I went to one of these places when I was 13. Same thing, picked up in the middle of the night, and sent to a wilderness program that turned into 18 months of boarding school.
The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensive psychiatric care and were an immediate danger to others around them.
I look back on it as one of the most valuable experiences in my life, not because there was any validity to the program but because it just confronted me with a lot of intense challenges at a young age that really developed my critical thinking and mindset at a young age.
My reaction to these kinds of things (see also: the abuse of the Battle School students in Ender's Game) is to think: (1) Perhaps it was the best way to teach certain things; but (2) I don't think the people who do such things usually rule out all the gentler methods first.
It sounds like the "challenges" weren't necessarily intended to teach you what you learned, and you just happened to have a mind and mindset that responded well to the situation, so it isn't even an instance of "competently executed dangerous teaching methods". Nevertheless, do you think there's a safer approach that would have had a high chance of teaching you and the other kids those lessons?
I think Ender's Game is the most compassionate protest against this kind of thinking - it is a thought experiment that demonstrates that with the right environment, even the most intelligent can be taught to use their skills in an utilitarian and amoral way - the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race, despite representing the moral middle ground between his monstrous brother and his saintly sister. The later books are about him trying to undo the damage he did.
I don' think the author intended the readership to see Battle School as an ideal form of education.
> that demonstrates that with the right environment, even the most intelligent can be taught to use their skills in an utilitarian and amoral way - the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race, despite representing the moral middle ground between his monstrous brother and his saintly sister.
Uh, I remember it as Ender having been tricked into it. He thought he was still doing simulations to prove his tactical ability, with how the scenarios kept getting more difficult, and did things he never would have done if he knew it was real.
In fact, the ultimate atrocity—destroying a planet (in what he thought was a simulation)—was something he did precisely because he expected to get kicked out of Command School for it (which he was sick of). If I break this rule, they'll never let me be a commander. It would be too dangerous. I'll never have to play a game again. And that is victory.
>the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race.
You may need to dwell some more, because there's some higher order practical and moral contention there. Guilt over things done in pursuit of survival is the victor's luxury. If you lose, and die anyway you don't have that problem. This is one of the sharp divergences that tends to exist between the soldier and the pacifist. One fights today to repent and atone tomorrow. The other risks destruction, robbing one of a future in which one may possibly avoid making the same mistakes or committing the same atrocities as one's forbearers. In this sense, the weight of being a mass murderer is shared equally by the warrior and the poet. One through action, the other through inaction. No matter the outcome, somebody's hands are covered in blood. Ender did what he was uniquely equipped to do in the moment where it was necessary for him, and those under his guidance to do it. We live not only under our own instrumentality, but under the auspices and obligations to which we are bequeathed by accident of our own existence.
Ender's Game is an exquisite portrait of how the central theme of human existence is suffering. If you live to fight another day, you suffer those fights in the future, and the scars of the past you carry with you. If you acquiesce to destruction, your suffering stops, but the world moves on regardless.
To be human is to struggle and suffer. The trick is coaxing some positivity out of the entire affair while we're around to do so. This applies at all levels of human endeavor. We all struggle against our own adversities perpetuated upon us by the "other". The biggest difference from one bit of suffering and struggle to the next, is how you define the "other".
It's weird, but Ender's Game made a lot more sense after a reading of the Bhagavad Gita. I do not know if Card set out with that intent, but the two mesh with, and complement each other in ways few texts written at different time periods have. There's also good resonance with Martin Heidigger's thoughts on the nature of man being inextricably linked with the act of becoming or Being, the characteristic quality of Dasein. You cannot change your past, you can change the future, but only in as much as the road that has lead you to where you are allows.
The Philosopher is left to wonder if it could have worked out any other way, the Faithful have their answer even if they didn't know it, and even a Free Agent, determined to sail their own way must navigate the waters pushed by the natural forces around them.
Except it wasn't necessary for him, since the entire war was premised on miscommunication and misunderstanding, which he turned out to be uniquely equipped to resolve... but was instead pushed & tricked into violence.
I read it as Ender successfully solved the problems that he were educated and grown into to solve, despite no known solution existing and while having to be creative and improvise in a "no win scenario".
The book is a critique, but more about wether it is good enough to be shaped by society, or how people shapes and make up society. When the latter is nearly non-existent, you end up with results such as in the first book.
I didn’t like Ender’s Game and it’s portrayal of military boot camp. I had no idea what the training in Enders Game was about besides bullying and cruelty and very simplistic tactics.
I went through US military training in the early 90s. A lot of it was bullshit but the intent was clear to weed out those who cannot handle an incredible amount of stress while you get little sleep or rest. There was no physical or verbal abuse. The intent of the training was to get people to keep performing and getting along with your team while everyone suffered the artificial stress created by the instructors.
I went through Marines boot camp and that was a ton of verbal and psychological abuse. There were very clear restrictions on physically assaulting recruits -- if a recruit entered within five feet? of a Drill Instructor, they could consider it an attack on their person and physically react -- so the DIs would spread their arms out and run at us to force us into their "engagement zone".
I saw a guy piss himself from the verbal abuse in front of 100 other recruits in the squad bay. Another recruit vomited bile from being spurred to exhaustion by our "Kill Hat", again in public view of the rest of us and to the protests of the medic who pleaded with the Kill Hat to stop. He seemed a deeply sadistic man. There were so many of us for so few DIs it was possible to avoid their attention: my teenage self with a head full of fantasy called this the "eye of the malefactor".
I've never seen so much evil in my life but I also never made it to a conflict zone.
> Felix was convicted of ordering Lance Cpl. Ameer Bourmeche into a dryer, which then was turned on as Felix demanded he renounce his faith. Bourmeche testified that he twice affirmed his faith and Felix and another drill instructor twice sent him for a bruising, scorching tumble inside the dryer.
> After a third spin, Bourmeche said, he feared for his life and renounced his religion. The drill instructors then let him out, he said.
He only got 10 years for that? What a farce. He should hang. That's a depraved attack on the core values of the nation he's supposed to be protecting.
Sorry you went through that. I can only speak for myself and what I understand to be the norm. I know many countries’ boot camps still believe in the lie that abuse makes someone better. When/where was your boot camp?
This was 14 years ago at the San Diego Recruit Depot right next to the airport. Those planes would keep us up all night. I remember breaking protocol to buy some earplugs so I could sleep. Much of that experience felt like a wild fever dream.
Of course some kids will get life lessons out of this experience, but they would get lessons from kinds of adversities anyway. I don't see the point. For me it's just cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
Another comment here talked how Canadian indigenous children were subject to this treatment for over a century https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559649 and this wasn't made in the best interest of the victims.
And anyway, I don't believe in having institutionalized "tough love" could ever work. This kind of institution often attract sadistic people, that enjoy making the kids suffer.
Enders game is a fiction. And while military boarding schools (and any closed seclude communities) in fact do have abuse systems amd are prone to bullying issue, there is zero evidence the abuses are best way to teach things.
Being strip searched does not fixes mental health issues. Really.
I think people setting these up get their inspiration from the agoge, the boy rearing system in Sparta. The same methods are used to raise children soldiers in Africa.
Most child soldiers’ mental health is ruined for life.
A model of obedience and desensitization achieved through abuse followed by committing unspeakable atrocities is not a great formula for making good citizens.
What kind of twisted mental gymnastics convinces the creators of these programs that their programs are anything but harmful?
I was rewatching shows from 1990 and so on lately. One of surprising observations was that "tough love" came up multiple times, always as positive.
There is something appealing about tough no nonsense solutions to people with authoritarian tendencies. And there is ignorance about how bad it can get in isolated communities where weaker individuals have no where to escape.
I think it's not surprising that it had (and probably still has) positive connotations to many people, because "tough love" sounds like something most people employ sometimes - from a parent enforcing bedtimes to a friend telling another friend that they're being an asshole in some way. I think what clicked for the majority of people was the idea that loving someone doesn't mean saying yes to their every whim, rather than anything extreme.
When growing up as a teenage male, there was a turning point in my mental development. I was sitting in class cracking jokes when this jerk kid stood up and punched me in the back of the head. I didn't know how to respond, so I just sat there. I was an out of shape kid who would have definitely lost.
That event changed me. In the weeks and months ahead, anger and shame in my response led to a focused and intentional mental and physical development. I started exercising, eating better, and learning how to fight. I developed social responses that helped me become better respected and less manipulated, and changed from a rotund pushover to a normal male.
Our society has changed massively over the decades, and one of the biggest changes I've seen is that it's become significantly more feminized, but I think it's important to acknowledge that some things that work for feminine young women won't necessarily work for masculine young men. I think that tough love programs exist because many men who go there and run the place went through similar experiences as me. If the stress is handled adaptively and not maladaptively, it can be a motivator for positive change while dealing with our weaknesses.
Your response to that problematic event seems like dealing with trauma and some of the words you use like “our society has become […] significantly more feminized” seem to indicate some of those issues are still unresolved.
While I appreciate that you turned this into a positive, I don’t think violence and tough love is something we should promote, celebrate or even tolerate as a society.
Here is a crazy thought: how about we strive to create a space where everyone feels valid as they are, where they feel that have a space where they can contribute, rather than make people feel like they have to toughen up in order to “take charge” or forcefully “making space” for themselves by forcing others to follow their will.
The guy hitting you was not an appropriate response, neither is you possibly disrupting class by cracking jokes. The solution is communication and respect. Getting buff and letting a culture of “boys will be boys” prevail is not.
Why do you think that people "as they are" are the best thing for society to have? What about the people who are violent and employ tough love, as they are? Should they feel valid too?
Your premise of "everyone feels valid as they are" written directly alongside "[we should not promote] violence and tough love" betrays the contradiction. What you actually mean is we should strive for everyone to change themselves to be feminized and noncompetitive, and the people who are already this way should feel valid.
"The solution [to dealing with a bully] is communication and respect" is not based in reality. No bully has ever responded to communication. What they do respond to, and what society responds to, because we have had it ingrained in our brain stems for millions of years, is masculinity and assertiveness, backed by a (perceived) threat of violence. I'm sorry that you don't like this, but it cannot and I argue should not be changed, short of chemically poisoning everyone's testosterone levels with microplastics.
My statement on the feminization of society doesn't come from trauma. Global testosterone levels have been dropping for decades[1]. You can see it in old pictures: men were less fat, more competitive, and happier. Rates of sex and relationships among men and young boys have dropped precipitously.
Speaking anecdotally, I feel most fulfilled when I embrace my masculine side and focus it on positive pursuits. Competition, pursuit of status, and power can all be good things if focused. This event unlocked that in me and helped me live a more fulfilled life I'm the long run.
In fact, your response is exactly what I'm talking about. Productive masculine behavior is shamed nowadays. That's sad to me.
> Productive masculine behavior is shamed nowadays
Can you list some examples for that? It just doesn't match my experience. When people complain about masculine behavior, it's never the productive kind.
Jumping at the opportunity to lead and fighting (figuratively) to spar with the instructor first seems like behavior that some would find heroic and others would find unfair. (note that boys that behave this way in elementary school are mostly advised to take medication to calm down and behave like their female classmates).
They say Ritalin is prescribed primarily for the teachers.
It doesn't really help the student all that much since they go from hyper, attention-seeking and not paying attention to stagnant, inhibited and disinterested (and still not paying attention).
I believe it does work for its purpose, but the dose is usually much too high and had to be taken often enough (it only lasts 3 to 4 hours) that the kid is pretty much constantly peaking then coming down.
Eventually they did create "extended release" tablets that probably fix that issue, so my experience may no longer apply.
So then you'd be in favor of Universal Healthcare, subsidies for gym memberships for low income individuals, stricter regulations against lying/misleading in fast food/junk food, and stricter regulations/penalties for pollution?
> Rates of sex and relationships among men and young boys have dropped precipitously.
Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but it sounds a lot like you want a return of pederasty? Let's assume you mean relationships and sex with people of similar ages, what ages should we imagine when you say "young boys"?
Well he did express a desire to return to traditional manliness, and you can't get more traditional than ancient Greece, right?
I think it's great that he managed to positively channel his masculinity, but I have my doubts at considering getting punched in the back of the head a good or acceptable thing, even though it may have had a positive outcome in his case. Perhaps I'm too feminized.
As a teen male of short stature there was no hope of exercise rescuing me from abusive peers. There were only appeals to authority, avoidance, attempts at deft commentary, or submission and befriending the problem.
Any gender preference school systems may or may not have aren't really a factor when the bully has 180 lbs to ones 100 lbs.
You see, if you look things up you will find that psychology is good at exactly what you'd expect it to be good at if you look at their methods: describing behavior "in the large". Think "Of 100 drug addicts, 10 will commit crimes due to drugs", those types of statements. Or "100 kids with IQ>130, 10 will develop severe autism".
It can also often describe what people here call a "funnel". 100 kids go into kindergarten, 10 will fail, of those 10, 5 will get into youth services ... and so on and so forth. Problem is that this makes people always focus on the worst possible outcomes (when reality is that the vast majority of psychological problems (and "problems") go away after a relatively short time, very short time in kids (think months, a year at most), and attempts to treat them make them worse rather than better for the large majority of clients. 3 main reasons are that, especially in kids, psychological problems exist outside of the kid, they're generally the result of repeating very bad experiences at school. Obviously nothing can be done to "fix" the kid that won't be undone 2 weeks after they rejoin school. Second reason is that treatment, especially residential, takes away the information the client needs to fix their issue, and thirdly treatment takes away the need to fix the issue. But ignoring such considerations has been how psychiatry has grown)
Like any statistician knows: predicting numbers can be done extremely accurately. Predicting one concrete situation, also known as "diagnosing", with incomplete situation and everyone lying about it, is utterly impossible.
This means that attempts to change these situations ("help these kids") fail spectacularly and often work extremely contra productively (I mean, everyone knows the reputation of CPS, who do nothing BUT this. Saying they don't produce healthy kids just doesn't do justice to HOW bad these organizations are for kids. Just the suicide numbers alone ...). Psychologists, orthopedagogues and even psychiatrists often CAUSE mental health issues in healthy kids because they interfere, against the wishes of kids and often parents too, without having any ability to make accurate diagnoses.
And of course, the worst of it are the incentives. Especially with kids, the problem is the environment. Generally not the home environment, but the school. However, CPS, psychologists, orthopedagogues have to keep in mind that they get "referrals" (against the wishes of children and parents) from schools, school-related (sport clubs), even sometimes police. So problems in schools grow and fester, because these professionals can't react to problems in schools, they would lose all their business. That even goes for CPS.
Because it is unfortunately not hard to explain why organizations, perpetually short of money and paid per-child (VERY short of money in the CPS' case), refuse to use the "leave them alone and in 6 months 2/3 issues go away" paradigm that research suggests to be used.
IDK, man… I know you’ve created a whole narrative here to conflate child soldiers and CPS/psychologists, but I’ve known several people who do CPS work here in Minnesota and the situations that get kids removed from a home are either chronic neglect, abuse and/or intense and actively harmful (like: kids chained to radiators in the basement). Even when kids are removed, the law actively requires the child go to a blood relative if possible (and returned to their parent as soon as possible). We’re not sending them west on orphan trains anymore.
IDK about Minnesota, but in Europe this is not the case. The vast majority of kids getting taken away get taken away for 1 reason only:
Some social worker (and there's lots of them) complains that they've refused necessary help. Of course, kids refusing help has direct financial repercussions for these people.
That's over 80% of placements (and let's not forget close to another 15% are kids getting arrested for crimes). Kids actually having seen physical abuse are very rare IN CPS. Hell, these days the proportion of kids that have gotten abused is higher in "Juvie" than in CPS institutions (most of these institutions will refuse kids who have "trauma as a first problem". Likewise they'll refuse addicts, anorexic, outwardly or inwardly agressive kids).
Issue is that what is never mentioned is the success rate of these social workers. Most often they're there to fix autism (and not autism like you've seen in documentaries, "autism" like refusing to listen to parents/teachers on occasion). Almost without exception problems exacerbate with these treatments (one simple reason that these kids are often smart enough to coast through (often primary) school. However, if they are denied school attendance (because social workers work during school hours, of course, so treatments happen during school hours), obviously they start failing more and more.
Given social workers' education (ie. high school, a VERY low course level in high school, sometimes not even having finished it) they are also incapable of helping out with most problems. You can't help a kid with math problems if you don't know math. So they should have a level of every subject given in high school, at least the level of teachers. To put it very mildly, they don't.
A bunch of these kids understand what is happening and start fighting social workers. This then leads linea recta to CPS involvement, mostly because these are very young kids. Violence works against them (read on), but these kids are too young to effectively use violence against an adult. Instead they cry and refuse to go or run away or the like.
Of course, the net effect is that CPS starts protecting their real clients, the ones who provide them new business: those social workers. Attacking the kids who asked for help, then refuse what they got. With threats, which doesn't work well, then, via youth judges, with violence.
And, the other side of the coin CPS becomes actively hostile to kids with real problems, whether that's abusive parents, drugs, criminal involvement or school problems.
They are very often accused that they do not protect kids. If the parents and/or the kid is really violent, CPS and social workers will keep their distance. Again some kids use this to "fight free" from CPS. The problem with that this that these kids are inexperienced, but trying to systematically escalate violence against adults, because that's the only thing that can get them out (and often back into a good school: CPS gets extra money if kids go to "special needs" schools). Issue with that is that "dosing" violence to the right level is hard for people who've done it as police agents for 20 years. Kids regularly use too little ... and too much violence, both of which have essentially the same consequence: getting locked up in isolation 23h per day for a period from 2 weeks to several years. And of course, this affects CPS employees: only the worst of the worst remain.
There is very little about your summary that resonates with how I have seen CPS work done in the modern day, but I’m sorry if you had an experience similar to what you are relating here.
> Especially with kids, the problem is the environment. Generally not the home environment, but the school.
Yeah, no. I'm not living in the US so maybe you really have a weird bully culture like it was showed in TV shows ten years ago, but no, generally its the home environment. Some children DO have issues with schools and schoolwork, but the broken children i took care of when i was a youth camp counselor were broken at home. Wether it was rape, daily violence (acid on the face was the worse, luckily one eye was saved) or sometime just psychological torture (fun time when a father prostitute his wife and his child until she loose it and put him in a hospital). Oh, and the trucker stepfather taking his 11 year old stepdaughter in his truck for short haul because he needs company, and the mother keeping her daughter from speaking about it?
I'm sure in some cases, the psychologists are overzealous. But i took care of placed children every summer for 6 years, and yes, mistake were probably made for some, but for the vast majority? I'm sure even hearing about half their life would make you ask why they were not taken away sooner. The eleven yo girl i talked about, do you know how it was detected? She started blowing guys in the school toilet. Probably a "shool issue", yes, obviously. Without the school, i wonder how this would have been detected.
And let's not forget just how bad the reputation of CPS is where it comes to getting things wrong. Some studies claim that false accusations of child abuse, because there is no standard of proof for taking the kids away (only for locking up the perpetrators), that the false diagnoses and false accusations far outnumber the true ones.
And like anyone who's seen an orphanage (they don't like to be called that anymore) and half of all foster homes knows. Seeing damaged kids in those places is perfectly normal: those places damage kids. These places are not hospitals, where patients come in damaged and get fixed. These places damage kids, they don't fix them. They're more like the ragged pillow at the bottom of a half-pipe, a catchment area for broken bones, doing MUCH more to protect the reputation of the rest of the system than preventing or helping with injuries.
And the horrible thing about such places is that they effectively prevent the kids from having a future (they have extremely bad schools, no alternatives, limited learning materials, ...), but throw them out at 18 years (and please: 21 years or even something ridiculous like 45 years would NOT be better). Please stop pretending that after 10 years where crime (from stealing from other kids to dealing drugs) is the only way to get even a trivial little extra, no-one would remain clean.
That only happens in protected settings. And the sad truth is that even very bad parents still provide a very protected setting for kids.
Besides, these places, for the large majority they don't even try: treatment, though often the very reason kids get taken away, effectively doesn't happen in such places. Just 1 underpaid person, often without any qualifications, per 15 or 20 kids, and some director "handling" 20 groups. That's all.
Please note: "System Crasher" is the more realistic of these movies (especially "Instant Family" is extremely toned down, I can guarantee a kid doesn't just shout 2 sentences if they fear everything they have will be taken away. They fight and scream and cry and kick and ... for 2 months).
If you watch "System Crasher" 5 times you will even start to see WHAT is happening. This kid made a mistake. Mistake lead to reputation (ie. to school teacher at the very least pestering her), which escalated matters. Help, effectively meant using violence against the child and more and more fear. And of course, the kid never gets any say, and therefore never learns WHY one needs control over oneself. This escalates and escalates and escalates BECAUSE OF YOUTH SERVICES. If they refused to intervene in the beginning of the problem, the odds of it just blowing over were very, very high, as the kid and parents would be forced to self-regulate their relationship. That would have happened, and at that point there would no longer have been a problem. And, frankly, it's hard to argue that any tactic, other than what was done, was worse, given the outcome.
Indeed, children need love in order to be able to give it (and be able to receive it). It seems better to me to keep them in the “circle of love” than to send them off to the well known circle of abuse.
Very often there's no choice. Either something under your control, or CPS comes and takes the kid away. Schools even do this to avoid dealing with abusive teachers and the like, or just to get rid of a specific child.
The idea that justifies the power of CPS, that these sorts of "measures" are taken in the interest of the child, are totally ridiculous upon inspection. Not because there aren't any problems, but because these "solutions" are so much worse.
How cam you reas that book and not think that the kida are abused and traumatized in horrific ways with minimal interest in the long term benefits to these kida? A core ethical question of this book is the degree to which the ends justify these means.
> I look back on it as one of the most valuable experiences in my life, not because there was any validity to the program but because it just confronted me with a lot of intense challenges at a young age that really developed my critical thinking and mindset at a young age.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Problem is, it does “kill”* some people.
(*) Sometimes literally, but probably more often figuratively.
I asked a psychologist (Dr. Judith Bernstein) if it's true that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and she answered unequivocally, "Trauma never makes you stronger."
In a similar vein, with respect to "there are no atheists in foxholes", A three-tour-of-duty-in-Vietnam captain in the US Army (Harry McMenamin) said, "I was an atheist when I was in Vietnam, and I was in a lot of foxholes. There are atheists in foxholes."
Trauma is like a sunburn. Adversity will give your brain a "tan", letting you handle worse adversity over time, but too much at once and it's trauma. The problem is that the kind of teens who go into these programs are often the equivalent of ghost pale, and get traumatized by even mild adversity.
That’s a good analogy. It also covers the increased sensitivity to additional trauma/adversity that it seems many people can’t understand: If you already have a serious sunburn then just a little more time in the sun, something you could normally handle, can cause a lot of pain and damage.
My family is forever destroyed from "tough love." I'm in my 50's and we still don't talk except for exchanging cards with the parents at various appropriate times throughout the year. They've apologized, but the scars are very deep.
We grew so distant that it is no longer repairable, and so we at least maintain that very distant relationship. I don't communicate in any way with the siblings since "tough love" taught me to despise them. Obviously I don't despise them any more, but the damage is done, and quite thoroughly.
There are many atheists in foxholes: actually a lot of people lost/lose their faith in a foxhole. How can you think deity exists in any, but especially, a crap situation?
> A lot of historical figures contradict the prevailing narrative [that trauma never makes you stronger].
I'd argue that the key word here is "trauma"; I think _adversity_ can make you stronger (more disciplined, and more focused), but I think that Dr. Bernstein is using the word "trauma" in its technical, medical, sense, i.e. "Psychological trauma is caused by an adverse experience, or series of experiences, that result in an injury that changes the way the brain functions, impairing neurophysiological, psychological, and cognitive functioning." [0]
That's a silly and highly unscientific definition that there is no way of demonstrating outside of "just so stories". Oh, someone had an experience and afterwards have symptoms - it must have been trauma.
There is large heterogeneity in the reaction of individuals to the sane exact experience, and sometimes what initially appears damaging ends up doing the opposite.
I would look up the life history of Temüjin, Viktor Frankl, and others. Seriously. Do a quick web search.
There is a circular definition here. If we define trauma in terms of harmful outcomes, it's bad by definition, but that's arguing semantics and not psychology. The slipperiness comes in when we switch definitions mid-paragraph.
Did you keep in touch with any of the other students? I can't imagine that anyone came away thinking it was pleasant, but I'm curious how their thoughts on the experience compared to yours.
Not many. There was a Facebook group where people kept in touch which I disconnected with because it was pretty toxic. Most of the people in there seemed like they never got over it and were sort of still reliving it 10 years later and still held a lot of anger about it.
To be fair a lot of them had pretty deep substance abuse issues and probably needed some kind of organized help although I doubt very many got any of that at this program.
My knee-jerk reaction to your statement that you're no longer in contact with your parents was "good!"
There's something about your story that really, deeply fucking bothers me. I think its the part where you're taken from your home in the middle of the night. I can't adequately describe how that makes me feel, and I wonder why. I'm sorry that happened to you.
Regarding the silver lining, as it were, do you think your parents could have arranged another sort of intervention or experience to give you those benefits, with resorting to institutionalized abuse? Would a better sort of "camp" have worked for you?
Yeah it's tough. I don't think my partents are terrible people. They are products of their own trauma and struggles and stuff. At the end of the day the relationships were just bringing a lot fo negativity into my life and I just didn't have the energy for it.
In terms of the other ways to produce my experience without the downsides, absolutely yes and if I have kids I intend to try to do exactly that. They would have the final decision on it and it wouldn't be a surprise but basically some kind of intensive month or two outdoor survival training or something like that. Maybe I'd even just do it myself with them.
Hey I think you have a healthy perspective about this all.
I think that doing it yourself (or participating at some capacity) is so much better than letting a third party you don't even know take custody of your kids for some months. The possibility for abuse is staggering.
Can you give more detail about the intense challenges and in what way they developed your critical thinking and mindset? Interesting to hear that learning is possible even in such a traumatic environment.
The feeling of losing my freedom definitely got me started thinking about poltical philosophy at a young age in a very organic way.
Why do we have rules. Who should get to make and enforce rules. When should I follow a set of rules that are laid out for me. I don't think many 23 year olds have too many deep thoughts on stuff like that but I had a more intuitive sense of my own answers to those questions at that age after having the sense of losing my freedom and being treated in a manner that I perceived as deeply unfair.
I'd say that's how childhood looks like for the majority of people on this planet outside of the first-world protective umbrella. Imagine growing up in war-torn Africa, drug-ridden slums of South America or fanatical Middle East with daily executions.
> Imagine growing up in war-torn Africa, drug-ridden slums of South America or fanatical Middle East with daily executions.
This sentence is so ignorantly woke that it has come full-circle and it is blatantly racist.
Latin America is much, much more than drug-ridden slums, war hasn't torn apart all of Africa - and many countries have recovered from such strife -, and many people in the Middle East live under moderate versions of the Sharia that don't entail gruesome "daily executions" like in ISIS-controlled territories.
About 700M people in the world live in absolute poverty nowadays, compared to about 80% in the 1800s [1]. There is no factual evidence that the "majority" of people in the world live in the abject conditions that you describe. In fact, many people now live in relative material poverty compared to Western standards, but in safety, dignity and prosperity.
We can argue all day about how there is a lot of work yet to be done or how at the extremes wicked expressions of evil continue to exist, but this savage and false interpretation of the world is completely out of place.
I traveled around the world and spent some time in Brazil. Look e.g. at Rio de Janeiro - a small "city" with a few luxurious somewhat safe neighborhoods like Ipanema and Gavea, then a bit more seedy Copacabana, then a Maputo-style Centro, and all this surrounded by slums that take about 20x the size of the core Rio, including the famous "Zona Morte" a foreign tourist sees first when arriving via the international airport. Friends were telling me stories they experienced in favelas, like grandma phoning to her grandchildren to skip the school because there "were a few rough days" with bullets flying around, or all inhabitants running away because two gangs decided to wage a mini war on some nice afternoon. You see 16 year olds with faces that look 50+ from the "tough love" they experience everyday, lack of opportunities, constant fear of not making it to another day, rampant cheating in everything because that's what everyone is doing, and that's just Brazil, one of the most developed ones. Now look at San Salvador or Guatemala, or some parts of Mexico that went completely bonkers. I am not sure what is "woke" or "racist" in this - most of our planet feels like a hellhole and there is a lot of work to do to improve it. Most people have terrible lives as they have to cope with these either directly or indirectly (even if your life is fine right now, you are still constrained by the hostile environment around), a small minority is cushioned from all that "fun" and pressure.
I volunteered as a teacher in Honduras, embedded in a piss-poor shanty town near La Ceiba that was once ravaged by hurricane Mitch, and while I saw some horror stories (ex: one of my pupils had a forced abortion b/c her partner kicked her), I still believe that about 95% of people lived decent, happy lives and not the constant oppressive existence you describe.
I've also travelled across Africa, and have seen plenty, and I mean plenty, of happy people. They lived in material poverty compared to my cozy European living standards, but in relative safety and prosperity.
Your interpretation of how most people in the world live in absolutely abject and violent conditions is not only wrong in my opinion and experience, the data is also there to back it up. Massive improvements in healthcare, education, policing have happened all across the board in the world.
There is atrocious violence in too many parts of the world, but not "most" of the world like you describe. For each example you describe in Latin America or Africa, I could come up with one hundred counter-examples of towns that live in pretty safe and prosperous conditions.
The world still needs a lot - and I mean a lot - of work, but an utterly bleak and defeatist vision of things does not help the cause.
I don't think it's defeatist at all - it's realistic, I am not putting on rosy glasses but see the reality as it is. Even the people you saw living happily at the moment are in a high risk of experiencing a massive trauma that would scar them for the rest of their lives as their environment can change abruptly. If you want to change something for the better, you need to understand what is the exact state right now. At least we agree on the amount of work that needs to be done.
Did you even read what I wrote or was this just a cheap reaction from minimal pattern matching? One could describe state of hellhole as something to avoid and help others to escape it/change it. In your case you went with the "prevent anyone from there to reach my blessed state" interpretation, more consistent with the Donnie.
I think it is equating the term "hellhole" with "shithole"...which seems pretty fair to me.
I think you haven't traveled widely enough or looked at the data and as a result are makinf broad and innacurate generalizations that do qualify as racist.
If you're really worried about people in other nations, you should start voting and protesting against all our stupid wars, sanctions, CIA operations, assassinations, etc. that harm people in other nations. Left to their own devices, free from USA predations, they would mostly be fine. I mean, they might not have iPhones, but most humans throughout history also have not had iPhones.
If you don't want your communication to be compared to that of the crudest politician in recent memory, you shouldn't communicate like he does.
I wouldn’t say their perspective is woke at all, it reminds me of that well known passage in Hobbe’s Leviathan: nasty, brutish and short; which is a work associated with traditional conservatism, although you saw conservative neoliberals like Milton Friedman say similar things when arguing that capitalism has greatly improved the world.
Individuals' life experience isn't the average of a regions, or defined by headlines. For the most part, it's family and immediate community that define childhoods. A lot of good childhoods is otherwise dysfunctional places. A lot of bad childhoods in otherwise wealthy places.
My first thought: wow, the US is crazy, I’m glad they don’t have this in the UK! Then I remembered that I was at a famous boarding school for five years, the most miserable years of my life. Thirty years later I’m still coping with the aftereffects. I think of that place as a form of institutionalised child abuse, and frankly if someone pipebombed it, I would not shed a tear.
One simple thing: it wasn’t authoritarian adults or teachers. If anything, they were AWOL. It was the students that really made each other’s life hell. Of course, we were teenagers. Much later, I stopped blaming the individuals and started blaming the institution.
Here’s a tiny anecdote. One guy, who I think was genuinely evil, took psychology as a minor subject. As an experiment, he decided to drive another, younger, vulnerable pupil mad. Gaslighting him, messing with his head, that kind of stuff. And he succeeded!
I absolutely empathise, as a fellow survivor of a ridiculously expensive prison. I boarded from six until seventeen, when I finally finished and got the hell out of dodge. My sister, who attended the same secondary school as me, and had previously been at a coddled US private day school, was almost ruined by her experiences. Over a decade of therapy later, and she’s beginning to live.
Throughout, it was (often school-endorsed) tribal warfare and arbitrary justice at the hands of masters and prefects. Eat or be eaten. It churned out future politicians.
We had literal knife-fights in the dormitories. It was normal to drag someone out of bed at 3am and beat the shit out of them with doorknobs. My dorm-mates, aged 14, kept a friend of mine cocooned in duct tape, upside down in a wardrobe, for an entire school day. I found him that evening during prep, and took a cricket bat to the ringleader. The poor bastard got detention and satisfecit for jocking classes. I was suspended.
I once had septicaemia from an infected wound, and the matron’s response was to fling a mop at me as I lay on the kitchen floor in a puddle of pus and blood while telling me to “clean up your fucking mess”. I blacked out at that point, and the aforementioned friend saved my life by calling an ambulance - I awoke in hospital weeks later. She was actually, unbelievably, fired over the incident.
So much of my behaviour, two decades on, is still driven by my experiences there, and the same applies to those few of my cohort I’m in touch with or aware of the fates of. Constant paranoia that you’re going to be double-crossed or arbitrarily beaten, a complete lack of faith in institutions of any variety, and bitterness and contempt for those who did this to me (my parents, the bastards that ran the schools (some of whom are now gratifyingly in prison)).
Institutionalisation. Everything is somebody else’s responsibility, and everything becomes about the metagame - working systems to your advantage, being the biggest asshole in the house and getting made prefect for it. Amongst students, it was all about social standing. Think prison gangs, but with posh British kids. Amongst staff, there were plenty who were good people, but also plenty who were there on a sinecure and were essentially untouchable.
Your comment reminds me of Robyn Hitchcock's classic line about English boarding schools: "they fuck with your mind forever, then send you out to run the country".
Reminded me of Orwell's account of his education (Such, Such Were The Joys) which contains one of my favourite quotes ("It was not only money that mattered: there were also strength, beauty, charm, athleticism and something called ‘guts’ or ‘character’, which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others.").
Orwell famously had a nostalgic view of his days at Eton. This doesn't much fit with the rest of his character and his great capacity not to be sentimental, but he was complicated.
Robyn Hitchcock's view of the school he was sent to (I think Winchester) is stark. He tells a story somewhere of not being allowed to leave the school to go to his grandmother's funeral, who was the one person he had really been close to. So he went to some kind of art happening organized by Brian Eno, of all people, and released a balloon with her name on it instead.
Sorry to hear you went through that. I went to a UK military boarding school (by choice) for A-levels and I agree with the above, in our case the issues were always caused by student on student. There was stories of what it used to be like “in the old days” and how the college was softer now and would produce weaker officers in the long run. I have no idea if it was true or just internal rumours but the leadership at the time was very focussed on pastoral care, academic excellence and ingraining the foundations of leadership and integrity with (looking back) not that much military-ness to it. I look back with very fond memories, it was tough but not in a nasty way, more just a “high expectations and packed schedule” way.
I was the last year to be Army only, after that they opened it up to all three military services and civil service along with moving to a new purpose build facility - leaving behind the old abbey it had been based at for 50 years. I imagine that that cleared out any remaining vestiges of a less pleasant past.
> One guy, who I think was genuinely evil, took psychology as a minor subject. As an experiment, he decided to drive another, younger, vulnerable pupil mad. Gaslighting him, messing with his head, that kind of stuff. And he succeeded!
I’ve seen grownups engage in this kind of abuse too. It’s incredibly disturbing, almost a legal (or very hard to prove) kind of homicide...
But what can you do about it, other than try to encourage the victim to distance themselves from the abuser? There’s a lot of room for plausible deniability, and any attempt to prove it will look a lot like the ramblings of a mad man...
Sure, I did, and do. But it’s a surprisingly difficult social balancing act: if you go into specifics and try to prove / point out the abuse it’s very easy for the abuser to make you too look like a rambling madman.
I’m also chocked by how many do not stand up for the victim / truth, even when the abuser is clearly exposed as a lier many people (with social incentives to do so) will just say “well, I didn’t see that” or similar. A disturbing aspect of it is that I can’t tell if those people are consciously laying, or just in denial on a deeper psychological level... Scary shit.
We have something called Cadet College here in Bangladesh (grade 7-12), and British public schools were I think the primary inspiration behind them (actually first few principals were all British). It was just as brutal as you say, if not more.
But the attitude of "ex-cadets" here is that of extreme pride, many consider it to be the best 6 years of their life. And this feeling is almost universal.
I have now several times come across criticism of British public schools by their own alumni, I wonder why there's so much difference in attitude.
it reminds me of an episode of a podcast i was listening to recently about somebody who grew up in a tough area with other people who experienced violence and difficult circumstances, and while there he had no emotional issues and simply pushed everything down; but once he moved to a 'nice' (american middle class) college and people heard about what he had experienced and felt sorry for him, he suddenly developed symptoms of ptsd. i think our individual response to circumstances can largely be shaped by what is normal around us.
I was sent to an “emotional growth boarding school” in the ‘90s. I wasn’t kidnapped but many of my schoolmates were. A few years later the department of education (can’t remember if it was state or federal) shut the school down after stories got out about the horrific things that were going on there. Kids forced to sit in corners for days at a time, ambulances not being called for kids who had very seriously self-harmed, strip searches (administered by other kids), physical restraints... I could go on. The place had a cult-like atmosphere that was centered on the headmaster and his weird homegrown therapeutic method.
I had nightmares for years afterwards and still haven’t fully come to grips with what happened there.
It’s insane these are a thing. I didn’t know about them until the recent Paris Hilton documentary. She was sent to something similar and if I recall correctly was taken in the middle of the night, as though being kidnapped.
Thanks. I understand why my parents did what they did. I was addicted to meth and probably would’ve wound up dead without a serious intervention. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
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Sounds like the kind of thing that sounds like it would "help" on the surface but maybe create more suffering down the line.. do you think there were any benefits to your life for having gone or was it a purely negative experience?
I’ve gone back and forth on that question a thousand times. I’m almost pathologically agreeable so it’s easy for me to minimize and slip into a place of, “oh, it’s ok, I was off my rocker and extreme measures were necessary.” But just because I needed help doesn’t mean I needed what that school was doing. So, while it introduced me to a way to stay clean, and kept me clean for long enough to clear my head, those aren’t, like, super unique things that one can only find in these horrible programs. For me it was a net negative, and I could’ve gotten the positives from any number of other places.
Honestly, I don’t know. I have some general ideas from my own experience but I also know better than to be confident they’d stand up to reality. Especially since I’ve dodged the issue by deliberately not having children. I’m not sure there’s a one-size-fits-all solution; I think so much depends on the specific circumstances of the child’s family, peers, and personality, and specific events in the child’s life. I, for instance, really needed my dad to take responsibility for his terrifying behavior, to see the harm it caused me; I needed friends who didn’t bully me; I needed support for coping with scary transitions, like starting middle school; and I needed someone to teach me about life. The drugs were just a symptom. So I don’t know what an effective intervention looks like for that.
The "troubled teens industry" definitely has a lot of weird stuff going on. Some of the institutions are are bad-faith operations that were always scams (or worse); some were well-intentioned but were managed in a way that produced abuses nonetheless. Maybe a few actually did a good job helping out troubled kids, but it does not seem to be the norm.
This is perhaps a place where internet culture has been somehow ahead of the curve in a positive way. Former residents have been organizing online and exchanging information for a few decades. I believe the longest-running forum for discussions is the one at fornits.com: https://www.fornits.com/phpbb/. This site has been around for about 20 years, and used to also have a wiki with extensive information about specific institutions. Alas, the wiki seems to be down for several years now, and the discussion board is a few years past its peak of activity too.
A teen I know was committed for anorexia. It's obligatory when you hit a certain body weight. Another teen there slit her wrists with something sharp she managed to pull out of a wall. She didn't do much damage to herself. The nurse patched her up and tied her to her bed, all the while degrading and abusing her verbally. Kids wrote a letter to the doctor in charge, complaining about the nurse, but the nurse was back at work soon after. The number of hours she gets was reduced, I believe. This is a public institution in a first world country. A caring and therapeutic mindset is just too much to ask of some people or places.
In a lot of ways, good faith, "fix people" institutions are the worst. Belief in a system, religious, psychiatric, social or whatnot can allow good people to override their common sense interpretations.
Early modern prisons were designed to help/fix people. Some were designed by moral philosophers, experts in ethics. These became nightmarish, producing more psychological injury than many intentionally punitive models like "hard labour."
Good faith is worse than... bad faith? Or worse than pure intuition?
Because people have had intuition for all time, and they've never stopped using it, including herbal cure remedies for cancer. The option to go without institutional care is already there for anyone without enough money, and it's being exercised all the time, all around the world.
Even when you choose institutions you must exercise intuition.
I meant worse than bad faith, not always... But sometimes in these circumstances.
Maybe "no faith" is closer to the mark. Reformatories with no ideals, just trying to stay open and make ends meet.
I suppose the canonical example is the Spanish inquisition, and the rest of the conquista culture. They were saving people from hell, barbarism, sin and such. Also Russian gulags, Canadian residential schools, and many other examples.
A "for your own good" mentality has often resulted in some of the worst institutions, or at least a distinctive flavour of bad.
I’ve never heard of that fornits site but I found my facility (Cross Creek) on it! The thread hasn’t been updated in over a decade and that makes sense, since last I heard it had “shut down” and been “replaced” by a “completely different” program owned and operated by the same group of people.
In Canada our government ran a program like this for all indigenous people for over a century, the goal of which was to "take the Indian out of the child". The children would be taken, often forcefully, and maybe allowed home for a visit one a year maybe not. They were beaten if they spoke their own language or indulged in their own culture. Often abused, sometimes killed. The goal was total cultural annihilation, and the results is generations of entire peoples with PTSD.
Many of these "schools" were lovingly run by Christian churches in the name of the friendly government. The only "trouble" these kids had before most of them were forced to attend the schools was that their parents were messed up because they were also forced to attend the schools.
That seems to a common thread. Homes for young mothers, and their children, in Ireland. Orphanages in Germany. All the same all run by Christians ignoring love and care for the sake of some higher moral purpose.
Maybe it's because Christians are often the only folks who give a fuck? At least the largest group that does, so there's way more chances for some of them to be damaging.
I've been in a ton of shitty situations - on the street, ect - and christians as a group are way more reliably kind than any other group - particularly compared to anything run by the state.
I was genuinely surprised to learn this in high school (for me, 2017-2021 or so) - not because it's not a notable event in US history but because I was surprised my history teacher was allowed to teach it.
High school teachers are not given free reign to teach whatever they want. Even college professors are currently being threatened. See all of the rules being written about "CRT" being disallowed in curricula (not that the authors of these rules even understand what CRT is) or the mandatory ideological surveys of college professors in Florida.
We (the US) are currently in a debate about banning the teaching of “critical race theory” in schools.
Many history text textbooks downplay slavery to such an extent that most high-school graduates think the Civil War was about “states rights” when it was really about several states committing treason in defense of slavery.
The genocide and ongoing mistreatment of Native Peoples is barely covered.
In some states, teachers are required to sign documents saying they don’t support the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement against Israel.
Telling teachers what they are allowed to teach doesn't really go against free speech. I can talk about how I think the earth is flat for as long as I want, but if I start teaching that to students I'm going to get fired (hopefully).
Provide evidence. In Washington State the genocide of Native Americans and Black slavery was the topic from elementary through high school. I can't remember a single year either subject wasn't explored, critiqued and analyzed.
1: Only 8% of students understand that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.
2: Here is a book that destroys the myth of the Alamo, and points out that the white people in Texas went to war twice to keep the institution of slavery.
3: There are lots results for problems with the way native history is taught in the US. I grabbed an interesting read as an example. As further evidence, until a few years ago, the Washington NFL team used a racist slur as its name
Similar situation in Australia. They're called the Stolen Generations, children who were removed from their Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent parents by state agencies and church missions. This happened until the 70s. It's nuts how recent it is.
Oh, the Aussie government has been sending immigrants, including children, to processing centres in Nauru and Christmas Islands for a while. This is even more recent.
This sent me down a rabbit hole. I watched the trailer for The Last Stop, and now I'm inconsolable.
My experience at a boarding school in Australia was similarly themed, though nowhere near this extreme. I feel I ought now to write to my old dormitory master — my own Nurse Ratched — and remind him of some of the abuse.
Wow, thank you very much for this link! I had no idea and the comic presentation is fantastic. I couldn't stop reading and read it front to back. It's horrific what these kids had (and surely somewhere have) to endure without a chance of getting out. I hope that person is better now and that his work will help to continue to fight those practices, bring justice and raise awareness. (Like also others did in books and other forms of course!)
This reminds me of something; I was a “troubled” teen, social outcast, quite insular and probably ADHD; this lead to multiple exclusions from schools and constant harassment, which led to more expulsions (because if harassers > 1 then it’s more expensive for the school to exclude the harasser than the harassee) this was the UK where expulsions are as far as I understand relatively expensive for the school to conduct.
Anyway, at some point when I was 14 or 15 I ended up in some kind of troubled kids training thing, it was ran by two (older than average, maybe 35~) university students and it was about assertiveness and understanding yourself.
The course was only a couple days a week for 6 weeks, but honestly it completely changed my life. I didn’t even realise it at the time but some low level anxiety seemed to get washed away after that and I became a much less awkward, more outgoing person who could handle making mistakes.
I truly wish I had paid more attention to the course itself so I could refer to it now.
It was probably standard assertiveness training, but honestly I can’t put words on how much my life improved as a direct result.
A large part of it was acceptance of yourself, and acceptance of each other in the group, we told each other what we thought of each other, the bad and the good. Most people didn’t get that kind of feedback and never thought about themselves the way they are seen by Others. Or if they did, it was the negatives or the ego. A few people were perplexed at why their ego didn’t match how they were perceived; or that their negatives were barely considered at all or not brought up when discussing negatives.
https://elan.school/ is a deep and artistic comic from a survivor of the infamous Elan School. It really gives you an impression of what these places are actually like.
I spent the last couple hours reading this. It is heart-wrenching and infuriating. It is like the Stanford prison experiment on steroids, but with kids. My gut reaction is everyone involved, and everyone who knew even a single thing about this - including judges, police, social workers, government employees and of course staff - should be in prison. Unfortunately the reality is likely that no one is punished, or it is so meaningless (like fining a multi-millionaire $10k) that it's pointless.
Cynthia remembers her daughter as a bright, thoughtful and athletic young girl who had always done well academically until she began suffering from mental health problems aged 14. Her struggles led her to become suicidal and begin experimenting with illegal drugs. When Erica was admitted to hospital and excluded from school, the family felt frightened and out of their depth.
I am reminded of this piece from a few days back:
A boy, his brain, and a decades-long medical controversy
I first began blogging about twenty years ago to write about parenting. That never really gelled and I keep trying and failing.
We seem to have gone wrong somewhere really badly. It seems like you can't talk about the connections between physical health, social stuff and mental health anymore. It's verboten or someone decries it as "practicing medicine without a license" or (insert some other objection) or maybe people just no longer understand the connections.
"A sound mind in a sound body" is a very old saying, yet we seem to now think mental health is some distinct issue from physical health.
I am appalled that the parents thought they could help their child by deceiving her so terribly. I cannot fathom where people get such ideas.
It's crazy making when you can't trust the people close to you, doubly so when they have as much power over you as parents have.
I keep wanting to write about such things but my only real qualification is "I was a full-time mom for a lot of years and I'm a great mom" and how do you prove that? That was a private activity.
My sons think I'm a great mom and say so regularly, but you can't build an audience on that and ...there have been a lot of issues I have been trying to sort out, from how to write well to how to deal with privacy issues while writing about family life.
I don't know how to make the connections I need to make with people in order to get meaningful traction on what to write about, where to promote it, etc. And it just really upsets me to see articles like this and feel like good information on the topic of parenting is desperately needed and not know how to make that happen.
1. There is a connection between physical and mental health and one can ruin the other, but they are not identical. Even a physically healthy person may have mental trouble.
2. If you want to start blogging, the bar today is lower than ever. Choose a name that resonates, and at the lowest and easiest level just get a WordPress blog with a domain. If things go well you can always upgrade to something else.
3. Try rereading your own post and think whether that's something others would want to read. E.g. each (!) of your paragraphs starts with I/my and the entire post is rambling with little coherence. Cut down to what is essential, focus on a single thought and develop it - few authors can pull of an interesting 'stream of consciousness' text.
4. Consider working on your voice and style, e.g. buy the cheap, tiny, excellent & fun Strunk & White book for a great starting point.
You already reach a lot of people with your posts on HN. You are one of the few names I recognise and I always appreciate your comments. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Just want to mention that I recommend the book "Rethinking School" by Susan Wise Bauer. It's a book I recently read that I wish I had heard about several years ago as it discusses the futility of trying to fit a round peg (child) into a square hole (traditional k-12 system) and discusses various strategies for working around that.
The author and colleagues have set up a related website (welltrainedmind I think?) and forum which seems to be fairly active and with a diverse set of viewpoints.
I was at Casa by The Sea in Ensenada Mexico from 2000-2002 [0]. These were run by WWASP (I wish I was making that up). What a trip to learn today that Paris Hilton was at one of the US based programs. As bad as these were in the US, the foreign ones could be very brutal (Casa was raided and shut down by the Federales).
The problem is, that these "institutions" are allowed to exist.
This might give parents the impression that they are kind of legit. The same people who psychologically torture the children probably will have great stories to tell to the parents, perhaps even other people are telling the parents, that these "institutions" are a great and good thing. The parents even might be pressured themselves by a community they belong to into this decision. And of course the true nature of these places is kept hidden.
Yes, submitting your child to abduction is obviously a total failure as being parents, but never underestimate the influence the environment can have onto your judgement. This applies to the children at the camps who get turned into tornmentors, this applies to the parents who might think it is a good idea to send their children there.
A few years ago, I might have considered all of this impossible, but recent years have shown me, how far off the judgement of people can be, considering the bubbles they are in. And I don't think these bubbles are an invention of the internet, though the internet is very influential in creating new ones. But the long history of these facilities show, these bubbles are nothing new. Especially if this thinking is influenced by the religious communities they are part of.
If people can be convinced that drinking bleach is good for their health, I am sure, some might buy into the lies about the benefit of those facilities. That doesn't take any bit of resposibility from the parents, but puts an equal amount of responsibility on the public to not allow these things to exist in the first place and to prosecute anyone involved in this.
In most cases it's parents who are at the end of their rope and feel like they have no other options. I'm not claiming they're necessarily making the right decision. It's just that they've tried everything they know how to do and see it as a last resort.
...and the predatory, profiteering abusers who market to those parents (and, for quite a while, another layer of attention seeking self-help celebrity profiteers who publicized them in the media.)
Kids are "defiant" or have "bad behavior"? Just abuse them more. Even better, just hand them to institutional abusers.
> Cynthia says they eventually settled with the programme for an undisclosed amount on the condition they could speak freely about the circumstances of their daughter's death. She learned Erica had been pushed to keep hiking as her condition worsened throughout the day. She later testified to Congress about how her daughter's distress had been mistaken for teenage belligerence by staff.
No, it requires a parent way more invested into outsourcing the whole job of parenting than a typical lazy parent just letting the TV et al. handle things as much as possible. The lazy parent would just continue letting the TV handle things even when things aren't going so well, and hey on average it's probably an improvement over the parent who sends/has kidnapped their kids off to these places, since the TV can't physically abuse anyone.
This should be illegal: it is inhumane and weird. Parents sending kids there are weirdos imho. They had (do not know if that is still the case) something similar in France. My cousin committed suicide after being sent there. People are insane sometimes.
Parents do this because on some level they feel resentful of the kid’s needs of them and want to push the hard work of being a parent on to someone else. The parents also tend to be in a narcissistic / enabler dynamic, so it really is all about them and solving their inconvenience, not the kid’s best interest.
Yes, which is a better way of wording this even more negative. Which it should be. There is no upside imho. It is hired bullies as a service hired by parents.
Weird shouldn't be illegal, in fact, the opposite should happen. The more weirdness can peacefully coexist, the better. Inhumane, on the other hand, absolutely. The fringes of society are under constant abuse, and it's a sad state of affairs, given that much of this abuse is straight-up illegal already, just not enforced as much on the fringes.
It's bound to fail when you just take any kids and throw them all into an environment like this. And I doubt the kidnapping approach is ever a good idea unless there are mental health professionals involved at every step.
But I think some kids really do need to get away and change environments and do some things on their own at an earlier age. Maybe a small town kid really needs a year in the city, or vice versa.
Maybe there could be more programs to facilitate that without it looking so much like a punishment.
My family got into this "tough love" garbage. It destroyed our family relationship so badly that in my teens I ran away and didn't speak to anyone in the family for 20 years. And even now, decades later, we are still very distant.
I had several friends go through the “Utah programs” back in the aughts and they were abused so badly. It still pisses me off. Paris Hilton did a great job with her documentary, her experience was so similar to the people I knew.
"the world is hard so lemme hit you really hard so you learn fast what reality looks like and can fight back"
this, is one or another form, goes around A LOT still.
Boomer's as an entire generation are addicted to the idea that all problems are solved by just yelling at people or committing violence against them.
Not to say humanity has collectively improved, but the age group which tends to "wonder" if corporal punishment should be brought back has always been very specific when I encounter it.
I was born very late to parents who otherwise would have made me a boomer. I'm pretty sure what you say is correct and caused by the little accepted fact that people were traumatised by the war not anything like this fantasy idealism that they just had Gary Cooper laconic takes and stiff upper lips. My parents gen (born into the great depression) were messed up to silence.
My parents are boomers on the cusp of being silents, themselves, and there's definitely some difference between what they percieve and the younger generations. It's hard to say how far back it all goes, really - while the depression and war years were certainly influential in making the culture that overshadowed the rest of the 20th century, stories of harsh discipline are age-old. Perhaps what makes it defining is just the fact that it occurred as a near-universal in the same way that the current pandemic did, and the result was a postwar generation with very sharp differences in attitude.
"When I was your age I got whooped all the time and I came out alright" says the parent who did not come out alright, left with an internalized belief that abusing children is totally fine.
Do you really think that for 5000 years, throughout which physical punishment was the norm, nobody was "alright"? And that only in the last 50 years of human existence have we started to realize how to raise children "correctly"?
We can ignore the swiftly rising depression rates among children for the sake of the argument.
Do you have a justification for implying that adolescent depression stems from the lack of abuse? I'd point to half a dozen potential other reasons that immediately spring to mind.
Please stop equating physical punishment with abuse. I did not say the word abuse, so don't make a straw man of me. Abuse is, by definition, negative. We can't have any kind of discussion about whether physical punishment is negative or positive if you can't distinguish it from abuse.
Our entire society is quite literally based around physical punishment for law breaking, in that you go to jail. Society does not function with solely positive reinforcement. I'm sorry about this, and I don't like it either, but it's just a fact of life. I fail to see any justification for the strange idea that a child or adolescent should never be punished physically, but an adult should be. If there exist adults who are deterred from bad behavior due to the consequences, and they obviously do exist, why do you think that such adolescents don't also exist? For such adolescents who don't respond to gentler measures, a spanking may very well deter the bad behavior. I very seriously do not understand why this is debated.
In regards to the historical context, I find your opinion on that myopic and egoistic.
To me, trauma is when your gut tells you something is wrong but your ego/mind chooses to ignore it.
In this case it's impossible to think that you're not safe with your parents and then they hand you over to one of those camps.
In my own case, i've learned early that mum isn't safe and trusted dad more. Something was up, the body knew. When he split and didn't want me, that's when trauma occured.
I'm almost 40 now and only pulled my life together 2 years ago. Be honest with your kids. They can handle the truth, but never lies... it's okay to not love them, but lying about it... really sad.
I went to one of these places in the early 2000's. It's difficult to wrap your mind around it. it was most definitely a cult
Some thoughts
- archive.org has most of fornits
- hashtag breakingcodesilence on pretty much any social media platform. tiktok has quite abit
- a SURPRISING amount of 'counselors' account for their time at these schools on linkedin. some are even licensed now (bravo?).
- this individual who has since passed away did a great job at documenting CEDU - https://survivingcedu.wordpress.com/cedu-documentary/
- at a high level there was a literal cult known as the Church of Synanon which was disbanded in the 70's by the federal government. This cult's purpose/mission was to save people from addiction by brainwashing/abuse/prophets. These principles then created the concept of 'theraputic boarding schools'. It has since hydra'd as it is an unaccountable industry and certain states have laws create conditions for less oversight.
- The school I attended, the headmaster was from a cedu school that was shuttered, his qualifications was a degree in creative writing. There were maybe 6-10 counselors from other schools who then taught the hired 'uninitiated' counselors who themselves were typically 18-25 years old, without any college education. Students that excelled at these schools sometimes became counselors themselves.
This is tragic. What's so tough is that kids who are this troubled are in so much pain, and also cause immense pain to their families who feel helpless. My sister starting in early teens was intensely troubled (depression, drug abuse, self-destructive behavior, etc) and made my parents life very difficult. There was never a tough love camp, but I can understand the desire to try something, anything to place the kid somewhere out of harms way, both as a Hail Mary attempt to help them and to get some peace themselves. That these kids end up in harms way is the evil twist.
My sister, to this day, is intensely troubled. My parents, in their 70s, are raising her 7 year old. Immense amount of resources (time, love, medical care, psychological care, money) are spent every year helping her. Sometimes, there's just nothing that can "fix" these situations it's an ongoing process. My parents thankfully are well resourced in all the required ways to provide this level of support, and the siblings are onboard as well as this will continue past my parents time.
I guess I just think it's worth considering that there sometimes seems to be no real option in helping troubled kids / family members and it's a heartbreaking situation.
No matter the reason only sick, crazy parents would do that to their kids. They should either lose their parenting rights or forced to take a psychological treatment themselves.
It was our family doctor who recommended it to my parents. I don't think any of them knew how destructive that advice was about to become. And that destruction was very swift.
It seems all countries have their difficulties with their troubled teens industry. In Germany their was recently an outcry because there were cases rather critical outsourcing to Eastern Europe:
Wasn't sure what to make of "critical outsourcing" (hiring too many programmers from Romania? I'm probably missing a second meaning of outsourcing) but the page doesn't properly load for me (in Germany). I can read it in HTML source though, so in case anyone else wonders the same:
It's about the same thing, German teens sent to some labour camp in Romania.
I forget which podcast it was, but they had an interview with someone who survived one of these and wrote the book on them. I wish I could remember the podcast or the person's name, but the impression I got is these camps are completely horrible with no redeeming qualities.
I have no idea of US law, but shouldn't the state law suite these things shut? Here in germany there can be a case of public interested and torturing kids definitely sounds like one...
Reminds me of mandatory military service in Africa, most people hate having to do it because it's a waste of time for them (1 year) they complain about the tough work but I haven't heard any of my friends saying they were traumatized by it.
Which leads me to believe the "kidnapping" is probably the cause for these people's troubles, because for military service you'll know 3 months prior or something, or the culture difference might play a role into why different people take it differently.
Parents whose choices and behaviors have resulted in having raised a troubled teen make really poor choices in how they deal with their troubled teen. That’s not surprising.
Is that really true? At my school your peer group was heavily influenced by your interests. Kids who played sports hung out together, kids into band hung out, kids in honors classes hung out. And kids with no other interests hung out too. By and large this last group had parents who weren’t involved in their kids’ lives.
It’s just one data point, and there were many non-troubled kids who had non-involved parents. But I can’t think of many cases of the converse, troubled kids with parents who actively were invested in their kids’ success.
There are probably no simple answers when it comes to how a person's character forms. I just wanted to point out that "the parents are at fault" is not the whole truth either.
As are genetics. Psychological illnesses often first manifest in the teenage years and they happen in all kinds of families. People always want to look for some kind of reason but sometimes there just isn't one.
I've heard it as the adage 'you are the average of the 5 closest people to you'.
> Parent have little influence on that.
Depends if the parents can afford to live where they want. For me growing up, friends were people who lived close enough to bicycle or walk. Given where I lived this meant some were jocks, some were rich, and some were poor.
We were closer to the poor side, but having rich (basically both parents were doctors or some other professional) friends taught me a lot. Namely, there is a path to not being poor. My parents for better or worse put me in that neighborhood.
There is quite a lot parents can do to stack the odds, though of course nothing is ever certain. Signing their kids up for extracurricular activities to keep them busy after school is something my parents did. And not all teenagers are disobedient all the time; twice my parents forbade me from hanging out with somebody. Maybe it's a coincidence, but one of those people is now in prison for domestic violence, and the other is dead from drug abuse. In retrospect I think my parents were right to put their foot down in the case of those two.
I was in one of these and found the Paris Hilton documentary to be mostly spot on. If anything, (probably due to time constraints) it left quite a lot out.
For a country founded on the ideas of individual freedom, the US seems to have an incredible blind spot when it comes ot the rights of children. In any country with any sort of child protection laws worth their name, these would be illegal, as would most forms of physical punishment and emotional neglect that seem to be permitted in the US.
If you make shallow, pejorative generalizations about a country—any country—then you are adding nationalistic flamebait to the thread in the sense that we use the term here. Let's not argue about definitions; please just don't post such comments.
I mean, being named and shamed has lower impact on your life then being charged, prosecuted and sentenced. And it is cheaper as payments fot layer alone can bankrupt you whether guilty or not.
You can't post nationalistic slurs to HN, regardless of which nation you have a problem with. Since you've broken the site guidelines repeatedly before this as well, I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
That’s a very gross generalization and could be said about many countries.
I think a lot of people fail to understand that while the US is a single country, it is massive and has many distinct governments and regional communities that make it impossible to throw it all under a single label.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It destroys this place, and it's a non sequitur. Mistreatment of children exists in many countries, though no doubt it takes various forms. Letting a story like this one land on and inflame pre-existing prejudices is not the best way to process this information.
The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensive psychiatric care and were an immediate danger to others around them.
I look back on it as one of the most valuable experiences in my life, not because there was any validity to the program but because it just confronted me with a lot of intense challenges at a young age that really developed my critical thinking and mindset at a young age.