children – The Daily Opinion

Your Kids Are Depressed? No They’re ******* Not!

If there’s anything that’s truly a fixture of the world we live in then it certainly has to be the fact that we always have to think that every child is depressed because they’re not happy. A recent BBC article really highlighted the whole depressed people thing today as it reported that 1,000 under 18s had been referred to mental health teams in Sussex.

We’ve actually had this turn up quite a few times now as a few years ago there was a big media storm over the subscribing of antidepressants to young people. Now, depression is a strange beast. It’s not something that’s imaginary, like certain people would have you believe. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the person is weak either. What it means is that when depression is genuine something needs to be done. The problem is that you can be diagnosed with depression at the slightest thing these days.

Obviously, the number of children who are depressed is going to be higher due to the fact that this isn’t something that was taken seriously; mental health problems as a whole weren’t taken seriously. We also have to acknowledge that our population has increased significantly over the years so the number of depressed people will naturally increase.

What people have to acknowledge is that being sad once in a while does not equal depression. Depression can come in many forms, but it isn’t occasional. Some depressed people may switch between happy and sad every few hours, or it may even be prolonged periods of happy and sad over months. This is depression and these people need help, they are the genuine ones, and many of the ones who claim to have depression today won’t fall into these groups.

What would make a child fall into depression, though?

I’m not going to go into the blatantly obvious things like an abusive household because that’s plain obvious and it would be an insult to dedicate half of a page to it. Some people believe that the accessibility of the world’s events is to blame. There’s no doubt that the world is a depressing place to be in, and this worry and anxiety that’s always permeated the mass media will naturally fall on the heads of children. And children will have access to all of this stuff because they are usually more technology orientated than most adults.

Another reason? Well there’s the argument that the stress of school is a major factor, but I completely disagree with this for the most part as that’s always been present and we are seeing a spike in the number of depressed children in recent years. I would agree that those who are bullied on a regular basis may garner some depression as being bullied is a traumatic experience. I, myself, was bullied and I had a horrible time for years, but luckily for me the chav bastard died at the age of 18 from an ‘unlucky’ brain aneurysm. I’m very happy about what happened and it did lift a weight off my shoulders as I did believe that justice was done, but such karmic justice isn’t present for many people. I understand that many children who don’t have their bullying issues resolved will feel cheated, and that will certainly contribute to depression.

Dead guy — An over exaggerated representation of karmic justice.

However, what I believe the main reason is is the lack of parental love in the world these days. There’s no getting away from the fact that many depressed people don’t have the support or regular companionship of their parents. And this can be attributed to many things. Some may argue that it’s declining family values. Some may argue that it’s because most families tend to have both parents who work for long periods these days. I believe that it’s due to the fact that many parents don’t realise what they are doing. If a parent decides to forgo spending time with their child for an hour or two then what happens? Usually, absolutely nothing so they believe that everything is ok when really it’s not.

This is usually when we start seeing the spoiled brat who has all of these presents and gifts and yet they are still upset. Many people can’t fathom why someone with everything could be so upset. But what they don’t take into account is that material goods can’t substitute long-term love and affection. It just doesn’t work. There’s absolutely no correlation between amount of material goods and long-term happiness. In fact, that’s how those with everything can still become depressed. This is due to a psychological incident known as hedonic adaptation (or the hedonic treadmill), which is where humans become happy when they receive material goods and revert back to emotional stability after the initial period of euphoria is over.

Materials are temporary. Love is forever. That’s why your kids are supposedly depressed.

Do Children Who Snore Equal the Signs of a Little Bastard?

Why are some children just bad? This is a question which has followed society for hundreds and hundreds of years. And, despite the advances in science and technology, we still have no idea why some children who come from seemingly good homes have to act out on a consistent basis.

But a study which was published in the scientific journal Pediatrics believes there may be some visible signs involved. The study claims to have found a link between behavioural issues in children and sleep-disordered breathing; sleep-disordered breathing is defined as apnoea in this case.

The study was carried out at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and followed over 13,000 children from infancy through their early childhood.

The study originally found that 45% of this group remained free of any sleep-disordered breathing. 8% of children fell into a worst-case group, which involved children who had breathing problems which persisted after the ages of two and three; a group dubbed by the researchers involved in the project.

By age seven, the research team discovered that those with so-called sleep-disordered breathing were more likely to develop some form of behavioural or emotional disorder by age seven. These disorders included anything from ADHD disorder to anxiety and depression. This link was discovered because 13.5% of children had these kinds of symptoms, as opposed to only 8% of children who had no sleep-disordered breathing problems.

But here’s where the problems with this study arrive. The researchers admitted that they weren’t sure about whether any of these children actually had these disorders out rightly or not because the results are based off of questionnaires given to parents. Now isn’t that a reliable way to gain results? Obviously, it’s not which already leads to much scrutiny.

Ok, so they claimed that they accounted this link by using variables such as parental income, education, race, birth weight, and whether parents smoked. This is all well and good, but did it take into account how much a parent smoked or exactly how much the parent weighed? Of course it didn’t. So, these figures are already looking very sketchy already. And this is before we get into the fact that people who smoke already underestimate exactly how much they smoke.

Continuing on, the researchers went on to say that even with these variables they discovered that sleep-disordered breathing was the biggest factor involved as the researchers plucked out a figure which said that there was a 72% chance of behavioural or emotional symptoms in children at age seven.

Now, this seems like they just pulled this figure out of nothing because if 45% of children didn’t have any breathing problems whilst sleeping then that means 55% did. If 55% did and only 13.5% of these children had any of these behavioural or emotional issues by age seven then where is the 72% figure coming from? Luck?

And let’s look at the figures they gained from sleep-disordered children versus children who had no issues when it comes to any symptoms and issues when they got older. 13.5% and 8% are incredibly close to each other as a 4.5% difference in a study of 13,000 is marginal, to say the least. If another 13,000 study was conducted then would these figures necessarily be the same? I think not, but if they are then I would be surprised.

For now, this writer will be blaming bad parenting and poor discipline when a child decides that it would be funny to throw a brick at another child’s head.

Alcohol on the Big Screen Encourages Binge Drinking (apparently)

It was suggested in a US study, published in online journal BMJ Open, on the 21^st of February that actors who drink on the big screen are encouraging experimentation with alcohol amongst children.

The study says that the stars act as successful role models who encourage children to drink. The thinking goes that if a child looks at a famous actor and they are drinking heavily then it’s ok because they have already made themselves famous and they don’t look like they are suffering from health problems.

This study was unprecedented in the number of test subjects as it randomly selected more than 6,500 American children between the ages of 10 and 14 for a phone interview, and then another three additional interviews in the next two years. Obviously, they would have had an issue getting through to some children as their parents were too drunk to answer the phone at the time (hint hint).

The questions asked ranged from which movies they had seen, whether they currently drank or had drunk alcohol in the past, and whether they owned any merchandise which had any alcoholic brands attached to it. Of course, they were also asked about their school and home lives in general too.

The films used to compare the implied and actual consumption of alcohol by researchers were taken from films which had grossed at least $15,000,000 when the interviews had first started. After that the researchers then used the character’s implied and actual consumption and purchases of alcohol to find out the results.

The researchers found that youngsters, on average, had been exposed to roughly four to eight hours of viewing involving alcohol from the most popular films on the market. Other items of interest from the survey also showed that during the two year study, the number of respondents who admitted they had started drinking alcohol had risen from 11% at the start to 25% by the end of it.

Furthermore, the number of binge drinkers tripled from 4% to 13% by the end of the study; binge drinking, as outlined in this study, is having at least five drinks in a row.

Ok, these are startling figures as they do eclipse the figures gained from having bad parents, having lots of money, and a rebellious teen spirit. But can’t we see one fatal flaw in this experiment? How exactly do you isolate this one specific factor?

How are you going to isolate this one specific factor, which is alcohol in movies, without putting the kids in a room on their own? The answer is you can’t. So how can these figures really be that reliable? The answer is they can’t as they are also going to be exposed to a number of different factors at the same time; such as peer pressure, rebellion, and coming into money.

And let’s go further and make the point that a phone survey is just a phone survey. None of the test subjects were ever met in person so how can you be sure they are telling the truth? And when someone talks about alcohol we all know that people significantly underestimate how much they really drink, don’t we?

But let’s look at children. Children are always being told how bad it is to drink underage, which is against the law. So realistically how many of them are going to readily admit it? How do you know that some of the test subjects are not claiming they don’t drink when they really do? If they did this would further support the study’s conclusion, but it’s important just to bring up the point anyway.

Nonetheless, what we can expect from the findings of this study is that they will either slink away from the publix gaze into the darkness after a week or so or it will cause panic throughout America and parents will be covering their children’s eyes and protesting for the removal of all alcohol from films. Sooner or later we are going to end up living in a world where alcohol can’t be seen on TV, can’t be talked about on the radio, can’t have colourful packaging, and can only be drunk within the basement of one’s own home, when the child is at school.

So it’s either going to be a giant overreaction or completely ignored, what do you think?