Treating Symptoms

Driving around in the car listening to the radio the other day, I heard back-to-back public service announcements. 

The first was the sad story of the kid sitting in the corner of the playground without enough energy to play because he was hungry. It told me that one out of six kids in America is hungry and there is no reason for it. Donations would presumably help get food to the kid and solve the problem.

Someone at the station may not have been paying attention because the second PSA had the same theme, except this time it said that one out of five kids in America is hungry. I didn’t pay close enough attention to tell if this was a solicitation from the same charitable organization. I was too busy thinking about the underlying messages.

These PSAs actually led me to wonder about two questions. First, where did those seemingly iffy statistics come from? With about 74 million children in America, the difference between one in five and one in six is about 2.5 million kids. Are they hungry or not? But that’s just nitpicking.

The more important question is why are we only treating the symptoms? Hungry kids on the playground are the result of kids not being fed at home. Why are around 30 million families not feeding their kids? This is not a question anyone seems interested in answering – not these organizations and not the government. We just hear lamentations about how unfair it is that the food is not distributed more justly.

It’s hard to believe, especially at a time of full employment and help-wanted signs up everywhere, that all those families have just fallen on hard times. There must be a sizable percentage where people just plain didn’t acknowledge that it was an important enough consideration to be able to feed their kids before having them. In some cases she may have thought about how cute babies are and how having one would make her happier. In other cases he may have thought how cute she was and how getting her into bed would make him happier. When the consequences of those behaviors come calling, he may or may not even stick around and she can always look to the government to help bail her out.

Meanwhile the government has programs to feed the family while those other programs from the PSAs try to find ways to move the food around so the kid gets a good breakfast or a sandwich for lunch. Such systems are treating the kids almost as hostages. They are hungry and need to eat, so no one addresses the underlying issue of parental responsibility! Over and over we treat the symptoms and never dig any deeper to solve the core problem.

What’s worse is that by treating the symptoms, nothing was being done to discourage the same behavior by this generation or to discourage the same in the next. Whenever society decides to shelter people from consequences of their actions, they have less motivation to change, and others that observe this dynamic are less inclined to view those same decisions as problematic.  Of course, society can't let the kids go hungry and to confront irresponsible parents is branded as lacking compassion. Later everyone sits around wringing hands and wondering why the War on Poverty has not reduced the poverty rate after 50+ years in operation; but few understand why we will probably be hearing the same statistics 50 years from now unless something changes.

What's a Parent To Do?

At first many people thought this was so unbelievable that it must be fake news, but I found it in the Chicago Tribune, and other reputable sources.  “Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants Chicago public high school students to show they have a plan for what's next before they can get a diploma.”  This adds a requirement for graduation, to become effective for the class of 2020 if approved by the school board.

His justification is to set expectations that the kids actually have a plan.  The article quoted Mayor Emanuel, "Just like you do with your children, college, post-high school, that is what's expected. If you change expectations, it's not hard for kids to adapt."  So apparently the city is taking over the job of the parents whose kids attend Chicago public schools (CPS).

If it is approved, Chicago will be the “first large urban school district to require students to develop a plan for their lives after high school.”  I guess there will be no more backpacking around Europe looking for your head that was popular among some in the generation of these kids’ grandparents.

But the idea of the city and the schools taking over parental responsibility is not new to Chicago.  An earlier article from the Tribune explains, “Starting this fall [2014], all Chicago Public Schools students will be able to get free breakfast and lunch at school.”  They had so much trouble with fraud in their reduced and free lunch programs that it became easier just to feed everyone.  For the past three years the parents need only provide one meal a day for their own children.

But it doesn’t stop there.  From the CPS website:  “Since 1998, Chicago Public Schools has required students to complete 40 service-learning hours in order to graduate.”  Since then parents don’t have to worry about instilling compassionate values or setting an example.  (In this case, the question always is whether required service makes people more generous.  We don’t celebrate those doing court-ordered community service as selfless volunteering.)

How are all these initiatives working out for the city?  From a report in September 2016 – “The latest five-year graduation rate is 73.5 percent, CPS said. The rate has been rising steadily over the past five years, according to district figures, and in 2014-15 was 69.9 percent.”  Note that even with an extra year to graduate more than one-quarter fail to do so.  Compare that to the national high school graduation rate in four years of 83.2 percent.

So it’s not fake news, just sad news.  And they are working on the wrong things.  In their book The Why Axis, authors Gneezy and List, who were working at the University of Chicago, report on various studies of motivation and incentives.  One was to try different incentive programs with students, parents and teachers in Chicago Heights public schools.  (It is not a pure comparison.  They wanted to study the CPS, but the teachers' union would not approve.)  They found that when the incentives were properly designed, minority students in this system performed just as well as their suburban counterparts in "rich, white neighborhoods."

Maybe with all that extra time on their hands the parents should take the school system to task, demand more and better education with less city and school board interference in their responsibilities.  Of course, giving up responsibilities to someone else is the easy way out – until we discover that it also means giving up control or freedom to choose.

Burning Your Way to the Top

Personally I am skeptical of motivational speakers for the same reason I am skeptical of sellers of energy bracelets or any other magical solution.  In general, they get people all fired up about success in their personal or business lives and then send them back to the same old routine with the same old co-workers or family, who are not fired up.  Soon the enthusiasm wears off.  I have seen this over and over.

When the entire team is sent to one of these events to climb rope ladders and swing from trees, for example, forced to work together to solve some artificial and usually physical problem, they experience the same sort of half-life of enthusiasm.  They return to work to face the same business problems that are totally unrelated, except by a major stretch of the imagination, to those artificial problems encountered during the “field trip.”  With these more typical problems in more familiar surroundings and no one accountable for continued reinforcement, the spirit from the outdoor exercise quickly wanes. 

These types of events usually rely heavily on hype and endorsements from selected feedback forms filled out immediately afterward when the feelings are still fresh.

It didn’t surprise me at all then when I saw the headline back in June:  “More than 30 burned during famous motivational speaker's hot coal walk.”  Ambulances took five of the participants who were more seriously burned to Parkland Hospital Burn Center in Dallas.  “Members of Dallas Fire-Rescue also asked that a Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) bus be used as a staging-area for between 30 and 40 people who were less seriously hurt.”

The theory is that doing what you think is impossible, that is, walking across a bed of hot coals, leads you to face other challenges that seem impossible or, as they put it, to “conquer the other fires of your life with ease."  The organization’s statement says that there were only a few minor injuries out of 7,000 firewalkers.

Of course anyone who thinks walking across hot coals is impossible needs to do just a little research. This site tells about the history and science of fire walking.  Fire walking is really “no more impossible than putting your hand in a hot oven without getting burned.  It has to do with the heat capacity of the coals and the temporary insulation provided by the soles of the feet especially if the soles of the feet are wet from sweat, which they may be from the nervous energy of facing such a challenge.  “Thus, even if the coals are very hot (1,000 to 1,200 degrees), a person with ‘normal’ soles won't get burned as long as he or she doesn't take too long to walk across the coals and as long as the coals used do not have a very high heat capacity.”

“Nevertheless, some people do get burned walking across hot coals, not because they lack faith or willpower, but because the coals are too hot or have a relatively high heat capacity, or because the firewalker's soles are thin or he doesn't move quickly enough.”  In other words, the motivation is about getting moving and keeping moving, not about whether or not you get burned.

But doing a little research is critical thinking, and most people these days tend to skip it.  So the practice continues with people spending their own time and hard-earned dollars ($4995) to get this (often temporary) psychological boost.  This speaker, just one of many confidence builders available, has over 2.8 million followers on Twitter.  But wait!  If this stuff works, why do you need to be a follower?  I guess the effect really is temporary and you need a booster shot for continuing to do what you think is impossible.  Or perhaps followers must check to see if the guru has come up with another secret or magic formula since you last attended, a secret that you can’t miss out on for fear of losing your edge!

These rah-rah gatherings might very well work for some people, probably the few that stick with it.  But I believe long-term motivation comes not from a seminar, but from within.  So one week of your time plus $5000 and the possibility of burned feet seems like a big investment for a questionable reward.  Needless to say, I’m still skeptical.