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Contributing factors clearly include sloth due to the uncontrolled experiment with sticking kids in front of tablets or smartphones for hours every day to tranquilize them for our convenience; ditto prescribing massive quantities of mind-altering drugs to mask symptoms rather than treat causes in schoolchildren; a flood of unhealthy processed food. Ah, at last. A chance to blame capitalism, “the system” or some such bogeyman.

Except even the increasing tendency to eat processed food, and feed it to our kids, is related to the recent disintegration of family life that is the main problem here.

Over a decade ago I was horrified to read in the National Post that “Family mealtimes are becoming so rare … that one in four British homes does not have a dinner table…” And British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, lamenting the inability of “intelligent and decent” students to grasp that eating in the street showed lack of restraint and, not coincidentally, accounted for most litter, wrote in 2003 “a large proportion of young Britons never eat in the company of others, except possibly in feral packs. Many of my patients … have never, in their entire lives, eaten round a table at home with other members of the family … ” Instead they feed wantonly, even “furtively,” like (my analogy not his) the savage hero in One Million Years BC. Which isn’t progress.

The collapsed dining table matters enormously because children learn self-control and solidity of character in the family and, within it, at mealtimes. Or don’t. The problem is not lack of self-esteem, too much of which consumed raw turns kids into brats. It’s lack of justified self-esteem, which can only come from self-control. Without it life is mentally and physically unhealthy. And parents without it spell trouble for children.

I may be attacked for lacking compassion for persons of size, single parents, the differently abled etc. But let me be blunt: to ignore a problem because somebody else has it is not compassionate. It’s callous and selfish. And all family structures are not equally valid any more than all body shapes are.

If my explanation strikes you as reactionary tripe, how do you account for the mass of unhappy flesh under which Britannia now groans?

National Post