Why Am I Upset?

After writing the previous blog I realized I was upset and that is not good because it can miscommunicate my intentions. I just reread some research by a national group about the importance of building safe and loving communities and the dangers if we fail.

I know that church congregations are the very best places to develop good parenting skills and enter the lives of families to give them support, love and education. Here is some of that report.
Read it and see why I am upset that so few churches are developing intentional communities of health and growth.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities

New Scientific Findings Shed Light on Why Large Numbers of American Children Suffer from Emotional and Behavioral Problems

Thursday, September 9 (Dirksen SOB, Room G50, Washington, D.C., begins 9:00 a. m) Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona, U.S. Assistant Secretary of HHS Dr. Wade Horn. The Commission on Children at Risk, a panel of leading children's doctors, research scientists and youth service professionals, has issued a report to the nation about new strategies to reduce the currently high numbers of U.S. children who are suffering from emotional and behavioral problems such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit, conduct disorders, and thoughts of suicide. The Commission is basing its recommendations on recent scientific findings suggesting that children are biologically ``hardwired" for enduring attachments to other people and for moral and spiritual meaning. Meeting children's needs for enduring attachments and for moral and spiritual meaning is the best way to ensure their healthy development, according to the Commission's report. Dr. Kenneth L. Gladish, the National Executive Director, YMCA of the USA:

Â? children are hardwired for close connections to others and for moral and spiritual meaning.

The report challenges all of us to strengthen those groups in our society that promote this type of connectedness. Here at the Y, we have been working for children and families since 1851 and we intend to be a part of that solution." The Commission on Children at Risk, YMCA of the USA, Dartmouth Medical School and the Institute for American Values. Commission members include Steven Suomi of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, T. Berry Brazelton, Harvard Medical School, Allan Schore of UCLA Medical School, Alvin Poussaint of Harvard Medical School, Robert Coles of Harvard Medical School; James P. Comer of Yale Medical School; developmental psychobiologist Linda Spear of Binghamton University; the author and clinical psychologist Judith Wallerstein of the Center for the Family in Transition; and Thomas Insel, who was at Emory University at the time of the study, but has recently been appointed director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Despite a decade of unprecedented economic growth that resulted in fewer children living in poverty, large and growing numbers of American children and adolescents are suffering from mental health problems. Scholars at the National Research Council in 2002 estimated that at least one of every four adolescents in the U.S. is currently at serious risk of not achieving productive adulthood.

Twenty-one percent of U.S. children ages 9 to 17 have a diagnosable mental disorder or addiction; 8 percent of high school students suffer from clinical depression, and 20 percent of students report seriously having considered suicide in the past year.

By the 1980s, U.S. children as a group were reporting more anxiety than did children who were psychiatric patients in the 1950s, according to one study.

The Commission is calling upon all U.S. citizens to help strengthen what it calls authoritative communities as likely to be the best strategy for improving children's lives, in its report, Hardwired to Connect: The Case for Authoritative Communities.

Authoritative communities are groups of people who are committed to one another over time and who exhibit and are able to pass on what it means to be a good person. These groups provide the types of connectedness our children increasingly lack.