Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives.
What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
> What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my depression, which I've never really been able to do before despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that I see depression as a chronic condition I have (say perhaps analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as opposed to something that I am at my core, it makes it much, much less scary and threatening to me.
In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very, very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good enough there either.
Very true. Self-confidence and grit are immensely important in overcoming or even just rationalizing the obstacles of life, doing so in an almost logical way without letting a person's self-defeating emotions or perceived shortcomings get in the way. It's such a huge divider and it singularly is based on what kind of adult(s) that person had in their life when they were young.
In the wise words of the late child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell:
In order to develop – intellectually emotionally, socially and morally – a child requires participation in progressively more complex reciprocal activity on a regular basis over an extended period in the child's life, with one or more persons with whom the child develops a strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment and who is committed to the child's well-being and development, preferably for life. (Bronfenbrenner, 1991, p. 2)
Or paraphrased by him:
“Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”
Learned helplessness can also afflict adults, especially those who are not accustomed to dealing with computers. I get that quite a bit, and it's not just older people. Young people who have only used tablets, phones, and Chromebooks also are affected. YMMV
No. They can see that there are other ways of living by watching their peers or random people on the street.
But they need somebody to make them understand that it’s not them who are destroying the relationship with their surroundings and their chance for being happy but the other way around.
Some children in bad situations understand that without guidance but they are rare.
Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives.
What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.