Why is it so hard for our kids to just LIVE these days?

[hunter]

28. "Coddled by the school system???!!!" WTF?

The only reason I survived high school, quite literally, is that I quit high school, as in "fuck that place, I'm not going back."

Some of my friends and classmates were not so lucky. They did not survive.

My nickname in middle and high school was "queerbait" and I was beaten bloody by classmates more times than I care to recall, and given bad advice by supposedly responsible adults that all my problems would go away if I'd just "be a man."

As a skinny squeaky highly reactive autistic spectrum kid of indeterminate sexuality, "being a man" by the social norms of the times wasn't in the cards, not even by faking it.

I was good at taking tests. That got me out of high school and into college. I was still a misfit in college but the physical abuse stopped. It took me nine years to graduate.

I've never known the optimism you speak of. I am a highly fractured human being.

My own children and their classmates, attending "woke" public schools where bullying by students or staff was not tolerated, thankfully missed out on those "good old days" and this has given them the strength to deal with a complex world that I could not have imagined at their ages.