As we all pitched in to help flood victims of Iowa, were we adding another problem to Iowa’s list? We sent bottled water, water in bottles that it is unlikely even 20% of will be recycled. Okay, I know it’s a “time of trouble” decision that will be followed by a “time of trouble” response. Those bottles won’t get recycled because there are more important things to think about. I get it, but I sure wish we could we have helped without “eco-sinning”.

“Learned helplessness” is a is a psychological condition in which a person  learns to believe that he/she is helpless in a particular situation. They believe that they have no control over their situation and that whatever they do is futile. As a result, the person will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant, harmful or damaging situation, even when it they actually have the power to change their circumstances.  Martin Seligman was a psychologist who conducted a famous experiment that involved placing animals in a situation where they could not escape electrical shock.  The animals initially reacted strongly, and tried to escape.  Eventually, though, they gave up.

When I realized my indifference to the rising gas prices, I immediately thought of Seligman’s study.  Then I thought about all the students that I have experienced over the years in my job as a school psychologist.  We look at these students who are dropping out, truant, failing and ask, “Why don’t they care?”  Isn’t it possible that it is not apathy that we are dealing with, but learned helplessness?  If students believe that they are powerless to change their life circumstances, as many of our children who live in poverty do, they become passive.  They look at their parents, relatives, etc. and give up trying.  I once had a 4th grade student that I was counseling tell me that his primary goal every day was “to not get shot & killed.”

What’s my point?  In attempting to reach the truants and dropouts of our world, I believe that we must take into consideration the mindset that we are dealing with.  What we interpret as apathy and indifference may very well be learned helplessness.  There is a very big difference between someone who doesn’t care and someone who has given up hope.  It is my opinion that if we are going to make a lasting impact on these students, we must work together to get them to believe that there is hope - we have to get them to believe in their potential, to help them see that there is a real chance for something better than what they’ve experienced.  That can’t happen without developing relationships with these children and their parents - and that takes time & effort.  Never underestimate the impact that one person can have on another person.  Maybe we can’t change gas prices, but couldn’t we attempt to help just one student who has given up hope to believe that there is more to life than not getting shot?

Obviously the city does not care about the parking lot which they share as it looks like a war zone, with all the pot holes.

Why close two successful businesses, and probably the audio store on the North West corner of Main and Auburn, when space is available across the street?

 I recently read an article entitled “The Early Catastrophe” by Betty Hart & Tod Risely.  Although the article was written to show the effects of poverty on early childhood (birth - 3 years) language development, toward the end of the article, the authors also examine the psychological effects of poverty on youngsters.  Over two and a half years, the researchers compared the language differences in “professional,” “working class” and “welfare” families.  Besides the predictable differences noted in language development, what startled me was the information reported near the end of the article.

The authors that “the children’s language experience did not differ just in terms of the number and quantity of words heard….”  They go on to report that the average child in a professional family experiences a 6 to 1 ratio of “encouraging” comments to “discouraging” comments per hour.  The average child in a working class family experiences a 2 to 1 ratio of encouraging to discouraging comments per hour.  The average child in a family who lives in poverty hears 11 discouraging comments to 5 encouraging comments per hour - this is a greater than 2 to 1 ratio of discouraging comments to encouraging comments!

Extrapolated over the first 4 years of life, the average child in a professional family would have accumulated 560,000 more instances of encouragement than discouragement.  Compare that to the average child who lives in poverty, who must endure 125,000 more discouraging comments than encouraging comments.  One can begin to understand why, by the time these children who live in poverty enter kindergarten, many of them have deeply ingrained feelings of inadequacy.  It should not come as a surprise to anyone, then, that these children are at increased risk for academic, social, and behavioral difficulties from the first day they set foot in a school.

The effects of our early childhood experiences are far reaching.  Rockford’s problems are not unique.  In fact, you can find problems like the ones Rockford is facing (crime, truancy, unemployment) anywhere, provided there are enough people living in poverty.  Writing tickets for truants and building bigger jails are not going to effect the kind of change that I know our mayor and leaders want - but these problems are so complex, and the solutions even more complicated.  These solutions must begin within the family unit.  But how can we reverse the kind of early damage that this study (http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring2003/catastrophe.html) reveals?

 Jan Herbert