"The study suggests that it makes sense for parents and anyone involved in raising a child to try and shield or protect the child from exposure to adversity."
I'm sorry, this is just silly. Prior to the industrial revolution, low SES and high TES were normal; life was hardship and adversity. Think about that: humans have been around for about 200,000 years - that's a lot of generations of f'ed up kids. How did we ever survive?
Far fewer people did. Dead children were routine, as were deaths in childhood. The Black Death killed half the population of Europe; the PTSD must have been horrific for the survivors.
Trying to remove childhood sources of traumatic stress is like trying to ensure your child reaches adulthood with all their teeth and no broken bones. It won't affect their survival but it will improve their life.
>Sheltering your kids too much will make them fragile and unable to cope with actual adversity as adults.
One could argue that adults from the third world are saner/happier than adults from the first world, despite poorer material conditions, because the struggle to obtain food, survive war and so on keeps them more more in contact with reality.
Does this mean we should deliberately starve western adults, or introduce artificial viruses and other stressors into their environment, in order to improve their mental well-being?
Of course not. The reality is that there are many urgent problems of survival for all humans, for example: supervolcanoes, ice ages, asteroid impacts, cancer, genetic meltdown, local supernovae, and an unlimited supply of others yet unknown. The physical universe is hostile to first worlders and third worlders alike, and to adults and children alike. The social and bureaucratic environment can be pretty bleak too!
Therefore we need the material and technological space we inhabit to allow us the best chance of solving these problems. We also need to find ways to make them seem less abtract and remote, so that we engage with them as if our lives and our sanity depended on it. Because they do.
Any research on that? This sound so pleasent for people who had effed up childhood and "turned out ok". Something they might wish was true. So unless it's rigidly confirmed I remain sceptical.
Life was certainly hard in ways that it is not now, but it was definitely hard in the precise ways that we evolved to cope with.
You had to worry a lot about obtaining food and shelter, and protecting yourself from predators and enemy tribes. You also had vast amounts of time for playing, contemplating, dancing, cooking, having sex, drinking some of the weird concoctions made by the local shaman that made you see things differently. All of this.
I am not sure I would be able to forego antibiotics, anesthesia and modern medicine in general, but for those not assuming this, I wonder how nice or lives of 24/7 stress and isolation would look like to our more primitive ancestors.
Our lives are potentially longer, but are they more worth living? I'm not pretending to have an answer, but I do think the question is valid.
Could be that there is a kind of developmental switch. If life is tough as a child, it makes sense to speed up development to improve odds of survival. If you find yourself in a safe, loving and caring place, then you have the option of spending more time and energy developing the brain.
> life was hardship and adversity
Not necessarily. Many argue that hunters and gatherers lived a much better life than during most of recorded history. There is plenty of evidence for this. It's entirely possible that a child would find itself in a small, well functioning group of people, without any major adversity during childhood.
> Could be that there is a kind of developmental switch. If life is tough as a child, it makes sense to speed up development to improve odds of survival.
Sounds reasonable. In crowded waters fish start to mature at a much younger age.
Source: studied farming and a non trivial part of the curriculum was related to taking care of fishing and hunting resources.
Agriculture is also more intensive than hunting / gathering, supporting more humans per area. When the two conflicted, the agriculturalists won by strength of numbers.
Generally, more intensive civilizations outcompete less intensive ones, even though the average individual may be worse off in that society.
> The study suggests that it makes sense for parents and anyone involved in raising a child to try and shield or protect the child from exposure to adversity.
I have repeatedly witnessed parents doing this, and their children inevitable became incapable entitled brats.
I agree that the framing of low socioeconomic status and traumatic experiences as anormal is questionable when the absence of these influences is the real anomaly. On the other hand, normal doesn't imply good and mere survival is a pretty low bar for quality of life. You probably wouldn't abandon your children in a warzone so they can have a more normal childhood.
When all those humans that as children expeirienced "low SES and high TES" sat on then fruits of industrial revolution we got two world wars. Heck, we were close to nuclear holocaust thanks to f'ed up kids. Lower IQ makes you more susceptible to getting violent (childhoood lead exposure vs crime).
That Flynn effect? Could be just result of not messing up our kids so much anymore.
I'm sorry, this is just silly. Prior to the industrial revolution, low SES and high TES were normal; life was hardship and adversity. Think about that: humans have been around for about 200,000 years - that's a lot of generations of f'ed up kids. How did we ever survive?