That’s what the United States Surgeon General says. His solution?
[Surgeon General Vivek] Murthy prescribes a mix of institutional actions such as child income-tax credits and workplace management training on one hand, and individual action such as seeking more mindfulness and self-care on the other.
Sure. The typical progressive mix of throw money at the problem along with feel good self-care claptrap. Nothing about taking care of the children directly. Nothing about local community involvement, and no, I’m not talking about it taking a village nonsense. I’m talking about misdiagnosing the problem because the Progressive-Democrat Surgeon General bureaucrat possessed of a medical degree has missed the underlying problem altogether.
It’s not the powerlessness of parents, nor is it their loneliness; although, the latter does play a part.
Parents have nearly complete power over their children except in some jurisdictions where government asserts itself as the sole possessor of children, whether through public schools locking parents out of their children’s education or emotional problems or directly by locking parents out of the government’s decisions regarding children’s sexual health. “Nearly complete” because parental power does not extend to abusing children. That’s the short and simple of parental power.
Now, the loneliness aspect. The loneliness of parents isn’t from being a parent, it’s from lack of community in the local neighborhood. The folks in too many neighborhoods don’t interact with each other, so they don’t know each other, so they’re in no position to support each other. Yes, yes, both parents work in a double potful of those cases. So what?
I grew up in a household where both my parents worked. At the same time, I grew up in a neighborhood where most households had both parents working. In those days, though, there weren’t backyard fences for individual privacy in the neighborhood. Instead, all those backyards, and front yards, too, functionally ganged together as one large playground for the neighborhood kids to play together, sometimes with ad hoc games, sometimes with less informal games: croquet courts, football (yes, we played tackle), sometimes out into the streets for baseball. The noise of children having fun was loud and common, from toddlers more closely watched by the various parents through high schoolers playing those football and baseball games, and soccer today—and where basketball hoops were set up in driveways, those games, too.
The parents interacted among each other, too. They all knew each other, and they all looked after all the kids, emphasizing their own, to be sure, but all of them. They even had each other’s kids over for snacks or a dinner.
We’ve lost that capacity now, with those ubiquitous fences isolating the back yards, and the children and adults, from each other. We’ve lost that capacity now, too, with today’s adults—parents—more self-centered, me-time demanding, and less community oriented. Today’s neighborhoods are eerily silent of kids playing outdoors.
That sense of community is much harder to achieve in many inner city (and a growing number of outer city) neighborhoods, but that’s not the loss of community among parents and families, it’s the destruction of community through two mechanisms. One is the crime rate. Too many city, county, and State governments reduce, or leave already inadequate, funding for policing the neighborhoods and don’t prosecute criminals that the police do catch. Crime expansion makes the neighborhoods unsafe for parents or children to go outdoors, for adults interact, and for children play with each other.
Community: gangs fill a lot of that—children need their own sense of community, and gangs, however dysfunctionally or crime-oriented fill a lot of that. Those gangs are potentiated, too, by the lack of policing in the neighborhoods.
The other aspect is the lack of effort in or facilities for encouraging newly arrived immigrants to assimilate into American culture. Instead, the newly arrived immigrants hold themselves apart, keeping themselves and their children apart. And they become old immigrants, establishing themselves in their own small (or large) enclaves, into which further newly arrived immigrants of the same culture go to live, and to stay apart.
Lose the loneliness by tearing down those fences; throwing the kids outside to play, without their electronics; talking to the neighbors; get adequate numbers of beat cops in the neighborhoods; prosecute crimes—especially by the gang members. Take concrete, measurable steps to get immigrants assimilated rather than held apart.