[overflow] Re: GHHS

[Lee Gold <leeway@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mat Butler wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, Lee Gold wrote:
> 
> > Maybe a list of suitable pastimews (the positive version of Berne's
> > GAMES PEOPLE PLAY).
> >       Complaining about mutual annoyances:  the weather, the
> > teacher, the textbooks
> >       Praising mutual pleasures:  flowers, blue sky, artwork,
> > a local winning sports team, fireworks
> >       Compliments:  the other person's hair, clothing ,
> 
> And what about the tongue-tied teenager who's had very little in the way
> of positive reinforcement about themselves, much less being taught that
> it's actually okay?

Yes, that's the sort of thing people need to be taught --
see examples above.  But I'm not guaranteeing that people
will want to learn.

My father spent hours trying to teach me to make Proper Small Talk
about the weather and "What's new with you?" and I just couldn't
do it -- it felt too hypocritical.  Truth was the only thing I'd
found I could depend on, and I just wasn't secure enough to 
venture out on  the thin ice of white lies.
> 
> Partly it was because I didn't have glasses back then
> > and so couldn't recognize people well and so didn't know their
> > names, and they felt insulted by this.
> 
> Was this in an era when vision screening testing wasn't mandatory?  (When
> did that come into effect, anyway?)

I was told in the 4th grade that I was near-sighted.  I assumed
they also told my parents, and that my parents had decided for
some reason or other not to get me glasses.  

In seventh grade, I ran into teachers who wouldn't let me sit in
the first row because I was so short, and went home to tell my
parents that now I really needed glasses because I couldn't see
the blackboard -- and found out they'd never been told I was
nearsighted.  

> It's quite amazing, I think, that we're never taught to open up, to be
> open... we try to take our cues from what other people do, and try to make
> as much sense out of it as possible.  

One of the things that makes fans different is we also take cues
from the heroes of the books we read, who may have been written
decades or even centuries before.  Then again, at least we're a bit
insulated against the stupider effects of peer pressure.

> And the older kids (at least in the male circles -- I
> wasn't enough of a queen in JH/HS to be one of the girls) generally try to
> outboast each other.  

The girls of junior high/high school try to be popular
-- and at least used to equate that with getting love/approval
from the older popular kids.  In the 1950s, this also meant
girls pretending to be dumb because boys didn't want a girlfriend
who got higher grades.  In the 1950s, it meant girls being
"good" and staying virgin, or getting ephemeral popularity
by having sex.  This is said to have changed but I'm not at all
sure how much things are really different.  So girls boast 
about the great date they went out on and how sweet their
boyfriend is and the new clothes and jewelry they've got 
and how they're learning to use makeup and shave their legs
-- or at least that's how it was in the 1950s.

> In the 1990s
> and 2k-oughts, you have kids who don't know how to deal with jealousy, you
> have kids who don't know how to deal with any kind of negative emotion,
> you have kids who don't have any kind of previous exposure to
> solidly-based, loving relationships... you have a severe lack of grounding
> to teach any kind of unselfish empathy.

I wish I could say all that stuff is new, but romantic love is a
dangerous game to play and adolescence is when we start playing
it.  I think that adding sex to the mix just makes the stakes
higher.

I grew up in a family/area where parents stayed married.  And this
undoubtedly helped make me feel more secure -- plus giving me  a
chance of absorbing a bit about how a longterm, solidly-based
loving relationship works.  Though admittedly Barry & I are 
different enough from either set of our parents that we've had
to work out a fair amount of stuff.  

re lack of examples of unselfish empathy:  No dogs?  That explains
too much about why the popular pet now that Heinlein's Crazy
Years are in full swing is the cat.

> I'd also argue that knowledge of basic psych would most likely (in the
> first seven years of deployment) lead to more emotional peer abuse, the
> same way of the IALAC example above.  (And I'm not saying this to combat
> the idea that it should be deployed, I'm just wanting to get some ideas on
> how to combat this particular problem with the deployment?)

You may be right.  I was recently startled by news from a British
co-apan that out there kids are using "challenged" as a nasty name
to call outgroup kids, in about the way we used to say "spaz"
(for "spastic," someone with cerebral palsy) back in the 1950s.

--Lee