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Is the decline in teen mental health mostly about parenting?
https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescent-mental-health
A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches". But where it really gets interesting is here:
That paragraph actually understates the findings compared to the chart just above it, if you click on the link- just look at the stark discontinuity between 'very conservative' and everyone else. In fact the order by political ideology, on parenting quality, is 1) very conservative 2) blank spot 3) conservative 4) moderate 5) very liberal 6) liberal. And I would hazard a guess that this is majorly correlated with the other two, quality of parents' relationship, factors.
Now there's a couple of hypotheses as to why this is- it could be that parenting has just been getting shittier recently, that more conservative types are somewhat insulated from the trend by being, well, conservative, and that there's some population discontinuity between 'liberal' and 'very liberal'. This could be red tribe-blue tribe ethnogenesis manifesting itself in an interesting way- the red tribe adopted adaptive parenting measures, the blue tribe didn't(or alternatively, they both used to share good parenting practices but as part of ethnogenesis the blue tribe is moving away from them, which I guess is pretty close to the first explanation. It seems pretty clear that they didn't both used to have terrible parenting with the red tribe moving away because teen mental health is a relatively newer problem). It could be a regional difference. It could be that, given fertility differences by political ideology, conservative parents have more role models allowing them to more easily adopt good parenting practices. Personally, I lean towards number two, myself- I'm reminded of a section in Irreversible Damage, describing how nearly every girl with rapid onset gender dysphoria had a liberal mother, and some had country club republican/rino fathers but most of the fathers were liberal as well. The section goes on to claim that at least some parents of daughters with ROGD found success in sending their daughter to live with more conservative relatives, resulting in desistance. That's obviously not conclusive, or even particularly strong, evidence(and it's also confounded all to heck by duh), but it's a second datapoint on a trend.
In any case, it seems like the other interesting question raised by this report is, well:
My assumption is that inscrutable bureaucratic reasons are the main factor in that. But it's worth noting that this is probably the main explanatory factor behind why conservative teens have so much better mental health than liberal ones; after all, the competing "it's smartphones and instagram" hypothesis doesn't explain this. And even if you assume parenting doesn't matter much in the long run, it doesn't pass the smell test to say it doesn't affect kids while they're being parented.
What makes standing for the national anthem important? Like, which one? The national anthem of England, or the one of the traitorous colonists? If in Nazi Germany or the USSR, is it a basic civic norm to stand for the national anthem?
In my book, trying to force kids to stand for the national anthem is practically child abuse. Loyalty to country is a thought-terminating cliche.
It’s child abuse to… strongly encourage your child to have the same beliefs and behavioral norms as the vast majority of people he or she will meet and interact with? To set your child up for a smooth and healthy social life rather than encouraging him or her to be an atomized contrarian?
Look, man, as someone who staunchly refused to stand for the national anthem starting in high school and continuing up until a couple of years ago, I probably share nearly all of your complaints about the thought-terminating clichés implied by standing for the national anthem. I personally derive very little patriotic feeling or inspiration when I hear the Star-Spangled Banner; its lyrics are a mawkish and clumsy paean to an irrelevant battle from a war which America didn’t even win, and to a country which no longer exists in any meaningful sense.
But saying it’s child abuse to want one’s child to fit in and to have normal run-of-the-mill beliefs that will allow that child to go through life successfully and have healthy relationships with others? That strikes me as a completely ass-backwards accusation.
To me that is the worst part about it; it means that it can’t be sung communally by a group of normal untrained people without sounding like absolute shit. Personally I would prefer an anthem that is accessible to the common man, rather than being essentially an operatic aria which we all need to stand around and solemnly observe an elite trained singer perform.
Most songs designed for mass singing have all the notes in the same octave. Looking at national anthems, God Save the King and Deutschland uber alles are all on one octave, La Marseillaise goes one note beyond the octave, and The Star-Spangled Banner goes four notes beyond a single octave. In addition, the top note of the tune is on "free", and "ee" is one of the harder vowels to sing at full volume.
To put the required vocal range into perspective, an operatic soloist is expected to to have a useful range of two octaves, and chorus singers can get by with slightly less.
A soloist singing The Star-Spangled Banner can choose the key to optimise for the middle of their vocal range (and the singer opening a sporting event will do just that - that is part of the reason the song is usually sung unaccompanied). Someone singing it in a choir can't - in order to be in tune they either have to sing at the same pitch as everyone else, or exactly one octave different.
This was never a song that was easy to sing.
As an aside, I've always wondered why we don't just make a song like America the Beautiful the anthem. It's a much better song, to be honest. And it's less arduous to sing. But it would lose the flag stuff and I think that would make a lot of people very angry. And I have no lack of judgment to think that if we open that can of worms, we won't get something by Cardi B as our anthem. So this is all just a useless lament.
Sometimes I feel like the flag itself has a position that flags don't in every other country, it's the center of civic nationalism in the way that monarchs tend to be in some other countries. That's probably the core of the disconnect that makes non-Americans weirded out by the American love of the stars and stripes.
Brits sing "God save the King" and pledge allegiance to "his majesty King Charles III and his heirs and successors according to lawr", Americans sing "does that star-spangled Banner yet wave" and pledge allegiance to "the flag, of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands." The British make fun of Americans for frequently flying the flag, but then they go wait hours and hours to see the Queen lying in state and buy cheap tat whenever there's a jubilee year. Conservatives push to ban flag burning as a constitutional exception to free speech, "compassing or imagining" the death of the king is a crime -- once upon a time a capital one -- in Britain. We hand flags out for dead veterans, soldiers talk about the flag as a centerpoint for allegiance the way the British talk about the King. Conservative Americans get very, very offended if people talk about how they hate the flag, conservative (well, high Tory, at least) Brits get very, very offended if people talk about how they hate the King. And progressives push those boundries because of course they do.
As another aside, I wonder why the British don't make "Rule Britannia" the anthem. (Of course, I understand why, but still.) God save the king is so... bland. "RULE BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA RULE THE WAVES! BRITONS NEVER, EVER, EVER WILL BE SLAVES!" is so fucking metal and it makes me want to go to war for the country, and I've never even been there.
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