(searched for that to post this, and they cite %60 since the 1990s).
Freud himself discovered a tremendous amount of horrible abuse in his patients; depending on the culture, most people just turn a blind eye. People that haven't experienced it and recovered from it a bit are really good at not believing how common it is.
A friend who is counselor and head priest at a girls’ Catholic school thinks it’s a large factor behind the childhood obesity epidemic too. Not just sexual abuse but childhood trauma in general leading to food as a coping mechanism.
His offhand theory is that the increase in the prevalence of restaurants and hyperpalatable foods gave people an outlet to feel safe (a third place in public where the whole family goes and acts their best) and the hyperpalatable food gave an easy and cheap dopamine boost during hard times leading to a spiral.
It really is a silent crisis and difficult to get a hold on the scale of it. To the point where it feels like everyone has some kind of trauma, but that might just be the circles I'm in.
As someone who's spent 26 years in GA and met many folks also in AA and NA, I estimate that at least 80% have had childhood trauma. True for me, true for my eldest child.
> People that haven't experienced it and recovered from it a bit are really good at not believing how common it is.
Also, for people who have experienced it, it's often the last thing they'd ever want to talk about. With anyone, including people they are really close to.
There's a good chance you could have a close personal friend or even your partner and never know they had gone through something like that.
> it's often the last thing they'd ever want to talk about. With anyone, including people they are really close to.
'Get over it' is the most common response. That's why they shut up about it. People who are close to them are only close because of something positive that is being offered. Nobody wants to deal with anyone else's issues.
I'm really glad to see courageous people changing the trend on this one, though I hope it continues to be an invitation to others to share, not a demand.
These kinds of things fester in darkness and loneliness. I think bringing them out into the light where we can find out we're not alone is helping.
I have read Gabor Mate's works on the subject. I think he would say that more children are traumatized today. Whether they are traumatized more deeply is another matter.
The earlier trauma happens, the more amplified the effect is. Sometime in the 1950s it became a common parenting approach in the US at least to "not coddle children". That creates trauma for a sensitive child to not have their emotional needs met (an insensitive child may be just fine). There are different degrees of trauma- others that fight wars may experience a much deeper trauma later in life. The trauma to the ignored baby is not as traumatic of an event, but the baby does not have any abilities to cope and the effects are amplified in early developmental stages.
There is less community today to help with the coping process and emotionally distant parenting styles also make coping harder. And there is less religion today- religion both provided community and sometimes specifically helps people deal with trauma.
Trauma can be generational- someone that suffers trauma is much more likely to have difficulties raising their children. Consider someone that survived war but lost their home and witnessed horrors. They may turn to drugs to cope with the psychological pain. Being drug dependent, they have difficulty raising their own children. Those children don't have their emotional needs met, and a cycle of trauma can continue.
From Mate's point of view addiction rates would probably be one way to measure the trauma of society. Drug addiction is a way of coping with severe psychological pain. Drug overdosing is becoming a leading killer in some age groups.
We generally have more resources and knowledge now. People tend to want to raise the bar when that becomes possible.
When kids suffered or died because humans lacked food security, reliable medical treatments etc, it was also generally not really the parent's fault. Knowing you could have been treated better and your parents/the world just didn't actually care about you is scarring in ways that "No one has enough." aren't.
Plus, everyone is in it together when no one has enough. Once you get to "some people could have enough at the expense of other people," victim/perpetrator dynamics show up, but when no one does, you're suffering together.
Abuse of children is isolating for the child victim in a way that suffering hardship as a family unit or community isn't. There's no sense of "I'm as safe as it gets here, at home, with these people (even if that's not very safe)." There is no place of feeling even relative safety, no sense that anyone is even trying to care for or defend you.
One factor might be family size. Purely anecdotal, but I have a friend who grew up in an extremely abusive household and said directly to me that the only reason he thinks he survived his situation was because he had 4 other siblings and they all supported each other during the difficult times.
Another consideration: could it be that with more children, in an abusive household the abuse is typically spreaded out to more children, so that each individual child gets less abuse than in a smaller abusive household?
Anecdotal, but I think it's that one of the children gets the brunt of it and the others adjust. In my case, my elder brother had it the roughest, also since my parents were young and it was their first; I "compensated" for his more rebellious behaviour by not doing all the things he did "wrong". There's also something at my ex partner's case but I can't speak for her, but I can say that even though she got it worst, all her siblings ended up messed up in some way.
Every kid hands up having a separate childhood even in the same house, because the caregivers/abusers will change over time. Often one kid tends to take the brunt of the abuse, and the family roles end up reinforcing that.
My brother and I talk a lot about this, how we're only 5 years apart, but the first 5 years of my childhood and the last 5 of his are full of completely different types of abuse, and we weren't really treated the same during the years we were home together. The worst things that happened to me happened before he was old enough to form memories, and his were after I left the house.
Mine is 2 years younger but it resulted in post traumatic stress and high dissociation for me, and not nearly as bad effects for my sibling. We were treated different, had different roles, we are different in that I’m neurodivergent and he is not, and also he had a much more available social group of his age.
I think it’s more visible now, but as well, I wonder if it’s just that we have more leisure time to actually worry about / deal with it.
Personally I think every child needs some sort of effective therapy to help heal the trauma of their formative years.
I use trauma freely here, there’s quite a big difference between someone who was bullied a couple of times and is naturally quite resilient vs someone who was mercilessly bullied for years on end pushing them to the brink of life.
I classify both as trauma, very different degrees though.
As well, people react very differently to similar events.
The effects of trauma are not new. What's new is we have a deeper understanding of how it comes about, what the long-term effects are on both an individual and societal level, and what can be done to prevent or remedy it.
Who is we? You talk like there is some hypocrisy here but you’re treating all people as one person. Mental health researchers and workers advocate for more support for people across the board. Politicians don’t give a shit because their constituents, on the whole, don’t either.
I have powerful anecdotal hypocrisy from the closest people in my life.
They work in mental health, but intentionally to a degree much higher than neglect, and over recent and long periods of time: kick people while they’re down, not limited to me.
I don't know anything about your experiences so don't take this as an attempt to defend them but I've been told that the mental health field has a substantial amount of people who suffered or suffer from mental health issues and to some degree their pursuit of the career is an attempt to understand themselves better.
My mom is an alcoholic and also formerly a psychologist and I’ve heard that from her too. Her early childhood bore many of the traumatic experiences that this article warns damage childrens’ brains.
> Are children more traumatized now than in the past? Seems like the past was harder on children.
My guess is that in the past child mortality was higher and children traumatised enough just didn't survived. And because of such high mortality no one cared to find out why.
My hunch around childhood is we’re doing better with young kids (due to awareness around this stuff). But we don’t give teenagers the independence they need to develop.
If you read about the history of childhood I think it's clear that children were immeasurably more traumatized in the past. The concept of child abuse barely existed, and the relational needs of children weren't recognized at all.
That raises the question of why contemporary attention to trauma is so elevated, if the problem is actually smaller now than it used to be. There's an easy answer though: this is first moment in (recent) history where we finally have a chance to begin dealing with it.
Divorce is a massive cause of trauma and increasing in the west
I organized a large group of trauma experts last week (church pastors), and although they were amazing and had clearly overcome trauma; residual selfishness and power grabbing meant a child got ignored
The same last night: a bible study with the homeless. A happy and peaceful place, though one member was throwing trauma bombs
There's not a simple switch, though having lived in war zones and done churches of, for instance Syrian refugees, unconditional love of God, and letting trauma be presented in the middle of that is deeply powerful
But you are right divorce rates vary, for instance decreasing post covid. I was thinking on the century scale. But also percentage of people entering stable commitment, and so even the possibility of divorce is much lower
> "The share of children born outside of marriage has increased substantially in almost all OECD countries"
This seems like it's unrelated to divorce.
I don't think it's fair to look at divorces on a century basis given that no fault divorce only became possible in the United States in 1969 - before that you needed to prove there was some sort of abuse or infidelity involved.
It certainly becomes more complicated to try and draw trends, and impossible to assume it was stronger family value that held them together before that point - in fact, the peak in the early 70s indicates that once it became possible it was used with gusto.
Children were definitely abused more in the past, but were they traumatised more?
In the past much more than today, kids had defined roles and work to do in families. The stronger sense of identity may have lessened the trauma. As may the knowledge that their peers in neighboring familes were going through the exact same things.
Trauma isn't as simple as more worse things -> bigger/more trauma.
Under certain circumstances people can experiences horrible stuff with barely any ill effect while other times really trivial small things can totally break them.
Just having one stable positive relationship with an adult can make a child significantly more resilient while the child that lacks that relationship might break at a minor problem. There are many factors that determine resilience and it can vary greatly from person to person. And it is situational. Someone might be a hardened war veteran having seen it all but totally break when seeing a child getting a minor wound.
So children today might be objectively better off than in the past but it does not necessary mean their struggles are less valid, they are just different. So hard to say whether they are less traumatized or not, maybe a little bit but mostly probably just in different ways.
But yeah, the main thing is that we are much better at recognizing signs of trauma these days and people can be more open of their struggles so it might seem like there is more traumatized people when probably there is the same amount or less.
Probably more traumatised, but talking about it was much more socially unacceptable (and even potentially dangerous; in many countries involuntary institutionalisation on extremely flimsy basis was very much a thing until the late 20th century, especially for women).
As with many things like this, getting hard numbers would be extremely difficult because it's the sort of thing where peoples' inclination to answer surveys honestly changes with social norms.
