, but they're notoriously staffed by idiots and they often make things worse. We remove kids from abusive homes and put them in the foster system, where they're likely to be abused again.
What would have stopped your mother? Who could have intervened? How could she be held responsible? Prison? Then you'd have been put into the system, shuffled from house to house, and likely mistreated.
I ask because I look at the situation and I despair. Cluster B abuse is self-perpetuating. On the other hand, none of my siblings became NPD despite having an NPD father. My nieces and nephews weren't abused.
We had a lot of mediating influences: my mom's side of the family wasn't abusive, and we saw them more often. And the father of our friends next door was the most gentle, tender-hearted, sweet soul I've ever met. He did lots of fun stuff with the neighborhood kids. Our whole neighborhood was filled with functional adults. We also had a strong church community with ethics that most people lived by.
Maybe when abused kids are identified we need to make sure they have ample access to normal kids and normal adults. Places to go. Decent people to hang out with.
Unfortunately, sane people don't live in the neighborhoods where the abuse often is.
I don't know. I really don't know.
I don’t know either. Maybe there is no solution and I’m just flailing.
I’ve been watching as more and more people become aware of the gender Borg, and by extension the rampant paedophilia associated with it. My prediction is that the internet will now make it much easier to respond to abusive situations. Spreading awareness is one thing that just got a whole lot easier.
A few weeks ago, I saw a video of a black WWII veteran giving a lecture to a group of college aged black kids. He told them that their success does not, and should not, depend on the failure of white people. That’s just one example; I’ve also seen self confident men responding to men’s dating issues, and of course I spend a lot of time chatting with young conservative men, helping them figure out women and dating. We “noticers/helpers” just DO that, apparently.
Now that the population is becoming aware of the problem, the right people for the job will just automatically respond, and that will change the culture.
I am glad for your optimism and work! I wish I could feel as you do.
We’ve already come a long way! Think about what it was like a year ago!
Keep the faith. Every day, more and more people learn the truth, and more and more people leave the Democratic Party in disgust.
Our planet harbors at least one large culture (1.2 bn) where strict religious codes about sexuality share space with rampant child sexual abuse. The boys in those cultures grow up homicidally enraged; the girls trauma-bond with the system.
I have no idea how that cycle of abuse gets broken, either. Makes Noah's flood look more like mercy than wrath.
Noah's flood was both mercy and wrath
I remember when we were able to discuss this issue in the context of national awareness. Do you remember billboards where sad kids in a shadowy type background had hotline numbers to call for help? Well maybe it really is just too unpleasant for 'regular' people to have it in their face.. so instead it festers under the surface of a hypnotized populace. Hiding the underbelly of dysfunctional families doesn't heal them and the big game of pretend where it's merely a need for equity and childcare is polishing a turd. The fact is that as soon as they started denigrating the importance of the nuclear family, or secularizing the communities, they handily validated that broken families are fine. They aren't, we weren't, and now?
Yes. It's all gone now. We've lost our morals, our soul, our cohesion.
Time to bring it back.
The bubble people....are most frustrating and they are the reason we still have this problem. They shut down any type of REAL discussion abut these things as too dark and depressing. They love their oblivion more than their fellow man. Do not desecrate their happy happy joy joy with reality. They are....polished turds who live in lala land
Josh, your ability to persevere against such a terrible start is so commendable to me. I appreciate your insight into the common thread that binds together the kids who lash out. I am so sad for kids who lack parents strong and caring enough to help their offspring learn to manage their impulses. A family is truly an economy of love. Parents pay into the future for us all, or otherwise default.
I had to send you a tip for this one. Very powerful. Thanks for being awesome.
You’re very kind in multiple ways. Thank you.
I never met my father. When I was nine, my alcoholic mother left me alone for a week. From there, I went into foster home and had several very nice foster parents.Years later, my wife and I considered adopting a foster child. We had to go through a year of training and evaluation. We attended a large group session where we got a brochure with anonymous profiles of young foster children. A third of the kids had a physical problem because their parents did drugs when they were born or badly abused them. Another third of the kids had severe mental problems because of the kind of horrible parents Josh described. There are all kinds of safety precautions that we had to comply with. For example, we had a swimming pool in a fenced back yard. Not good enough. We were required to put yet another fence around the pool that was already fenced. Even though we had to comply with all manner of training to make sure that we were worthy, we learned that the parents of those kids had all manner of rights to come into our home, blah blah blah. Yes, drug addict types were gonna be able to come into our home, but the foster system was worried about fences. In the Big group session after the presentation of what we have to do to qualify to take one of these foster kids, the people in the audience started asking questions. Typical question was how many kids can we have in a single bed room? I’m surprised there aren’t more school shootings.
What.....? Do you think those adults eager to foster multiple kids without adequate space are doing it for the money? I'm trying to make that make sense. (There are plenty of poor people who'd rather foster than work for $. After all, being a parent (foster or otherwise) isn't as hard if you're not doing it right. I grew up poor, and for a while an obese lesbian couple rented next door, collecting money for their foster kids, and they also had taken in a veteran and received money for that. One of the women told my mother that she would let the severely handicapped one (physically and mentally, from horrific parental abuse) lie in bed with her and touch her naked body, since he seemed "so curious" now that he's 11. It speaks volumes to me that my own piece of work mother told US that story, but not the authorities.
Susan, my impression was that the too many would be foster parents were setting up foster kid businesses. I was lucky. All of my foster parents took in kids to love them. Sadly, those types of people are likely discouraged by the over-zealous and worthless bureaucracy that heaps rules on foster parents and yet allows the biological parents to have no rules.
So it sounds like you are affirming what I said, which is that some are in it for the money.
Hi Josh ….. two siblings, same crazy family. It can feel like a mystery sometimes, but on a gut level I think the ones that come thru it understand that maybe, just maybe, we are made of stronger stuff .
I've often contemplated the "why" I was " different" too. I watched as most of my cousins went the same route as our cluster B parents. Im hardly special, I am in fact a mess of a wreck like them, having come up in the same environment. The only real difference I can see is that I look on how we were brought up with revulsion, but they look back on our childhoods with fondness?
They laugh and joke about getting drunk and high as kids with their parents, they call their neglect, freedom to run the streets at all hours of the night as a child. Ive seen this same delusional thinking process in the adult children of middle class white collar families who were abusive behind closed doors and seemingly the perfect family in public. One instance, the parents were seen as overprotective because of their great love, the truth was the parents were highly controlling of their children to protect the family secret. Couldn't risk the truth going public.
Start with a thought that might seem trite and unrelated, but even so...
This weekend, I plan to make enchiladas. It is, by far, my favorite meal. But an impossible question is "Why do I love enchiladas so much?" Reality is, of course, too complicated, too impossible, to untangle everything in my life that contributed to the reason I love my favorite food. Genetics, environment, choices, etc., we're looking at a decades-long interaction of hundreds upon hundreds of events--some out of my control, others in my control--that made me the enchilada fan that I am.
If we can't reasonably untangle something as simple as a favorite food, it should be clear that it is probably even harder to pin down why this 14-year-old shooter chose to murder.
There are no easy answers because the decision, the opportunity to commit the murders, and the moral and emotional state necessary to carry them out--they're borne out of a life of these kind of influences. Some innate. Some environmental. Some borne of choices that took him to where he is now.
We all wish the cause could be easy to understand, because then the solution would be easy to implement (and bonus points if we can find an easy cause and solution that fits our ideological preferences).
Was this boy treated cruelly by peers at times? Probably. Teenagers are REALLY good at being cruel. Was he also treated well at times? Almost certainly. Was his home filled with abuse and chaos? We don't know, but if we honestly look at the odds, there's a really good chance. Were drugs involved? I don't know, but I know they often are in these kinds of situations.
I think the most clear thing to say is that in a nation that nurtures chaos and dysfunction--moral chaos, emotional chaos, mental chaos, societal chaos, family chaos, etc.--we are sadly going to see terrible events and outcomes. And many victims will become perpetrators of the future.
Hell is for children
https://youtu.be/0gaXL0_7wno
Lyrics of Hell Is For Children by Pat Benatar
They cry in the dark, so you can't see their tears
They hide in the light, so you can't see their fears
Forgive and forget, all the while
Love and pain become one and the same
In the eyes of a wounded child
Because hell, hell is for children
And you know that their little lives can become such a mess
Hell, hell is for children
And you shouldn't have to pay for your love
With your bones and your flesh
It's all so confusing, this brutal abusing
They blacken your eyes, and then apologize
Be daddy's good girl, and don't tell mommy a thing
Be a good little boy, and you'll get a new toy
Tell grandma you fell off the swing
chorus
Because hell, hell is for children
And you know that their little lives can become such a mess
Hell, hell is for children
And you shouldn't have to pay for your love
With your bones and your flesh
No, hell is for children
Hell, hell is for hell
Hell is for hell, hell is for children
Hell, hell is for hell
Hell is for hell, hell is for children
Hell, hell is for hell
Hell is for hell, hell is for children
Hell is for children
Hell is for children
You won't be surprised to know that I considered using that Benatar song at the end. I'm glad you remember it so well.
It is a very good song. If you look it up on song facts, there’s some interesting details about how they wrote it. They did a great job with it, there are a few songs like it.
I will. I suspect Pat Benatar knows what she's talking about from personal experience. No, I'm not saying I know it to be straight autobiography; I don't know that.
But the opening of the video "Love is a Battlefield" always made me suspect.
OK. It appears I'm wrong after doing some reading.
That should say few songs like it, not a few songs like it.
When people used to ask me why I was so into true crime and serial killers, I would sometimes say it was like examining a different “me.” The me that could have emerged if things were a little different. I actually spooked a therapist with that one.
You have to look them in the eye and ask them why they're so sure that you're not a serial killer, preferably while slowly closing the door to the room behind you. Hold eye contact until you see real doubt start to creep into their expression.
Not all jokes have to be fun for everyone. Sometimes you have to put yourself first.