When Hell Happened

I stare at the ER room monitor and want to cry.

The security camera shows a boy, not yet a teenager, sleeping on a mattress on the floor in one of our secured “psych” rooms. He was brought in by the police hours ago, after yet another stormy outburst at home. His mother declared he was “too much for her to handle” and he needed to “go somewhere to get help.” To protest his ER visit, he had kicked, thrown, banged, wrenched and tried to destroy whatever he could get his hands on.

Hence, the sparse accommodations in his room now.

A familiar lump swells in my throat and a vague throbbing behind my eyes threatens to unleash a surge of tears. So I squeeze my eyes tightly shut and take a really big breath. This is not why I became a nurse. He is not the patient I had imagined while studying nursing care decades ago.

7.4% of children aged 3-17 years (approximately 4.5 million) have a diagnosed behavior problem.     CDC.gov

Not in My Neighborhood

Worse yet, this solitaire sleeping boy is only the tip of the iceberg. He is, in fact, the sixth pre-teener to occupy our psych rooms in my last eight days of work. Two were suicidal. One was homicidal. Three were “behaviors.”

Yes, here in rural Minnesota. Not in some gang-infested inner-city neighborhood, but right here amid the snow-covered cornfields. In MY neighborhood. Week after week, month after month, the statistics in the ER logbook grow, like an epidemic virus of juvenile chaos and despair. The drip, drip, drip of adolescent psych patients grows faster and louder until I find myself fighting the urge to stand in the middle of the ER and scream:

“What the hell happened????”

Baby-boomers, meet your offspring. That young boy—and millions like him—are the consequences of our actions.

Fruits of Our Labor

7.1% of children aged 3-17 years (approximately 4.4 million) have diagnosed anxiety.      CDC.gov

If the Baby Boomer Generation eagerly takes credit for major, world-changing accomplishments like the artificial heart, the worldwide web and cellphones, then we must acknowledge our ultimate failure. Just as every generation before us, we were once the primary guardian of the Family unit.

As a generation, we failed to protect it.

“Wait!” You argue, “That tweener in your psych room isn’t mine! I raised my children decades ago!”

Really? Our hands are clean and we had nothing to do with that young boy? Let’s consider our plea of innocence.

For me, childhood was a lot less complicated than it is today. I’m guessing it was the same for you, too. Overall, we probably worked harder and had fewer gizmos to distract us, but for the most part, life was good. At age 10, I’m sure “suicide” was not in my vocabulary or even an inkling in my mind.

A small study by the National Institutes of Health found that about a third of preteens suffer from suicidal ideation…it seems obvious that something in our culture is adversely affecting them.     Psychcentral.com

For one thing, life was safer. It came with a rule book. Our parents – Mom and Dad – were stern, totalitarian and prone to saying “No” a lot. For the most part we accepted their unreasonable rules, their curfews and their abolitions because they were the parents and we were the kids and that was the way life worked. When we didn’t follow their dictates, we knew we were stepping outside of the boundaries and consequences would follow.

In my family, consequences meant revoked privileges, a fair amount of yelling, and an occasional flyswatter or switch to our fannies. Sometimes the switch punishment was delayed by a brief escape through the farmyard, but our parents cared enough to chase us down and deliver on their promise.

Good heavens above, how Mom could run.

Then All Hell Broke Loose

Then came the ‘60s and ‘70s, and as a generation, we revolted. We decided all authority was bad. Out with oppressive edicts. Our psychedelic dreams debunked the idea of Right and Wrong. Love—whatever the warm, fuzzy word meant to you—was the answer to every question and the solution to every problem. We took that ol’ parochial rule book and tossed it out the window.

Literally. In 1962 the Supreme Court banned prayer from our public schools. A year later it banished the Bible, too. No more infringement to our First Amendment rights. No more archaic references to the authority of a God of “shalt not’s.” Heaven became whatever we wanted it to be. Hell became a myth.

“Hell no, we won’t go.”

While I seriously doubt that the baby-boomers were the first generation to protest wars, military drafts and political establishments, we were the first to have the luxury of venting our angst on nationwide evening TV news. Cops became “pigs” during prime-time coverage of the 1968 National Democratic Convention and it became a buzzword overnight. To be antiestablishmentarians was hip and cool, even if we couldn’t spell it.

Our free-wheeling, free-speech rights celebrated another marvelous milestone on November 1, 1968, with the release of the first R-rated movie. The social restraint floodgates shattered. Pop culture exploded with profanity, sex and drugs. As a generation, we thought we had won something.

Based on the 2017 Youth Risk Behaviors Survey, 7.4 percent of youth in grades 9-12 reported that they had made at least one suicide attempt in the past 12 months.     American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

We were liberated from the restraints that had oppressed our parents and even stodgier grandparents. Wishing the same for our family structure, we mainstreamed “free love” and instituted divorce and co-habitation as liberating alternatives to the shackles of marriage.

We wanted our children to think of us as “friends”, even as Dads disappeared out the doors of homes across America. We encouraged our children to be free-thinkers, and we replaced our parents’ punishments with tolerance and understanding. In fact, how could we punish them for their wrong doings when 1) we no longer viewed their doings as wrong, and 2) we had relished doing the same things?

Not to mention that it made parenting a lot easier. Having your children scream, protest and yell “I hate you!” is so exhausting. And who wants to run after them through the farmyard with a swatter?

Kids were just being kids, we chuckled. They’ll grow up. They’ll do just fine. With the rule book trampled in the dust, we sent our children out into the world to raise their own offspring.

“I Do”…Not Know

With marriage only one option, many of the millennials decided to forego commitment altogether. Dads took a permanent holiday. “Family” became a hazy term defining anything. More single-parented headed households exist today than any other time in recent history—three times more than in 1960. Most of those families are headed by a single mom. In fact, 57% of millennial moms are unmarried moms as of 2017. The cost is steep—about 40 percent of them live in poverty.

No God. No family structures. No rules. Once you erase the big boundaries, it’s only a matter of time before all boundaries disintegrate. Schedules, like bedtime, mealtime, homework time, TV and Gameboy time—vanished. Personal privacy boundaries, as evident on the ocean of social media—non-existent. The simple boundary of personal space and pride in oneself—stamped out with tattoos, piercings and ragged t-shirts depicting ghoulish monsters.

In many cases, these confused moms returned to their parents for help. As of 2017, 2.5 million grandparents found themselves raising their grandchildren. Perhaps that was intended to be a second chance to get it right.

It’s not working out that way. One night a couple of years ago, I sat in the ER beside a mobile crisis counselor as she typed up the summary of her visit with a 9-year old determined to kill himself out of frustration and hopelessness. The counselor said a new pattern is developing—even more concerning than what the mental health system currently muddles through daily.

She said, “We saw a generation of parents who couldn’t raise their kids. So they brought them to Grandma. Now those kids are having kids of their own and can’t raise them. But this Mom can’t send them to Grandma, because Grandma didn’t raise her own. And Great-grandma is tired.”

So, more and more of these confused children become part of the medical and mental health merry-go-round.

…the rate of major depression for adolescents (ages 12–17) has risen 63 percent since 2013—47 percent for boys and 65 percent for girls.    Newport Academy, 2018

Between Heaven and Hell

Back in our little ER, the scantily-dressed, obese Mom of the troubled boy walks past the nurses’ station, clutching a bag of fast food in one hand and her cellphone—in mid-chat—in the other hand. My first inclination is to judge her as a stupid parent with no clue how to raise a child. I stop mid-condemnation. With the rule books destroyed and the boundaries erased, how was she ever supposed to learn the art of parenting?

In the Bible, the same one rejected by our nation, God warned us that the sins of the father would plague their children and children’s children. Some called it nonsense and voodoo. But really, God simply stated human nature. What we do has consequences, like it or not.

We tried to live without reason. In the end, we created a generation trying to cope in a world without signposts or directions. Is all lost? I grab a warm blanket and juice box for the young patient and head down the hall, praying it is not.