Our family are homeschooling Christians. I am actually writing this from our homeschool coop, so we are deeply embedded in a chosen community that is distinctly countercultural. This author underestimates the difficulty of sustaining that. A "secular countercultural community" may well be an oxymoron -- the root of "culture" is "cult" so it's debatable whether a secular culture has ever or could ever exist.
Religious communities (homeschooling Christians, Jews, non-assimilating Muslims) aren't bound together by a dislike of "secular culture". They are bound by a shared love of what they hold sacred. "We're a community because our kids don't use smartphones" just isn't nearly enough. The Jewish example of leaving their son at synagogue is telling: they trusted the other parents not because those parents eschewed some secular things, but because those parents shared their Jewish culture and worldview. I trust any parent at our homeschool coop to reprimand my children precisely because we share a culture and a philosophy. You can not create that out of a simple desire to negate popular culture. There may be lots of parents who agree that phones are bad but disagree on almost everything else.
Being countercultural isn't a goal. It's a byproduct of believing deeply in a radically different culture. It's a positive not a negative orientation, which is why I believe this author's approach will not succeed.
You are so right, Mr. Villanueva. I am an atheist, so my agreement comes from seeing the merit of your argument: a community where trust reigns must be premised on shared assumptions. I do not accept the notion that religious communities are necessary for this, or that those of us who lack a religious faith must learn from religious communities. I was raised Catholic and have a profound love for Catholic traditions, rituals, and even moral values, but I just don't believe in the existence of a God. I can share in Christian rites with my family--my sister is an Evangelical Christian, and many of my aunts and cousins are still devout Catholics--because of the community elements, the kind of thing that happens in human brains and human bodies when we partake in common rituals with common goals, but I cannot be a hypocrite and pretend to share in their beliefs, I was not raised to lie or to disrespect other people's faith like that...
I live in a First World European city with a very low crime rate. No child has been kidnapped or hurt by a stranger in this city in decades. No woman has been raped by a stranger in decades. People do not carry guns--not even the local police carry guns--and most of the city is safe even at night. Children here go to the park near their house alone since the age of 8 or 9, and play at the park with other kids since the ages of 2 or 3, with their moms and/or dads sitting around benches or nearby coffee shops with tables outside, BECAUSE THERE ARE TONS OF PARKS. I had never seen so many parks for kids to play until I moved here. The USA simply does not have this. Here, buildings are built around a central square, and that square has a park for the kids, and the bottom floor of the buildings are rented out for businesses--coffee shops, fruit stores or small supermarkets, laundromats, knick knack stores, bars (which in Spain are not like US bars, they're not 18+ venues for drinking), etc. This means that many parks are sort of self-contained, and kids are in the park, surrounded by people they know, who live in this neighborhood, shop in these stores, sit in these coffee shops, and people thus know their neighbors and their neighbors' kids.
My kids have been going to the city center, on the bus or riding their bikes, alone, since age 12, because the city shares the common belief that kids are sacred, kids are everybody's business, nobody can hurt a child. The common beliefs that we're all in this together--"this" is life in society--and therefore, it behooves us to be decent to each other and to keep a functional social fabric, instead of focusing on the individual, which is the basis of US culture. But having a government and public policies that promote public parks, a clean city, well-lit streets, the integration of all people so that there are no ghettos, free or very inexpensive activities for kids and families, public preschooling that starts at age 3... This is just as helpful for independent kids as faith-based communities.
Because, indeed, "secular countercultural" does not exist and will not exist. The most important element of a community is "the common"--the common good, the common existence, the common values... A common faith would help cement these, but lacking a common faith, one can make do.
Thank you for this post.As a high school educator of 35 years, who has been focussing on supporting my students and my greater community to thrive in dopamine addicted world for many years , I truly appreciate the concrete examples that you give for parents and educators. I will be including much of your post in my presentation to parents this coming week.
As Ben Franklin famously put it, "when the well is dry, we know the worth of water." Throughout most of history, faith and religiosity were simply a fact of life, a thing everyone took for granted. But over the past few centuries, as the technological advancements have bred hubris in so much of society, leading people to think that they could build not only better machines but better *people* and better social structures, they've slowly abandoned the existing social structures that worked perfectly well and have served their purpose admirably in getting us this far.
And now that deep-seated secularism has replaced faith as "the default," we're in a position to clearly see what we're missing. Turns out the answer is: quite a lot actually! Maybe our distant ancestors weren't nearly as foolish afterall as our more recent ancestors would like to believe.
"Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was."
Much as I appreciate Haidt's ideas, I'd like to make a distinction between intentional communities and the random mix of people in neighborhoods. It seems to me that it's more valuable for younger children to absorb a clear, coherent set of values than having to navigate the possible confusion and contradictions of very different ones. There's plenty of time to explore widely differing beliefs once childrens' baseline sense of values is established, and after their intellectual capacities awaken in adolescence. Having raised our children in rural areas with a wide variety of types, I can tell you that there have been several neighbors I would definitely not have wanted them to be influenced by - including, for example, the guy who flies a Confederate flag, and once boasted to me of having a standoff with a nearby town's police while wielding one of his many guns. This neighbor is not someone we'd want to have anything to do with. He'd likely feel the same way about us! While raising children, it was important to me to be able to carefully choose a "neighborhood" of the like-minded for our social circle - especially on the issue of screen use. All it takes is one over-exposed kid to wreck the most carefully-instilled habits. We drove our kids to the homes of like-minded friends, and thanked our lucky stars that nobody within walking distance had kids whose houses our kids could just walk to & watch TV or play on computers - both of which we deliberately did not own (this was back in the '90s, before all that became pocket-sized). Our kids were privately educated for some of the same reasons. How different is that from the value your article attributes to being part of a faith community? THAT I appreciate. The "neighborhood" emphasis, not so much. In fact, the article seems a bit self-contradictory in promoting BOTH random neighbors AND faith communities.
Embedded in this is another aspect of "everything wrong in the world is due to high real estate prices". For so many of us, being able to choose a true community of people who share our values is a luxury we can't afford because we are instead trying to solve the complicated mathematical equation of "what neighborhoods have prices we can afford and aren't more than ~30-45 minutes (driving, since there's probably no other option) from both of our jobs". That means people are forced to prioritise real estate costs over every other factor when deciding which community to take root in.
The "kids play outdoors all the time just like yesteryear" is also highly dependent on local climate. The spread of air conditioning means that previously uninhabitable places like Arizona (or Singapore or Dubai) have become boomtowns. But try playing outside in the middle of a summer day in those places and see how it goes.
I think there’s room to say that the key lesson is to form relationships in a way where you can invite non-geographical neighbors into your daily and weekly life that forms the desired institutions. Not all social networks will have the same physical closeness as the ones mentioned here. But we can import their lessons nevertheless.
I agree wholeheartedly. A geographically small community that includes work, home, play, and whatever else one needs within walking distance, and is self governing, is what we had before the advent of industrialization, motor cars and town planning. With the advent of town planning all the elements that need to be together, were forced apart. Today, a strong religious element helps to recover what we enjoyed before the advent of the motor car.
'Kids growing up in strong religious communities appear to be among the least affected by the screen-saturation of American childhood, as documented by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch.'
Forgive me for being unfair to some extent, but I am to accept that Christian Nationalism is an acceptable cost for raising Resilient children? Does heavy engagement with reality denying conspiracy theories lead to better mental health outcomes?
Okay, this post was about lessons from Orthodox Jewish communities, with no mention of either Christianity or nationalism. Many faith-based communities, with little regard to the precise faith, offer a degree of protection from the adverse conditions that are affecting most of the youth. If you want to believe that being part of any religious community is "heavy engagement with reality denying conspiracy theories" that's your right, but that doesn't change the fact that they report better mental health outcomes. Besides, the main purpose of the article was the illustrate ways to graft the positive outcomes from Orthodox Jewish communities and graft them onto secular communities, without transferring the religion.
Then the opening thesis is too broad, and should not make sweeping generalizations, if the only working example will be of Orthodox Judaism.
I provided an alternative example of a 'strong religious community', and *DID NOT* at any point imply *all* religions, as your use of 'any religious community' in-accurately characterizes my response. I'll assume it was an oversight and not a bad faith debate tactic.
Using the example I offered, I most certainly would accept that they score lower levels of anxiety, as many causes of current day anxiety are denied in the group I mentioned. Climate change - a hoax, the pandemic - a hoax. I am just not certain that out of context those lower anxiety scores represent truly adaptive behavior.
Well no, since the result of better reported comparative mental health is in large a feature of many faith-based communities, and not just Judaism. Orthodox Judaism is focused in on to more extensively deconstruct some of the systems that may be responsible for the disparities in well-being.
The reason why a broad characterization of your statement was given is two-fold. One that the post opens on religion in general, and hence your response was assumed to be on account of religion in general. Two being that the post does not mention accepting Christian nationalism to raise resilient children, which is already out of scope of the more narrow scope of Orthodox Judaism that the majority of the article is spent on, ergo the assumption that you might have been talking about religion at large.
There may certainly be a degree to which ownership to certain groups might alter ones predilection to evaluate their mental health, but the preponderance of this issue in terms of youth depression, loneliness, and suicide all decreasing while education scores are declining, suggests a net effect.
Literally took the time to explain the origin of the characterizations and inferences from statements you made in your post. Will try to be better at reading minds in the future then.
My only take-away from a post like this is the ignorance it implies. This seems like a perspective that I could imagine of what secular professors at secular universities imagine when they discuss Trump voters in their coffee shops while creating their own conspiracy theories.
I love this article! I shared it with my family and think it highlights some of the best things, we the Jewish community, have to offer.
While it looks all beautiful, the orthodox community had to combat something called “half-Shabbat”. This was where kids (usually in high school) were keeping all the elements of Shabbat but would sneak into their rooms and use their phones! I was in high school (2009-2011) when this was the trend. I’d have friends pick me up and see in their pockets the outline of a blackberry.
While I think the issue is mostly over (no Jewish leader has spoken about it in years) it was still an obstacle we, as a community had to face.
When I opened this, I thought I was going to read an article taken from the book Faith for Exiles by David Kinnaman. It is the same idea but from the Christian perspective. The ideas presented here mirror the ones found in this book. This article really does drive home the importance of real community in raising resilient children in this digital age.
For those that aren't religious, the lessons from religious communities are still the same, it just won't be oriented around a religion. In deeply secular Toronto, where people just don't talk about religion and there's no "Thank Jesus this," or "Praise God!" that, like there is in the US, you only know people ascribe to a particular religion by some outward sign - a cross, a yarmulke, a kippah, a hijab. I suspect this will be an extra challenge for those secularists, particularly atheists, who would like that communities described without the need for a faith. That's something that's also up for exploration.
It is not religion per se but the transition from a childlike conscience (manipulated by society) to a mature conscience (self-observation) that produces lessons from mistakes (resiliency).
It seems to me the term "community" itself changed during the late 60's early 70's and rather than referring to an actual physical place with people, buildings and places of worship and the like it became more abstract to designate a group of people or profession. My favorite was"the narcotic addiction community".
The same thing happened to the word "share" which had always meant having a physical thing to share. No one would have said , "I have something to share with you " unless there was a physical thing to actually share. I remember the first time someone did this to me and I was confused when there was nothing there.
There was complete disregard for Korzybski , "the map is not the territory" , "the word is not the thing". Words matter,; going from concrete to abstract matters.
Our family are homeschooling Christians. I am actually writing this from our homeschool coop, so we are deeply embedded in a chosen community that is distinctly countercultural. This author underestimates the difficulty of sustaining that. A "secular countercultural community" may well be an oxymoron -- the root of "culture" is "cult" so it's debatable whether a secular culture has ever or could ever exist.
Religious communities (homeschooling Christians, Jews, non-assimilating Muslims) aren't bound together by a dislike of "secular culture". They are bound by a shared love of what they hold sacred. "We're a community because our kids don't use smartphones" just isn't nearly enough. The Jewish example of leaving their son at synagogue is telling: they trusted the other parents not because those parents eschewed some secular things, but because those parents shared their Jewish culture and worldview. I trust any parent at our homeschool coop to reprimand my children precisely because we share a culture and a philosophy. You can not create that out of a simple desire to negate popular culture. There may be lots of parents who agree that phones are bad but disagree on almost everything else.
Being countercultural isn't a goal. It's a byproduct of believing deeply in a radically different culture. It's a positive not a negative orientation, which is why I believe this author's approach will not succeed.
You are so right, Mr. Villanueva. I am an atheist, so my agreement comes from seeing the merit of your argument: a community where trust reigns must be premised on shared assumptions. I do not accept the notion that religious communities are necessary for this, or that those of us who lack a religious faith must learn from religious communities. I was raised Catholic and have a profound love for Catholic traditions, rituals, and even moral values, but I just don't believe in the existence of a God. I can share in Christian rites with my family--my sister is an Evangelical Christian, and many of my aunts and cousins are still devout Catholics--because of the community elements, the kind of thing that happens in human brains and human bodies when we partake in common rituals with common goals, but I cannot be a hypocrite and pretend to share in their beliefs, I was not raised to lie or to disrespect other people's faith like that...
I live in a First World European city with a very low crime rate. No child has been kidnapped or hurt by a stranger in this city in decades. No woman has been raped by a stranger in decades. People do not carry guns--not even the local police carry guns--and most of the city is safe even at night. Children here go to the park near their house alone since the age of 8 or 9, and play at the park with other kids since the ages of 2 or 3, with their moms and/or dads sitting around benches or nearby coffee shops with tables outside, BECAUSE THERE ARE TONS OF PARKS. I had never seen so many parks for kids to play until I moved here. The USA simply does not have this. Here, buildings are built around a central square, and that square has a park for the kids, and the bottom floor of the buildings are rented out for businesses--coffee shops, fruit stores or small supermarkets, laundromats, knick knack stores, bars (which in Spain are not like US bars, they're not 18+ venues for drinking), etc. This means that many parks are sort of self-contained, and kids are in the park, surrounded by people they know, who live in this neighborhood, shop in these stores, sit in these coffee shops, and people thus know their neighbors and their neighbors' kids.
My kids have been going to the city center, on the bus or riding their bikes, alone, since age 12, because the city shares the common belief that kids are sacred, kids are everybody's business, nobody can hurt a child. The common beliefs that we're all in this together--"this" is life in society--and therefore, it behooves us to be decent to each other and to keep a functional social fabric, instead of focusing on the individual, which is the basis of US culture. But having a government and public policies that promote public parks, a clean city, well-lit streets, the integration of all people so that there are no ghettos, free or very inexpensive activities for kids and families, public preschooling that starts at age 3... This is just as helpful for independent kids as faith-based communities.
Because, indeed, "secular countercultural" does not exist and will not exist. The most important element of a community is "the common"--the common good, the common existence, the common values... A common faith would help cement these, but lacking a common faith, one can make do.
Precisely. There needs to be a new positive vision and set of moral and religious values.
Though the traditional religion based communities claim we already have everything. I would say the state of the world is evidence that we do not.
Where is the Joy of Rejection Desensitization? is something I'm never asked.
2
The Darker my sense of humor, the more of life's tragedies are funny.
3
The tragedies of humans' inappropriate evolution are funny to me. Is a Dark sense of humor ever cultivated in children?
FYI: The Normal Healthy Human Mind is Defective: inappropriate cravings for Sugar, Salt, Fat, Porn, Booze, etc.
What is the appropriate age for kids to learn we are FUBAR? :-)
Thanks Brian... I was about to pose the same oxymoron.....
Thank you for this post.As a high school educator of 35 years, who has been focussing on supporting my students and my greater community to thrive in dopamine addicted world for many years , I truly appreciate the concrete examples that you give for parents and educators. I will be including much of your post in my presentation to parents this coming week.
As Ben Franklin famously put it, "when the well is dry, we know the worth of water." Throughout most of history, faith and religiosity were simply a fact of life, a thing everyone took for granted. But over the past few centuries, as the technological advancements have bred hubris in so much of society, leading people to think that they could build not only better machines but better *people* and better social structures, they've slowly abandoned the existing social structures that worked perfectly well and have served their purpose admirably in getting us this far.
And now that deep-seated secularism has replaced faith as "the default," we're in a position to clearly see what we're missing. Turns out the answer is: quite a lot actually! Maybe our distant ancestors weren't nearly as foolish afterall as our more recent ancestors would like to believe.
"Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was."
— Donald Kingsbury
Much as I appreciate Haidt's ideas, I'd like to make a distinction between intentional communities and the random mix of people in neighborhoods. It seems to me that it's more valuable for younger children to absorb a clear, coherent set of values than having to navigate the possible confusion and contradictions of very different ones. There's plenty of time to explore widely differing beliefs once childrens' baseline sense of values is established, and after their intellectual capacities awaken in adolescence. Having raised our children in rural areas with a wide variety of types, I can tell you that there have been several neighbors I would definitely not have wanted them to be influenced by - including, for example, the guy who flies a Confederate flag, and once boasted to me of having a standoff with a nearby town's police while wielding one of his many guns. This neighbor is not someone we'd want to have anything to do with. He'd likely feel the same way about us! While raising children, it was important to me to be able to carefully choose a "neighborhood" of the like-minded for our social circle - especially on the issue of screen use. All it takes is one over-exposed kid to wreck the most carefully-instilled habits. We drove our kids to the homes of like-minded friends, and thanked our lucky stars that nobody within walking distance had kids whose houses our kids could just walk to & watch TV or play on computers - both of which we deliberately did not own (this was back in the '90s, before all that became pocket-sized). Our kids were privately educated for some of the same reasons. How different is that from the value your article attributes to being part of a faith community? THAT I appreciate. The "neighborhood" emphasis, not so much. In fact, the article seems a bit self-contradictory in promoting BOTH random neighbors AND faith communities.
Embedded in this is another aspect of "everything wrong in the world is due to high real estate prices". For so many of us, being able to choose a true community of people who share our values is a luxury we can't afford because we are instead trying to solve the complicated mathematical equation of "what neighborhoods have prices we can afford and aren't more than ~30-45 minutes (driving, since there's probably no other option) from both of our jobs". That means people are forced to prioritise real estate costs over every other factor when deciding which community to take root in.
The "kids play outdoors all the time just like yesteryear" is also highly dependent on local climate. The spread of air conditioning means that previously uninhabitable places like Arizona (or Singapore or Dubai) have become boomtowns. But try playing outside in the middle of a summer day in those places and see how it goes.
Sad truth.
I think there’s room to say that the key lesson is to form relationships in a way where you can invite non-geographical neighbors into your daily and weekly life that forms the desired institutions. Not all social networks will have the same physical closeness as the ones mentioned here. But we can import their lessons nevertheless.
I agree wholeheartedly. A geographically small community that includes work, home, play, and whatever else one needs within walking distance, and is self governing, is what we had before the advent of industrialization, motor cars and town planning. With the advent of town planning all the elements that need to be together, were forced apart. Today, a strong religious element helps to recover what we enjoyed before the advent of the motor car.
'Kids growing up in strong religious communities appear to be among the least affected by the screen-saturation of American childhood, as documented by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch.'
Forgive me for being unfair to some extent, but I am to accept that Christian Nationalism is an acceptable cost for raising Resilient children? Does heavy engagement with reality denying conspiracy theories lead to better mental health outcomes?
Okay, this post was about lessons from Orthodox Jewish communities, with no mention of either Christianity or nationalism. Many faith-based communities, with little regard to the precise faith, offer a degree of protection from the adverse conditions that are affecting most of the youth. If you want to believe that being part of any religious community is "heavy engagement with reality denying conspiracy theories" that's your right, but that doesn't change the fact that they report better mental health outcomes. Besides, the main purpose of the article was the illustrate ways to graft the positive outcomes from Orthodox Jewish communities and graft them onto secular communities, without transferring the religion.
Then the opening thesis is too broad, and should not make sweeping generalizations, if the only working example will be of Orthodox Judaism.
I provided an alternative example of a 'strong religious community', and *DID NOT* at any point imply *all* religions, as your use of 'any religious community' in-accurately characterizes my response. I'll assume it was an oversight and not a bad faith debate tactic.
Using the example I offered, I most certainly would accept that they score lower levels of anxiety, as many causes of current day anxiety are denied in the group I mentioned. Climate change - a hoax, the pandemic - a hoax. I am just not certain that out of context those lower anxiety scores represent truly adaptive behavior.
Well no, since the result of better reported comparative mental health is in large a feature of many faith-based communities, and not just Judaism. Orthodox Judaism is focused in on to more extensively deconstruct some of the systems that may be responsible for the disparities in well-being.
The reason why a broad characterization of your statement was given is two-fold. One that the post opens on religion in general, and hence your response was assumed to be on account of religion in general. Two being that the post does not mention accepting Christian nationalism to raise resilient children, which is already out of scope of the more narrow scope of Orthodox Judaism that the majority of the article is spent on, ergo the assumption that you might have been talking about religion at large.
There may certainly be a degree to which ownership to certain groups might alter ones predilection to evaluate their mental health, but the preponderance of this issue in terms of youth depression, loneliness, and suicide all decreasing while education scores are declining, suggests a net effect.
So the mischaracterization of my comment was a bad-faith tactic, that's all there is then.
Literally took the time to explain the origin of the characterizations and inferences from statements you made in your post. Will try to be better at reading minds in the future then.
So you mistakenly mischaracterized my initial comment?
My only take-away from a post like this is the ignorance it implies. This seems like a perspective that I could imagine of what secular professors at secular universities imagine when they discuss Trump voters in their coffee shops while creating their own conspiracy theories.
Not 100% sure what perspective you have on this post. What's your stance on climate change, and the recent pandemic?
I love this article! I shared it with my family and think it highlights some of the best things, we the Jewish community, have to offer.
While it looks all beautiful, the orthodox community had to combat something called “half-Shabbat”. This was where kids (usually in high school) were keeping all the elements of Shabbat but would sneak into their rooms and use their phones! I was in high school (2009-2011) when this was the trend. I’d have friends pick me up and see in their pockets the outline of a blackberry.
While I think the issue is mostly over (no Jewish leader has spoken about it in years) it was still an obstacle we, as a community had to face.
When I opened this, I thought I was going to read an article taken from the book Faith for Exiles by David Kinnaman. It is the same idea but from the Christian perspective. The ideas presented here mirror the ones found in this book. This article really does drive home the importance of real community in raising resilient children in this digital age.
https://a.co/d/3gumNdM
I don't want to be anyone but myself, even if I never get diamonds to comfort me.
——Anne of Green Gables(written by Lucy Maud Montgomery)
I'm fascinated by the intersection of digital media & faith and culture! It's shocking to me that non-Christians are the ones pointing out the dangers for kids. https://dearchristianparent.substack.com/p/atheist-says-christians-can-benefit
For those that aren't religious, the lessons from religious communities are still the same, it just won't be oriented around a religion. In deeply secular Toronto, where people just don't talk about religion and there's no "Thank Jesus this," or "Praise God!" that, like there is in the US, you only know people ascribe to a particular religion by some outward sign - a cross, a yarmulke, a kippah, a hijab. I suspect this will be an extra challenge for those secularists, particularly atheists, who would like that communities described without the need for a faith. That's something that's also up for exploration.
This is nothing short of revolutionary! God, help us to build these kinds of communities.
It is not religion per se but the transition from a childlike conscience (manipulated by society) to a mature conscience (self-observation) that produces lessons from mistakes (resiliency).
Dr. Haidt's talk on topic: https://youtu.be/s3SLTQR0mIE?si=seWEvke2AyBvD4Du
Thank you, solid and hope filled ideas for our culture.
Grace and Peace to you.
It seems to me the term "community" itself changed during the late 60's early 70's and rather than referring to an actual physical place with people, buildings and places of worship and the like it became more abstract to designate a group of people or profession. My favorite was"the narcotic addiction community".
The same thing happened to the word "share" which had always meant having a physical thing to share. No one would have said , "I have something to share with you " unless there was a physical thing to actually share. I remember the first time someone did this to me and I was confused when there was nothing there.
There was complete disregard for Korzybski , "the map is not the territory" , "the word is not the thing". Words matter,; going from concrete to abstract matters.