What Turning It Around
Causes and Cures for Today's
Epidemic Social Problems
Means to You

Your life, the lives of your loved ones and almost everyone are affected by social (people) problems in your community. We live our entire lives within the context of social problems in our country and our community. They become so much a part of our daily routine that we believe they cant be changed or even reduced.

Social problems (your personal problems, those of your family and those of your fellow citizens) can be changed, their impact on you and your family greatly reduced. Turning It Around shows you how this can be done.

Problems such as divorce, death of a loved one, loss of job, home invasions, road or office rage, muggings and rape devastate some people. For many, just the fear of these happening is a social problem itself. Fear is our most pervasive and destructive social problem.

What follows is the Preface to Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Todays Epidemic Social Problems. Feel free to copy and print it or to send it to anyone you feel could benefit from reading it. It's copyrighted by the author, so please keep the authors name and book information with it if you print it or send it to others.
Remember, it's to your benefit if as many people as possible know about this book. The program will only succeed if many of us work together, by emphasizing the beliefs and values that we have in common, rather than our differences.
This book will be a great personal help for you and your family and loved ones. You can help others by telling them about it. 

         Why We All Need This Book

You or someone you love could be the next victim of road rage, home invasion or an accidental killing in a drug war. Social problems like these and others you read on the front cover affect everyone. They affect our families, our homes, our relationships, even our personal well-being. Until this book, solutions to these problems seemed impossible. Most people have given up hope that they can ever be free of these threats.

Lets consider how this came about.

Survival and teaching of the young are the most important responsibilities of adults in any civilization, in any age. Primitive bands, tribes and clans in the prehistory years of modern humans had thousands of years to develop their skills of survival and their methods of teaching their young so that their way of life could be maintained, could thrive and flourish. In those days, everyone knew their social responsibilities. They were taught to every child. Social problems were minimized because everyone knew their role in guarding the welfare of the group.

Parents and other adults in modern mega societies have the same responsibilities. Teaching our young is no less important today because there are more of us around. Its as critical to our survival today as it was to our ancient ancestors who lived in caves. When educating the young is not done properly and thoroughly, social problems will result. Its simple. When people dont know what to do, theyre apt to make the wrong choices.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human population has grown so rapidly and lifestyles have changed so quickly that survival has become the dominant need. New ways of teaching our young were needed so that our values, our beliefs, our family institutions, the traditions of our way of life could be passed to the next generation. For many of us today, the need for teaching our young beyond knowledge and skills related to future job skills is fuzzy. There are no standards, no norms that we teach for all families.

We believe that we fulfill our primary responsibilities as parents and teachers when we teach our children a basic core of information and skills, plus what they will require to earn a living. To us, to earn a living is to survive. To a lesser extent, we teach them values and social skills, but most of this is not direct teaching. Children tend to acquire these incidentally, such as from television, friends and events they experience.

Children inherently know, though they are unable to express this, that they need more from adults than they receive. Whether they are consciously aware of this unknown, missing "other" or not, they experience stress and even anxiety knowing that they need something they dont know how to get. Children with needs they cant satisfy act out, misbehave.

A large majority of children accommodate themselves, over time, to become properly functioning adults in our communities. A small minority, unable to cope with an adult dominated world they cant understand and that cant teach them what they need to feel significant and worthy, strikes back.

This latter group form the core of our future social problems. Their behavior, often anti-social and intentionally so, affects the rest of us. We read about them in newspapers, watch stories about them on television, hear about them from neighbors, friends and work associates, and sometimes suffer direct attacks on our privacy by them. Most are in their teens, twenties or thirties.

By not fulfilling our roles of teaching our young children the knowledge and skills they require to live comfortably and securely as adults, we create the conditions for potential social problems.

Teaching of essential life skills has been a basic role of adults both through human history and in the larger world of animals. When it does not happen properly, problems result. Not surprisingly, those who are most unable to cope with their lives fill that vacuum with values, beliefs, skills and information that may not be in line with the norms of their communities.

Parents are not guilty because their children break laws. That denies a basic tenet of humanity, which is freedom of choice, even for children. Children make their own decisions. But they make decisions based on what they know and believe, which might not be what are socially acceptable norms. That is, what kids believe and what we would like them to believe often are not the same.

Parents have always tried their best to raise their children properly. But, through generations of repeated change in the basics of family life over the past few hundreds of years, children are no longer taught those skills of parenting and of coping with lifes thrills and terrors, its happiness and traumas by their parents. Todays parents, themselves unable to cope with the downturns of life in modern times, have no resources or knowledge base from which to teach their children. They were not taught these by their own parents.

While debate rages on between parents and school systems about who should teach what to children, both have lost track of what kids need to know to be good and productive adult citizens of their community. We want to teach them facts and skills. Kids need concepts to understand the world they are growing into. Computerized machines function on facts. People have a need to understand their world, to make sense of what is happening around them. If their world doesnt make sense to them, then some will make some dreadful mistakes.

When people dont understand the world around them, they may develop psychological problems. When young people feel lost in their world, they have a greater potential for problems because they do not have other life structures such as jobs, position in social clubs and family leadership roles to hold onto. Young people are in a constant learning mode throughout every day. They have bosses wherever they go, except within their peer groups. Even then they choose leaders. When they dont feel secure in their world, they tend to band together with others in similar circumstances. The door to trouble is wide open. Most adults cant recognize this and wouldnt know what to do about it if they did.

Kids need to know how to cope with situations that happen in the lives of most adults, at one time or another. Job loss, death of a loved one, someone close to them contracting a serious disease are examples. When they see their own parents unable to cope in crisis situations, such as divorce, they become confused, stressed, anxious.

For most of them, marriage of their parents is how they came into existence. When that crashes around them, it affects their concept and value of their own being. It could be months or years later before that hidden anxiety plays itself out in their lives. By that time, they could become social problems along with others like them in their home communities.

As parents, we teach children what we believe they need to know. The truth is that most of us dont know what they really need. We tend to teach our kids what our parents taught us. If our parents didnt teach us enough, we dont know enough to teach our own kids.

Most children manage to pick up the basics of what they need for their lives, from various sources, as they grow. Their parents consider themselves successful. Some children do not. The rest of us consider the parents of these kids to be failures. The difference may not be the parents themselves, but the coincidence of what the kids managed to learn along the way.

If we, as a society, knew what children really need and had programs for parents and children to provide for these needs, there would be no reason for failures. No need for anti-social behaviour on a massive scale. No need for social problems we believe are beyond our ability to solve.

The purpose of this book is to help you learn what you need to know, to close the knowledge gap. Only when you know will you be able to begin the process of correcting the problems.

Only when enough of us understand can we make a difference.

With your support, we can make a difference in the world. We can do something no generation in history has ever accomplished. 

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful
    committed citizens can change the world;          indeed it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead (1901-1978),
  American Anthropologist



 

 

 

 

Turning It Around Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems