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Notes -
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.
The most specifically challenging point of "The Star Spangled Banner" is that there actually is one weird trick that makes it easier to sing--at least for a soloist--that most people don't know. The third note of the song (on "say") is the lowest note you'll sing, so you want to start the song near the bottom of your vocal range.
It's pretty common for people to assume that the first note of a song is generally near the middle-ish of the necessary range, and choose their starting pitch accordingly, but this is a big trap here, leading to "free" being unreachable for most, when they are trying to fit the entire range of the song in the upper half of their own vocal range. "Free" gets most of the attention, but "say" is the first domino in the cascade--the "big range" of the song is mostly an illusion.
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