Category: Health

Are you suffering from outrage addiction, my friend?

Posted on by Suki

I am a strong curator of my social media feed. When people I follow post back-to-back ugliness, I unfollow them. I’ve read the research and I know that a steady peek into the ugliest parts of their souls is not good for my mental health.

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker

But then the 2020 election happened, and everyone was outraged. Conservatives were outraged, liberals were outraged, middle-of-the-road why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along people were outraged. We became a culture of outrage. Unlike some people I know, I didn’t leave social media, but I definitely limited my engagement.

There was a palpable drop-off in outrage after Biden’s inauguration. Most people not on the fringes moved on. But some of the people I know seemed, for lack of a better word, stuck in outrage. Outrage had become their drug of choice, and they simply couldn’t stop.

I started unfollowing people whose feeds were stuck in pointless outrage. In a few cases I attempted to post moderating comments, but the ugliness of the responses gave me pause. I decided I needed to calm my own brain and I unfollowed them all.

Righteous anger is not outrage

There’s a place for—and a grand tradition of—righteous anger in our culture. Righteous anger is focused and in its own way positive: its goal is to get people to sit up and take notice.

The BLM protests were initially fueled by righteous anger. And though they had been lied to and misled, a lot of right-wing voters who believed that our election was stolen were also initially inspired by righteous anger.

But I make a distinction when I use the word outrage. Outrage is a knee-jerk reaction that is unfocused and has no particular end-goal:

  • If you’re outraged by racism, you yell a lot, you riot, or you live in anger and fear.
    If you are experiencing righteous anger about racism, you take part in peaceful protests, you communicate the reality of the problem to others, and you vote.
  • If you’re outraged by voting issues, you yell a lot, you riot, or you decide not to vote because it’s pointless.
    If you are experiencing righteous anger about voting issues, you learn about how the system works, you read the data, you get involved to keep the election secure, and you vote.

This year has given us plenty of examples…

like racism

The BLM protests did a lot of good. They focused the attention of a lot of well-meaning white people in power whose attention really hadn’t been focused. People influenced by righteous anger got to work and pressured their lawmakers and their communities to do better.

But when you look at the outrage that accompanied the righteous anger, there was a fair amount of collateral damage. Property was damaged, people were harmed or killed, and lots of fundamentally decent people got really nasty in their social media feeds.

Righteous anger fueled real, positive change. Outrage fueled anger, depression, alienation.

and voting rights: on the right…

The concern over voting rights is shared by people all over the political spectrum. America without secure elections is not America, that’s clear. But on all sides of the political spectrum, you see the difference in outcomes between outrage and righteous anger.

On the right, people who listened to outrageous lies felt their outrage grow. Righteous anger would have led them to listen to conservative politicians and officials who did the research and found the facts. But the people who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were not fueled by righteous anger. Clearly, there is no logical world in which breaking windows and zip-tying Nancy Pelosi would end in a more secure vote.

There were those on the right who had, if not righteous anger, well-researched concerns. And you may have heard their voices if you were reading the mainstream press. But right-wing media feeds on outrage at this particular time, so that’s what most conservatives heard (and continue to hear). Conservatives who actually understand election security seem to be screaming into a void.

…and the left

The left wasn’t immune to voting rights outrage. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard—and saw in my social media feed in the last year—people saying things like “all politicians are the same so my vote isn’t important” or “the party has the vote rigged.” My observation is that this attitude is more common in younger adults, but there may be other factors than youth. Lack of interest in or understanding of the political process is probably also a factor. Although this may not feel like outrage, this attitude is often accompanied by outrage responses to particular triggering topics such as immigration. The same people who rail against Democrats being “as bad as Republicans” generally don’t take the positive steps that result from righteous anger. They just get pissed off and alienated.

I’ve had to turn off feeds from liberal friends because now that they got what they wanted, they are continuing to bang their nasty words against that wall of outrage. Their hatred of any politician who disagrees on policy is intense, immediately writing them off as “racist” or “in the pocket of corporations” if they don’t agree on the best way to solve a problem.

How are you feeling?

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker

I’m worried about you, friends who are still fueled by outrage. I did turn you off, it’s true, but I think of you and hope that you will be able to step off the outrage machine. It’s not good for your health or for our society.

I believe that we need lots of righteous anger. We have so many difficult problems to address in this country, and so little agreement on how to address them (and sometimes, so little agreement as to whether there’s a problem at all).

But I’d like to see the smart, fun, creative, and energetic people around me step back and assess whether their righteous anger is giving them the energy they need to solve problems, or if they’re allowing their outrage to make them part of a problem.

Picking the scab off the nuclear family

Posted on by Suki

The nuclear, 2-parent family, the gold standard of American parenting, is a relatively new concept. In the past and present, America and communities around the world function well—perhaps better—with a more communal approach to raising children.

The pandemic, I’ve noticed, has been picking at the scab that holds the nuclear family together. Quarantined families, in many cases, have become truly nuclear. A few of my students report that they literally haven’t had a face-to-(masked)face conversation with another human since last March. Most of my students report that they are spending way more time with their families than they ever did.

Of course, in some cases this has been a wonderful gift that Covid has given families. Many of us were stressed out and overscheduled, and the last nine months gave us some breathing room. We rekindled interest in cooking or crafting. We had time to play board games with our kids. We finally got around to painting their bedrooms.

But let’s face it. The human organism was not designed for the nuclear family. We thrive in situations where small communities trust and support each other, shifting the responsibilities of raising children to multiple adults who each have skills to offer. In that situation, no parent needs to be the perfect parent for their children.

But here we are, so what do we do about it?

Some families are thriving, and to you I say, good job! Enjoy!

But other families are experiencing more stress than ever:

  • Spouses have seen their relationships deteriorate
  • Teens are angry and resentful, or depressed and withdrawn
  • Kids are missing daily infusions of joy they used to have when they and their families interacted with others

I’ve been talking with my teen students on how to deal with this, and here are the fixes we came up with.

Remember that you can’t control other people’s emotions

This is such a hard lesson! Depending on our personalities, we respond to our family members’ emotions (especially negative ones) by either blaming ourselves or blaming them, internalizing negative emotions or lashing out with them.

Remember that we can control our reactions

We want to blame our reactions on others, but really, how we react is our choice. But it is true that we have to practice reacting appropriately. Few of us are born ready-made with Zen-level patience!

We can do a few things to practice controlling our reactions:

  • When we react badly, go back and figure out what we should have done. Then tell the person we reacted to about it—aka, apologize.
  • Try to stop when we see ourselves following a pattern of reacting and blaming.
  • Practice the healthy responses when possible.

Parenting peels off scabs of its own

Parents generally find that parenting peels off the various scabs that they formed to deal with life. Some parents don’t want to question their own reactions, and it becomes especially hard for them once their teens assert themselves as individuals. My teen students see that all the time, and it’s confusing to them. As parents, we can help them by verbalizing what’s going on.

“Hey, I’m sorry I’ve been complaining so much. Being stuck in the house and going to Zoom meetings stresses me out!”

“When I was growing up, my family just kept out of each other’s way so we never had to face the fact that we didn’t get along. But now, we’re stuck together so let’s try to figure this out.”

Be empathetic about our teens’ situation

Teens are stuck in between. They hopefully experienced some independence before Covid hit, and now they are stuck with and completely dependent on their families. We parents need to acknowledge that and support our teens in seeking whatever independence they can find—and that’s usually going to be done through a screen.

Don’t give up on each other

I tell my teens whose families are struggling that it’s important not to give up on their relationship with their parents. If we assume that our family members are doing the best they can, we will feel better about our relationships with them. We all have to cut each other some slack right now.

With care and patience, scabs will heal.

Educated: A belated book review

Posted on by Suki

I have to admit that I resisted reading Educated by Tara Westover when it came out with a big splash in 2018. I was, frankly, so done with the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope that I didn’t even bother picking it up.

But strange things happen in a pandemic, and one of those is you are sitting on the couch in the evening, having finished your latest book, scrolling through your mom’s Kindle account and you come across that book you resisted reading…

And so I read it, and was (perhaps not surprisingly) pleasantly surprised. Westover’s book does not promote the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope in the slightest. In fact, I would suggest that anyone who maintains that opinion read the book as a way to understand the difference.

On the fringe of the fringe

Westover was raised in an Idaho Mormon community in a family way at the fringe of the fringe of their community. Westover considers her father bipolar, though he has never been diagnosed. Whatever his diagnosis, he was clearly manipulative, paranoid, and delusional. Westover’s mother was both victim and then co-conspirator with her husband. The family maintained fragile ties with their more mainstream extended family and community, but they lived largely insular lives where the children had no idea what the outside world was like.

The psychological abuse and neglect from her parents stemmed from their extreme views: about the roles of women, about eschewing modern medical treatment, about blind obedience to the father’s authority. Another source of abuse was the constant psychological distress of living in a household that is constantly preparing for the end—which is always just around the corner. The physical abuse, however, came from an older brother. Himself a victim of their father’s paranoia and manias, the brother takes the “education” of his sisters into his own hands, his physical abuse stopping time and time again just short of murder.

The “homeschooling as abuse” trope would have you believe that this abuse was able to happen because of homeschooling. But throughout the story, Westover documents the complicity of relatives, neighbors, and their community. Homeschooling, it turns out, was neither a cause nor an affect of the abuse.

Through the support of a different older brother, who has escaped to college, Westover decides to “educate” herself. She eventually gains a high enough score on the ACT to go to college, and from there proves a brilliant student who can’t be kept back.

Is this homeschooling?

In some ways, Westover’s “education” at the hands of her parents was classic unschooling. Her mother taught all of the children the basics of the three R’s, and both parents gave them life lessons. Her father put the children to work in his (physically dangerous) business and enlisted their support for his constant preparations for the end of days. From a young age, Westover also acts as assistant to her mother’s (illegal) midwifery and then her highly successful essential oils business.

Since unschooling focuses on releasing children from the tyranny of standards and curriculum so that they can pursue their own passions and do meaningful work, one could argue that Westover was “unschooled,” albeit unconventionally.

However, this is not Westover’s view or mine. What happened to her was not unschooling, but baldfaced neglect. She entered the world only with the skills that she fought for. She often had to hide her studies from her domineering father and her passive or enabling mother. She was lucky to have mentors in her college-bound brother and a friend in town. Any resemblance her education has to unschooling is only on the surface.

The village raised the child

Westover’s story, in the end, isn’t about homeschooling at all. In fact, she makes a point of noting other homeschooling families in her extended family who are giving their children a real education.

Her story is about the strength of the human spirit, the importance of believing in factual truth, and perhaps most of all, the role of “the village” in raising children. Westover’s father’s manias and her brother’s abuse make her family an outlier in some ways. But in other ways, her story is a classic one: what her immediate family couldn’t give she got from others.

An older brother acted like a parent.

A friend in town acted like a brother.

A college administrator recognized a need to meet her where she was.

A roommate patiently educated her in the ways of the world.

As much as Westover’s father believed that it was his family against the world, it was the world that made sure that his neglected children could thrive.

A final rift

There is one sad theme to the book that feels unresolved. Near the end of the story, Westover muses about the fact that her siblings who “got out” are successful, with PhDs and lives in the mainstream. The children who stayed, without even a high school diploma, are still fully within their parents’ sphere of influence, their choices limited.

Westover realizes that this rift forces her to choose between her education and the myths her family survives on. Like many survivors of abuse and growing up in extremist communities, she has to choose between fact and family, a break or a continuation.

In the interview linked below, she draws a connection between the choice she made and our current political environment. It’s worth a read.

The ultimate homeschooler?

Westover’s education didn’t come from homeschooling. But in another way, Westover is the ultimate homeschooler—despite her parents’ influence. She took ownership of her education and her life, a process that is difficult for teens even in the most supportive families. She educated herself, then she let herself be educated.

This isn’t a book about homeschooling, but it is a book about learning, perseverance, and coming to terms with family. It’s well worth a read.

Further reading:

6 ways to structure online learning for physical and mental well-being

Posted on by Suki

The other day I went for a “physical distance, social closeness” walk with a friend at the beach. She teaches adults at a law school, and was wondering how to do her online courses in a way that would mirror how she teaches in person.

In the past, she had observed that her students, adults with day jobs, were tired in the evenings, so she arranged things so that they would get up and move about the room for various different activities. How was she going to do this online?

Yes, we were both wearing masks, just not for the picture.

We brainstormed some ideas for her, and while we were doing that, I mused about how my own students are no longer doing all the things they were doing before the pandemic. Most of them are probably doing online courses for much of the day now, even for physical education. Lots of them have working parents who can’t fill in the holes.

During the first quarantine, I paid special attention to my teens, many of whom are quite independent and not used to being at home with their families all day. I redesigned some of my activities with their mental and physical health in mind.

This coming year, I am planning to pay more attention to promoting healthy habits in my classes. In the spirit of sharing with other teachers, and hoping that parents will keep this in mind at home, here are some of my ideas and the reasons for them.

1. Incorporate movement when possible

Maybe this seems obvious, but kids are moving even less than they used to. At school, at least they were moving around the classroom. And during recess, they had other kids to interact with.

Movement is really not an obvious match with the courses I teach, but I hope to encourage them to move before and after class when possible. And who knows, I might figure out a way to incorporate movement specifically in my webinars…without inciting chaos!

We saw this man out making awesome bubbles when we were on our walk. Send your kid outside to make bubbles in between classes!

2. Get students away from the computer screen for specific tasks

It’s so easy for all of us to get sucked into the screen and think of it as real life. But that leads us to be less in touch with the environment around us. My classrooms (where students do self-paced learning when they are not in the live webinar room) are obviously full of videos. But I also incorporate real-world activities when possible, asking them to engage with physical objects, pets, and other people in their household.

3. Engage the senses

Obviously, my students are engaged with their eyes whenever they are involved in the class and their ears during our webinars. I try to make sure that my courses are visually and aurally stimulating. But that’s just a small part of the world.

Now that they aren’t getting as much sensory stimulation in their daily lives, I’m giving more thought to how to incorporate all senses into my webinars and my assignments. That will be an easy one in my new Yum! class about food and eating.

Even cats need to change their focal distance!

4. Get students to change the focal distance of their eyes

Our webinars are mostly around an hour long. Although I recommend that parents never schedule young students for more than an hour at a time online, many parents already did that before the pandemic. Now, most of my students will probably be online most of the day.

In normal life, our eyes change their focal distance on a regular basis. Aside from using screens, there are very, very few typical activities that we do that require us to sit with one focal distance for a long time. My plan is to try to get students to look away from the screen whenever I can, if only for a moment.

5. Keep students in tune with their physical bodies

If students are now going to be sitting in front of a computer for wall-to-wall online courses, it will be very easy for them to literally forget about their physical bodies. Breathing, focus, and periods of quiet will help them be more present in their bodies.

Teachers who have a single group of kids in an online course for hours at a time will need to find ways to keep the kids’ attention but also keep their bodies engaged. This will be a hard task for them! Since I never teach for more than an hour at a time, by design, I don’t run into this problem.

6. Keep them grounded in the physical world

All of us need to remember that the physical world is where we are. Lots of the services we use online are designed to try to make us forget. Kids are especially susceptible to becoming convinced that their online “life” is more important than the physical world around them.

Teachers can help students by making sure that their assignments and activities involve the physical world around their students. Even though we don’t necessarily connect with our students’ families the way that classroom teachers do, we can ask them to use their home life as a resource. Even though the room in which they are attending school is one that we may never set foot in, we can integrate that physical space into the world we create online.

Related:

Humans need meaningful work

Posted on by Suki

…and if you don’t have any, you have to make it up for yourself!

I was reading an article in from a March New Yorker (yeah, I’m a little behind) about the opioid epidemic, and something really struck me as relevant to all of us, especially during this pandemic:

What Case and Deaton have found is that the places with a smaller fraction of the working-age population in jobs are places with higher rates of deaths of despair—and that this holds true even when you look at rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease separately. They all go up where joblessness does.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/why-americans-are-dying-from-despair

The people they are referring to as “jobless” here are not people who are actively seeking employment. They are people who have given up. It turns out that the opioid epidemic is worst in places with higher rates of people who have simply given up on work.

Humans are built for meaningful work. We thrive on it. And it’s clear that “meaningful” doesn’t have to mean important, exciting, or high-status. A fellow school-mom told me that she found her job as a garbage truck driver extremely fulfilling, and I could go on and on about people I’ve met in all walks of life who found satisfaction in a job well-done—no matter what the job.

I think that this leads to an extremely important parenting issue during this pandemic:

Our kids need meaningful work

Any good teacher will tell you that their job isn’t to teach, it’s to inspire. All kids will learn if they feel that it’s the meaningful work that they are doing in their lives. Anyone can transmit information. Good teachers create an environment where learning is the job that kids are inspired to do.

But in a time of pandemic, lots of our kids are “stuck at home.” Their teachers are pixels on a screen, and now we parents are on the front line of helping them find meaning in what they are doing.

It’s a hard job! The other day I had a discussion about college during the time of Covid with my teen students, and it’s clear that this carrot that they were dangling in front of themselves is looking less like a carrot and more like an illusion, a whoopee cushion, or a relic from the past. Looking forward to college was the way they made the work they were doing feel meaningful.

Come fall, it’s going to be harder for them to find meaning in their studies. They and our younger children will all need a new way of finding pleasure in a job well done.

We ALL need meaningful work

So we parents are going to have to help inspire our kids to find meaning. But that means we have to look at our own lives and find it, too. A lot of adults out there are out of work, semi-permanently furloughed, part-time… Many of us have lost the rhythm of life that inspired us and made us feel pride in a job well done.

I’ve always felt that the number one thing parents can do for kids is to model the behavior they want to see. That means that we have to figure out a way to find meaning in what we are doing—whatever that may be.

Let’s avoid a new epidemic of despair

The New Yorker article points out that any person can become physically addicted to opioids. But the epidemic happened in places where a large amount of the people didn’t have work that gave their lives meaning.

As this pandemic runs its course, one of our jobs is to continue to be productive members of the society we live in, even if we’re stuck at home. Watching fear-mongering videos and going down Internet rabbit holes with other scared people is not going to give us what we need.

Humans need meaningful work. What does that mean to you?

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