Adults creating a world unacceptable for many children who become furries or self-harm

Social media can create pressures on kids. It needs to be controlled by parents and the government and kids need to use it to good effect and not bad. Image: BUPA.

I've written two articles about children adopting the identity of animals, specifically cats. They call themselves furries. There is a high-profile case currently in a school in Melbourne, Australia and several months ago I wrote about a school in Michigan, USA where the kids had decided to be cats and there was a viral story about the teachers providing cat litter trays for the furries. The school denied it but the press was all over it as it created an interesting story.

Kids identify as furries to escape the world created by their parents. Image in the public domain

But the underlying story is far more important. I see children as providing a window on the kind of society that the adults are creating. The distorted behaviour in children is a symptom of a world that they find unacceptable and which has been created by their parents. And the truth is that the parents don't like it either. But is out of control.

It seems that the grown-ups have lost control of their world, their creation. And it is a human world. Everything below adult humans have to suffer the world created by the grown-ups. That includes animals and the kids. In this regard they are in the same bracket; a world imposed upon them by out-of-control adults.

It isn't just kids who want to identify as animals - because they think that being an animal will distance themselves from the human world which they don't like - it is kids who are self-harming. There are some astonishingly distressing figures in the UK about self-harming schoolkids. And what about eating disorders in children? That mental health issue is growing, worryingly.

It took me about a minute to find an article from UCL about high levels of serious mental health difficulties among 17-year-olds in the UK. A survey found that 24% of young people report self-harming and 7% report self-harming with suicidal intent by age of 17. This is an expression of a rejection of the world that their parents have created for them.

It is a scream to the world from the kids that enough is enough. They don't like what they see. They are embarking on a life which stretches out before them and which, to them, looks uncomfortable and which is unacceptable to a substantial percentage of them.

This out-of-control adult human behaviour causing an instinctive out-of-control response in kids is resulting in the destruction of the planet through global warming caused by greed and the lack of self-discipline. 

There is also an element of bad parenting in the story. Today, Saturday, August 27, 2022, in The Times newspaper, there is a headline "Rude pupils driving out teachers, says strict head". The man, Barry Smith, 54, nicknamed person's strictest head teacher has said that children's habitual rude and aggressive behaviour was causing teachers to lead the profession in droves.

Stupid adult human behavior has caused the Covid pandemic which started in China in the wet markets where wild animals were slaughtered indiscriminately without regulation resulting transmission of a zoonotic disease from wild animals to person. The Covid pandemic was nature's way of telling the grown-ups that enough is enough. You can't go on abusing nature and animals that live within nature without consequences, dire consequences.

And the kids see this and they hate it. And the isolation caused by the Covid pandemic exacerbated the mental health issues. And then there was mismanagement of Covid. I don't mean the time during the pandemic in terms of protecting people. I mean the amount of money that was printed in order to jack up the economies of countries. This is called quantitative easing. But it means printing money which causes inflation.

And then after the pandemic we have rampant inflation across the globe in many countries because of financial mismanagement by governments. They borrowed trillions of dollars and gave it to people for doing nothing while on furlough. This has left countries in severe debt. Rising inflation and interest rates on that debt has created an enormous national burden. In the UK the government is paying over a hundred billion pounds annually to service their £400 billion debt acquired during the Covid pandemic.

This is going to destroy welfare services. The kids see this. They might not understand the full economics of it they see a future which is going to be far less enjoyable than it was for their parents. 

And then we have Putin and his invasion of Ukraine which has caused massive inflation as well because he's cut off gas and oil supplies to the West. This pushes up prices dramatically. This is a man hellbent on a legacy of expanding Russia as if he was Stalin expanding the USSR. It's an illegal war and its causing masses of damage to property and people. Tens of thousands have been killed both civilians, Russian soldiers and Ukrainian soldiers. For what? To satisfy the pipedream of a tyrant.

The kids see this. They see the death and destruction. They see the killing of animals. I reported 300,000 animals killed in Ukraine by Putin's forces over the past six months of the war. Innocent victims. Sometimes specifically targeted. Utterly disgusting and utterly unacceptable to both adults and kids.

And the schoolchildren will have to find jobs in the future. They will have to work and find a property to live in and pay their outgoings. They don't see a way of affording a property because house prices have risen in the UK because of mass immigration. I'm not against immigration but it needs to be controlled. Illegal immigration across the British Channel from France has reached utterly unacceptable proportions but these people are coming from places like Albania or Syria and so on.

I don't blame these people. I would be one of them if I lived in those countries. These are mismanaged countries. They want to go somewhere where life is better. You can't blame them. But once again it is the adults, the grown-ups who screwed up in managing countries causing mass emigration from those countries and mass immigration into northern European countries which causes enormous amount of pressure on the infrastructure and the resident peoples of those countries.

And also, in The Times newspaper of August 27, 2002, there is a story about "Record numbers flee failing Tunisia for Europe's shores". Tunisia's economy is crumbling which is prompting record numbers of their citizens to attempt to sail to Europe. People smugglers are reporting children and white-collar workers as well as female fans of émigré influences risking deadly boat trips across the Mediterranean, in the words of the Times journalist Tom Kington. There's an exodus from Tunisia. It is a country which is badly managed due to a range of problems including high levels of corruption.

The same issues are occurring in America where there is a huge immigration problem from Mexico. We see pictures of columns of people in their many thousands marching from Central America to Mexico up into Arizona over the Mexico/American border. The same problem as in Europe. But these people are leaving those countries for a better life. You can't blame them. But it signals mismanagement of countries. The solution is to improve these countries.

This all feeds into a negative impression of the future. And the future is for children. Many children don't see a great future. This causes stress. The stress is expressed in desire to be something or somebody other than that they are, which means identifying as a cat or dog. And it means self-harming as a means to control their lives.

The grown-ups need to reflect on what they are creating for their children. And when a country borrows billions of pounds or dollars, they are mortgaging their country's future. It is the children who will have to pay it back. It is the children who are burdened by this debt. It is short-termism by adults which is causing a deteriorating future for their children. It is time for them to take stock of this and change their ways.