Pride Belongs in (Pre)School

@McKinley McPheeters posted:

Wow, you've prompted a lot of thoughts for me, @Frank Sterle Jr.! Do curricula of that nature exist? If not, when do we start creating it?! That's a huge gap that I've never considered. And yes, absolutely including information about neurodiversity (and disability, honestly). I've just learned in the last two years or so that I am autistic and it has changed my life for the better in so many ways. I'd love to see students taught the information I've only discovered more recently, and in ways that challenge ableism rather than perpetuate it.

From my knowledge, such child development/rearing science curriculum is offered to high school students in some northeastern U.S. states. I believe it's not offered in similar full form here in Canada, however, where what I see as low/no-chance-of-offending-parents half measures are offered high school students as elective courses.

Among other aspects of the neuro-diverse human reality, the curriculum I’d like to have implemented, or at least tried, would explain to students how people with ASD (including those with higher and lower functioning autism) are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent — and mistreated accordingly — when in fact such behavior is really not a choice. Maybe as a result, students with ASD feel compelled to “camouflage,” a term used to describe their attempts at appearing to naturally fit in, which is known to cause their already high anxiety and/or depression levels to worsen. And, of course, this exacerbation also applies to the ASD rate of suicide.

My own experience has revealed that notable adverse childhood experience trauma resulting from a highly sensitive and low self-confidence existence, especially when its effect is amplified by an accompanying autism spectrum disorder, can easily lead to substance abuse. This, of course, can also lead to an adulthood of various forms of hazardous self-medicating. As a highly sensitive child, teenager and adult with ASD compounded by a high ACE score — what I consider to be a perfect-storm condition with which I greatly struggled yet of which I was not aware until I was a half-century old — I largely learned this for myself throughout my adult life. Such a perfect-storm condition can accentuate a drug-induced euphoria and, conversely, the come-down effect or return to one’s burdensome reality thus making the substance (ab)use more addictive.

Though by luck I’ve not been personally affected by the opiate addiction/overdose crisis (in B.C.), I have suffered enough unrelenting hyper-anxiety to have known and enjoyed many times the mental release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC, and on some occasions combined with a third substance.

Wow, you've prompted a lot of thoughts for me, @Frank Sterle Jr.! Do curricula of that nature exist? If not, when do we start creating it?! That's a huge gap that I've never considered. And yes, absolutely including information about neurodiversity (and disability, honestly). I've just learned in the last two years or so that I am autistic and it has changed my life for the better in so many ways. I'd love to see students taught the information I've only discovered more recently, and in ways that challenge ableism rather than perpetuate it.

When I asked a BC Teachers’ Federation official over the phone whether there is any childrearing or child-development science curriculum taught in any of B.C.’s school districts, he immediately replied there is not. When I asked the reason for its absence and whether it may be due to the subject matter being too controversial, he replied with a simple “Yes”.

This strongly suggests there are philosophical thus political obstacles to teaching students such crucial life skills as nourishingly parenting one’s children. To me, it's difficult to imagine that teaching parenting curriculum would be considered more controversial than, say, teaching students Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) curriculum, beginning in Kindergarten, as is currently taught in B.C. public schools.

By not teaching child-development science to high school students, is it not as though societally we’re implying that anyone can comfortably enough go forth with unconditionally bearing children with whatever minute amount, if any at all, of such vital knowledge they happen to have acquired over time? I feel it is.

A psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future should be all children’s foremost human right—especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter—and therefore basic child development science and rearing should be learned long before the average person has their first child.

I would also like to see child-development science curriculum implemented for secondary high school students, and it would also include neurodiversity, albeit not overly complicated. It would be mandatory course material, however, and considerably more detailed than what's already covered by home economics, etcetera, curriculum: e.g. diaper changing, baby feeding and so forth. I don't think the latter is anywhere near sufficient (at least not how I experienced it) when it comes to the proper development of a child’s mind.

For one thing, the curriculum could/would make available to students potentially valuable/useful knowledge about their own psyches and why they are the way they are. And besides their own nature, students can also learn about the natures of their peers, which might foster greater tolerance for atypical personalities. If nothing else, the curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood.