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Frank Sterle Jr's avatar

I cannot recall much of my half-century-plus life, and almost nothing positive, probably because I spend my ‘present’ anxious about my future and depressed over my past. For me, that includes a fear of how badly I will emotionally deal with the negative or horrible event — which usually doesn’t occur — and especially if I’ll also conclude that I'm at fault.

Like my (now deceased) father, I’ve been a chronic worrier and negative thinker for as long as I can remember, even making myself sick by it as a child. Indeed, I'd really like to have stated on my grave/urn marker someday that, “He spent his life worrying sick about things that never happened.”

But this curse, combined with a few other mental or cerebral dysfunctions, has for me prevented any plausible chance of even meeting someone. I'm mentally debilitated with anticipations of, for example, potential relationships' inevitable failures, right up to signing divorce papers a few years later.

It would be great if there could be some valuable academic or clinical use from it all — to create or extract from it some practical positivity and purpose — so it wouldn’t have been in vain. ...

... In Childhood Disrupted the author writes that “[even] well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24).

Although society cannot prevent anyone from bearing children, not even the plainly incompetent and reckless procreator, it can educate all young people for the most important job ever, even those intending to remain childless. And rather than being about instilling ‘values’, such child-development science curriculum should be about understanding, not just information memorization. It may even end up mitigating some of the familial dysfunction seemingly increasingly prevalent in society.

If nothing else, such curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood. Given what is at stake, should they not at least be equipped with such important science-based knowledge?

Crucial knowledge like: Since it cannot fight or flight, a baby hearing loud noises nearby, such as that of quarrelling parents, can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state. … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123). And it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, rather than the intensity, that does the most harm.

When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg. 42).

Being a caring, competent, loving and knowledgeable parent (about factual child-development science) should matter most when deciding to procreate. Therefore, parental failure seems to occur as soon as the solid decision is made to have a child even though the parent-in-waiting cannot be truly caring, competent, loving and knowledgeable.

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