Instructions For This Report

Overview Of My Report

The pages that I read were about children and depression. Children need to find ways to deal with the depression that is taking hold of them because of neglectful parents. There are sessions and programs studied that may help depressed children learn how to deal with and manage their emotions.

The Cost Of Emotional Illiteracy

This section starts of with a story about a fifteen-year-old boy named Khalil Sumpter who shot and killed two of his friends he had gotten into an argument with, Ian Moore and Tyrone Sinkler at Thomas Jefferson High School. Ian killed them fifteen feet from a school guard. He shot them because he thought that they were going to beat him up. Goleman says that this is a sign of a desperate need for lessons in handling emotions, settling disagreements, and just plain getting along. Teachers and counselors are noticing that there is an alarming deficit in emotional literacy. One teacher’s quote was "we care more about how well school children can read and write than rather they’ll be alive next week." The signs of emotional illiteracy can be seen in violent incidents such as the shooting of Ian Moore and Tyrone Sinkler. This is growing more common in schools. There are many statistics that show just how much trouble children are getting into: for example in 1990 compared with previous years, the United States saw the highest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes, teen rape doubled, and teen murder quadrupled. And Goleman didn’t give a specific figure, but teen pregnancy and drug use are also on the rise. The most common cause of all this is mental illness. Symptoms of depression affect up to 1/3 of teens. And Goleman says, unless things change the long-term prospects for today’s children leading a happy and fulfilling life are more and more dismal. In the nineties it is predicted that 2 out of 3 marriages will end in divorce.

An Emotional Malaise

This emotional malaise seems to be a universal price of modern life for children. These problems for children are universal. They do not only affect children in poverty, but rich children as well. Parents working long hours and children being left watching television all contribute to this emotional malaise. It is the erosion of the small nourishing interactions between parents and children that builds emotional incompetence.

Taming Aggression

If children are flagrantly aggressive, that could mean that they could have emotional and other troubles to come in the future. The family life of aggressive children typically includes parents who alternate neglect with harsh punishment. This could leave the child paranoid. But not all angry children are bullies; some are withdrawn and social outcasts who overreact to being teased. The flaw that unites these types of children is that they perceive slights where none were intended and they imagine that they peers are more hostile toward them than they actually are. This leads them to misperceive neutral acts as threatening ones. This in turn leads these children to being shunned and isolated even more. These kinds of children always see themselves as victims. And they can only think of one way to react, which is lashing out at others. These children jump to judgment and they act on the basis of the assumption of hostility or threat and they pay too little attention to what is actually going on. Goleman says that these perceptual biases are in place by the early grades. Since these children are rejected by their peers, they commit themselves to outcast groups. The difference between boys and girls with these emotional problems is that boys become violent and girls become pregnant. The psychological forces in aggressive children increases the likelihood of their ending up as violent criminals.

School For Bullies

A study of juvenile offenders found a common mind set: "when they have difficulties with someone, they immediately see the other person in an antagonistic way, jumping to conclusions about the other person’s hostility toward them without seeking any further information or trying to think of a peaceful way to settle their differences." But timely help can change these attitudes. Duke University worked with angry grade school boys. They had sessions twice a week for six to twelve weeks. During these sessions, the boys were taught how to interpret social cues, learned how to take the perspectives of others, and they were trained in anger control through enacting schemes. Three years after the boys had been through the sessions, they were compared with boys who had not gone through the sessions. The results showed that the boys who had gone through the sessions were much less disruptive in class, had more positive feelings about themselves, and were less likely to drink or take drugs.

Preventing Depression

Relationships, particularly in young people, can trigger depression. Depressed children and teens are unwilling and unable to talk about their feelings. These people show crankiness and anger, especially towards their parents. This makes it even harder for parents to provide emotional support. There are two areas that cause depression in the young: 1) relationship skills, and 2) a depression promoting way of interpreting setbacks.

A Cost Of Modernity: Rising Rates of Depression

• Dr. Fredrick Goodwin: "There’s been a tremendous erosion of the nuclear family – a doubling of the divorce rate, a drop in parents’ time available to children, and an increase in mobility. You don’t grow up knowing your extended family much anymore. The losses of these stable sources of self identification mean a greater susceptibility to change."
• Dr. David Kupfer: "With the spread of industrialization after World War II, in a sense nobody was home anymore. In more and more families there has been growing parental indifference to children’s needs as they grow up. This is not a direct cause of depression, but it sets up a vulnerability. Early emotional stressors may affect neuron development, which can lead to a depression when you are under great stress even decades later."
• Martin Seligman: "For the last thirty or forty years we’ve seen the ascendance of individualism and a waning of larger beliefs in religion, an in supports from the community and extended family. That means a loss of resources that can buffer you against setbacks and failures. To the extent you see a failure as something that is lasting and which you magnify to taint everything in you life, you are prone to let a momentary defeat become a lasting source of hopelessness. But if you have a larger perspective, like a belief in God and an afterlife, and you lose your job, it’s just a temporary defeat.

Pessimistic ways of interpreting life’s defeats seems to feed the feeling of helplessness in depressed children. Children who are most prone to depression are the ones who tend toward a pessimistic outlook before they become depressed. This suggests that there is a window of opportunity for inoculating children against depression before it strikes. Children who contribute setbacks (for example: a bad grade) due to some personal flaw feel more depressed than those who explain it in terms of something they could change. Pessimistic children fall prey to depressed moods in reaction to setbacks. Depression reinforces their pessimistic ways of thinking. So the child is left with an emotional scar. The fixed ideas left from the scar could make the child more vulnerable to another depression down the road.

Depression should be prevented in children because even a mild episode can mean that more severe episodes can occur later in the future. Maria Kovacs studied children diagnosed with depression and found that the children who had minor depression are more likely to have it intensify into major depression. This sadness leads children to avoid initiating social contacts. The result is that these children are rejected and neglected on the playground and they miss out on what they would normally learn. Another cost is that these children do poorly in school. There is a direct correlation between the length of time a child had been depressed and his grade point average.

Short Circuiting Depression

The good news is that there is every sign that teaching children more productive ways of looking at their difficulties lowers their risk of depression. There have been special after school classes that taught mildly depressed students to challenge the thinking patterns associated with depression, to be more adept at making friends, to get along better with their parents, and to engage in more social activities that they found pleasant. Fifty five percent of the students had recovered from their mild depression. The classes seemed to cut the risk of depression in half. One researcher said "If you want to make a real difference for psychiatric illness like depression, you have to do something before the kids get sick in the first place."

Eating Disorders

Young girls today are feeling compelled to compete with unattainably high standards of female beauty. Emotional deficits – particularly a failure to tell distressing feelings from one another and to control them – were found to be key factors leading to eating disorders. Girls are not able to tell the difference between feeling angry, worried, or hungry. So when they feel any of these emotions, they interpret it as hunger and they eat. And then when they feel they need to conform to society’s standards of beauty, the problem of eating disorders occurs. Girls as young as age six are already concerned about their appearance. When the habit of eating to soothe themselves interacts with pressures to stay thin, the way is paved for eating disorders to develop.

Only the Lonely: Dropouts

This does not apply to children who go through a temporary period of feeling left out.

Coaching For Friendships

There is hope for rejected children. Steven Asher designed a series of "friendship coaching" sessions for unpopular children and it had some success. The children were coached to act how popular children act. The children that were coached were solidly in the middle classroom popularity a year later. None of the children were social stars, but none of them were rejects either. There was a 50 – 60 % success rate. And the program seemed to work best for third and fourth graders. And it was also more helpful for socially inept children rather than for highly aggressive children.

Drinking and Drugs: Addiction as Self- Medication

This section says that there is a steady trend toward more alcohol use at younger ages. There are other risks involved when young people get drunk and they are: rape, accidents, and violence. Alcohol related accidents are the leading cause of death among young people. Those children living in high crime areas are more susceptible to drug use. This is the case because of easy access to the drugs. One current theory is that those who stay with the habit, becoming increasingly dependent on alcohol or drugs, are using these substances as medication of sorts, a way to soothe feelings of anger, anxiety, or depression. Children who have more emotional distress have higher rates of substance abuse. The craving for calmness seems to be an emotional marker of a genetic susceptibility to alcoholism. The metabolic effects of alcohol can worsen the depression in the long run. Acquiring the ability to handle feelings removes the urge to use drugs or alcohol in the first place. These emotional skills are taught remedially in treatment programs. But it would be a lot better if they were learned early in life before the habit began.

No More Wars: A Final Common Preventive Pathway

Poverty itself delivers emotional blows to children. There is a role that emotional competence plays over family economic forces – "It may be decisive in determining the extent to which any given child or teenager is undone by these hardships or finds a core of resilience to survive." There are educational programs to prevent one or another specific problems such as drug abuse and violence. But few of these programs are effective.

Information Is Not Enough

Many school shave offered programs to prevent abuse. But most programs focus only on information. The children must be given more comprehensive training including related emotional and social competences. If given this type of program, children are better able to protect themselves against abuse. These programs taught the children to find ways to solve interpersonal conflicts more positively, to have more self-confidence, not to blame themselves if something bad happened, and to feel they had a network of support in teachers and parents.

The Active Ingredients

These are among the core emotional and social skills for life.

My Overall Reaction

One thing that caught my attention was that Goleman wrote that boys get violent and girls get pregnant when they do not know how to handle their emotions. While I do believe that it is the boy’s fault, I also believe that the girl has to take some responsibility for her actions. It is just sad that a lot of these girls don’t know how to stand up for themselves.

I think that if parents teach children how to handle their emotions at an early age, then the children will not be influenced as much by other external factors because they will have a mind of their own.

 

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