My daughter is scared, and she doesn't want to talk about it.
At her school and all around Finland, the flags sat at half-mast. There was a school shooting in southern Finland yesterday, where a twelve year old killed another student, and seriously injured two others. These kinds of events are very rare in Finland for many reasons, but it is likely that they will increase in frequency. When I say rare, this is the fourth school shooting in Finland, with the first now thirty five years ago, in 1989.
Smallsteps heard more about this at school, where they observed several silent moments throughout the day. And, to make matters worse for her, the older sister of one of her classmates is friends with one of the victims, so there was more talk about that.
Smallsteps doesn't understand how someone can do this to someone else.
My wife had talked to her when she got home from school, but Smallsteps was reluctant to speak much, because she is so sad about it. When I got home from work, I sat holding her on the couch and said that she can ask questions, and bit by bit she started to open up. However, before she started speaking, we had a conversation about why it is good to speak about things that make us sad or scared, and also about the topics that we don't want to talk about, because that way, we have a chance to understand and potentially find solutions.
The twelve year old was soon caught, and the reason they gave as their motive, is that they were bullied. This excuse is akin to a thief saying they are poor, or a rapist saying they were horny - they don't excuse the behavior.
Nor does the age.
While the conversation will focus on gun access, mental health and bullying in schools, what the conversation will omit is the discussion around the degradation of society, the failing of communities, and the increasing drive for individualism in an on-demand environment, combined with a decreasing focus on emotional control. The newspapers won't talk about how parents no longer parent, or how interpersonal skills are near nonexistent. Because these are essentially outlier events, won't acknowledge that this is a social problem at all. That while these kids are outliers, they are also products of their environment, the one that they have been encouraged to embrace.
There are always psychological and emotional outliers in society.
It is the way a normal distribution works. For every genius, there is the idiot on the other side. For the kindest person, there is also the cruelest. And, we are all on the spectrum, under the right circumstances, we all have the propensity to be a positive or a negative force on those around us. But, what people seem to ignore is that while we are all individuals, we are also pretty predictable as a group. And, the trend of the group isn't moving toward a healthier direction.
So many people want to be considered normal, but seem to skip the part that "normal" today means to be overweight, poor, and unhappy. In the past we used to aspire to be better than we currently are by looking toward those who inspire us. Now, we don't want to grow, we don't want to improve, so we look to normalize people like as, by demanding "representation" in the media, society, leadership. When we keep looking to populate groups of people by average percentages, it is a race to the bottom.
What happened to wanting the best person for the job?
And, because we have created a content landscape that is filled with false transparency, and all-access passes, what is there to aspire to, who is there to look up to - if you had a child, who would you want them to rolemodel? A morally corrupt politician, a sexually abusive music artist, a lying social influencer? Forget the children for a moment, who is there to look up to as an adult? Even the superheroes have been downgraded with flaws, to make them more relatable, to bring them down to our level, barely distinguishable from the villain who plays their nemesis.
I don't want to be represented. I want to be inspired.
As Smallsteps and I were discussing, to find solutions to problems, we first have to understand the problem. A school shooting isn't due to gun availability, or bullying - but mental health does factor into it. It isn't about more psychologists though, as they are part of the problem. What I believe we need is to take a long, hard look at the culture we have created, the habits that we encourage, and the conditions that we have built, and recognize that we have created an environment that raises mental illness, that raises physical illness, and lowers the pool of people who we can actually look up to and admire. Not because they are the biggest assholes on the screen, but because they are the best people in our community.
As much as I would like to, I can't protect Smallsteps from the world. She is going to experience terrible circumstances, terrible people, terrible events and have terrible feelings arise. Avoiding discussing what is uncomfortable and scares us, doesn't protect us from it, it makes us even more reactive to it. Which is why we have a couple of generations of people who are triggered so incredibly easily, and feel that they are justified, entitled to overreact with impunity. They think that violence is justified, because someone made them feel bad.
We have rewarded victimhood.
And normalized pathetic.
Is this what we want our society to be?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
And there I was thinking you were going to be talking about homeschooling, this is much worse x_x
unschooling is our primary method
That's so much harder to fix, and also I can think up a million (okay just a couple) of conspiracy theories around this. At least with things like
politicians and people in general can pretend they have all the answers and everything would just be better if everyone else accepted the fact that they were right and implemented their simplistic solutions and continue studiously ignoring the fact that those problems stem from deeper problems which require more complex solutions (and some of which may never have a permanent solution because the problem variables keep varying).
How's the little one doing now? That's quite a lot for anyone, especially kids.
Simple solutions to complex problems. It can never work, as the landscape is always changing. Their solutions don't factor in the culture, or the dynamics and interplay.
She is alright. More questions will come in time.
I'm preparing to audition for the role of the Witch in Into the Woods. She sings a song about this problem, Stay With Me. So I've got the topic of wanting so much to protect a child that you harm them. Smallsteps needs to learn how to live, on her own, in this world, not a princess' fairy tale world. Curiously, really terrible things happen in fairy tales! Oh dear now I'm all confused. Are we preparing our children to live in a fairy tale, or is fairy-tale-ish all so very real?
You make an excellent point. The real causes of our murdering each other go untreated, but our access to firearms to protect ourselves gets less and less, with every one of these events. Some say, credibly, that many of the events are managed by tptb. One has to wonder. I know I do. Anything can happen in fairy tales.
I was talking to a client about this a bit this morning. We are preparing children for a reality that doesn't exist, one that puts words at the top of communication, even though it is a sliver of the understanding. One that doesn't let children explore their strength physically to learn what are appropriate reactions. We aren't providing a playground to build mature adults, we are protecting them to keep them children.
Our governments are doing the same, talk about preparing us for a world that doesn't exist. A world full of mindless, dependent beings seems to be the goal. It would be best for tptb if we begin this with our children.
"She is going to experience terrible circumstances, terrible people, terrible events and have terrible feelings arise. Avoiding discussing what is uncomfortable and scares us, doesn't protect us from it, it makes us even more reactive to it."
My wife has been awfully worried about growing concerns in the school system and the prospect of violence/mass casualty events. Due to the nature of my job, I study the events and prepare for worst case scenarios all of the time. I get anxious in crowds always looking for atypical or "red flag" behavior. I do my best to not take it home. I try to tell her that no matter what we do, we cannot protect our kids from everything. We can only hope to teach them to deal with situations on their own and hopefully make the right choices.
She really wants to do home school. I'm torn about it. I'm less worried about the violence issue, and more worried about the failings of public schooling built to "save" the least able student. (I remember being incredibly bored with redundancy at a certain age and basically checked out mentally.) In any case, I'm also worried that my kid is going to miss out on important social learning from his peers. Everything seems like the most important thing ever at a young age. Those situations stick with you and shape you. The dynamics of generational social contexts is going to be something I won't be able to teach because I'm disconnected from learning in that critical period which is dictated by the current environment.
This, and what they teach. They are teaching children to be more incompetent emotionally, as well as more reactive to their emotions.
If you do choose to homeschool, there are quite a lot of people now who do it, and they connect up for social activities in the neighborhood. It is almost like they are making a school system again...
Yeah I've seen some in my area. Sometimes I cringe at the "classes" that are offered. However, I've also thought I could teach a bunch of kids this stuff and make it fun for them. I've made some great strides in my collegiate scientific endeavors recently, but one of the coolest things I do there is occasionally teach high school kids human anatomy in the cadaver lab. It's fun watching them squirm looking at donor organs for the first time. Maybe there's some teaching in my future. I've really been enjoying research though, even choosing to step away from my job in a week or two to take a cool 10-week research opportunity. Kind of scary, but we'll see how it goes.
I’ve got nothing against firearms per se, but there have got to be better ways about limiting who has unrestricted access to them. The parents of a Michigan school shooter are facing prison time for letting their son have access. In this case, closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, but it’s a start.
There is this strange thing in the US where it is apparently normal to keep a gun in a bedside table drawer. Like, what?
The entire culture is broken - gun culture is just a symptom of it, and school shootings one of the expressions. Road-rage is a symptom too, as is youth crime.
I don't agree with the killing, but I think these comparison are really bad, especially the rapist. The one bullied is also a victim, but they shouldn't have resorted to killing. If I relate it to grownups, it could be a neighbor harassing another person. People will usually escalate to the police if talking it out doesn't work. But if the police [teachers] don't do anything, some take it into their own hands.
Being a kid, they didn't have the maturity or experience to handle it in a better manner. I would put the blame on the adults around them; the teachers and parents. I hope all the kids recover from this.
Making victims of others to meet our own needs, is never appropriate, is it? There is no good excuse for violence, but if we keep relying on other people to step in so we don't have to manage our own emotions, we will never learn how to. We need to stop expecting an authority to protect us.
Never said it was.
In an ideal world, I agree. What if a terrorist group, mafia, or gang are troubling you. Police or the government are your only logical choice. Unless you want to go Rambo on them, then you will just be like the kid.
I'm sorry that she has to go through that and have those feelings. It's sad that any child does. I can't even imagine four, that's like one day over here. I never would have thought working in education I might have to wonder if I will make it home alive each day, yet here we are.
It is an incredible fall in society, over a very short period of time. They are no longer outlier events, performed by broken people - they are not that far from the average.
For sure! It's horrible. It's interesting to see how shocked some people are in the comments. They obviously don't live in the states, they have no clue!
Wow! a 12year old? gun shooting?? that is just wild and enough reason for a parent to be worried.
But I think Smallsteps will do just fine with your guidance.
We can only equip our children and prepare them for the hurdles ahead. If one is religious, they can chip in some prayers.
The journey has never been a smooth one, but we travel it anyway
There is too much illness, disorder, madness, everything is mental health that makes this world more and more difficult for our children and for everyone Mr. Taraz I am sorry that this tragedy has happened in your country,you are doing your best to guide your daughter.
Tell Smallsteps, that life is full of many deserts, like this very painful experience that creates so much uncertainty in her Heart, but also of Oases where many of us are trying to build a world with a society with values, with more kindness, more love.
Very well said, @tarazkp
Ah!😳 What a tragedy! It's enough reason to make a girl afraid of school. Well in my country guns are not allowed if you are not in the military, not to talk of a child carrying it in school.
This is horrifying and to think the child is just 12 years old makes it more saddening.
I can't imagine the level of trauma this may have on the kids.
I hope your daughter recovers speedily, especially with your guidance.
It's sad to read that at a young age, one needs to experience how cruel the world can be. It's also disheartening to think that at a young age, some children are already exposed to evil. No matter what we do, if someone is inherently inclined towards being bad, even if we do good to them, they will still continue to do things that will disappoint us.
Schooling shouldn't be mandatory. It should be a service offered to parents; and those parents should decide how much or how little they want of it. Formal homeschooling too.
I shouldn't have to beg the state for permission to teach my own kids at home, any more than I need to beg the local restaurant to let me cook my own dinner.
Kids hate it there, and start bullying each other. The bullying makes it worse, but the kids have to keep going each day or they'll be abducted into foster care.
Eventually something like this happens, and everything except state-imposed schooling gets blamed.