My daily lead-ball-and-chain existence consists of a formidable perfect-storm-like combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, the ACE trauma in large part being due to my ASD and high sensitivity.

Ergo, it would be very helpful to people like me to have books written about such or similar conditions involving a coexistence of ACE trauma and/or ASD and/or high sensitivity, the latter which seems to have a couple characteristics similar to ASD traits.

While self-help books are informative and useful to me in other ways, they nevertheless typically fail to mention any of the three abovementioned cerebral conditions, let alone the potential obstacles they may or likely will pose to readers like me benefiting from the book’s information/instruction.

The Autistic Brain, for example, fails to even once mention the real potential for additional challenges created by a reader’s ASD coexisting with thus exacerbated by high sensitivity and/or ACE trauma.

As it were, I also read a book on adverse childhood experience trauma, Childhood Disrupted, that totally fails to even once mention high sensitivity and/or autism spectrum disorder. That was followed by The Highly Sensitive Man, with no mention whatsoever of autism spectrum disorder or adverse childhood experience trauma.

I therefore don't know whether my additional, coexisting conditions will render the information and/or assigned exercises from such not-cheap books useless, or close to it, in my efforts to live much less miserably. I wonder whether I, when reading such self-help books, should try considering/consuming their content as might a neurotypical or non-ASD person?

While many/most people in my shoes would work with the books nonetheless, I cannot; I simply need to know if I'm wasting my time and, most importantly, mental efforts.

The way I see it: ACE abuse thus trauma is often inflicted upon ASD and/or highly sensitive children and teens by their normal or ‘neurotypical’ peers — thus resulting in immense and even debilitating self-hatred and shame — so why not at least acknowledge it in some meaningful, constructive way?

Without the y. It's a guy without the least bit of concern for a child's wellbeing.

Back in the day, we'd refer to such a person as a goof.

Problematically, the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset basically follows: ‘Why should I care about others' children’s troubles and turmoil — my family and I are alright?’ or ‘What is in it for me, the taxpayer, if I support programs for other people’s children, however abused?’

While some people will justify it as a normal thus moral as well as ethical human evolutionary function, the self-serving OIIIMOBY mentality can and does debilitate progress, even when it is most needed. And it seems this distinct form of societal penny wisdom but pound foolishness is a very unfortunate human characteristic that is likely with us to stay.

The wellbeing of all children — and not just what other parents’ children might/will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — should be of great importance to us all, regardless of whether we’re doing a great job with our own developing children.

A perception persists of migrants, and sometimes even refugees, as basically willfully and contently becoming permanent financial/resource burdens on their host nation.

There is so much unwarranted contempt for these people, yet so many are rightfully despondent, perhaps enough so to work very hard in cashless exchange for basic food and shelter.

And they do want to pull their own weight through employment, even if only to prove their detractors wrong.

Often conveniently ignored is the fact many are fleeing global-warming-related extreme weather events and chronic crop failures in the southern hemisphere widely believed to be related to the northern hemisphere’s chronic fossil-fuel burning, beginning with the Industrial Revolution.

Migrant laborers should be treated humanely, including timely access to proper work-related bodily protections, but too often are not.

If they feel they must, critics of such refugees/migrants should get angry at the politicians who supposedly allow in ‘too many’ migrants; but please don't criticize the desperate people for doing what we'd likely all do if in their dreadful position.

But then all that no longer matters when the migrants die in their attempt at arriving. Last winter a young family of four from India froze to death trying to access the U.S. via sub-zero southern Manitoba. And I wonder how many have died or will while trying to access Canada.

“The way a society functions is a reflection of the childrearing practices of that society. Today we reap what we have sown. Despite the well-documented critical nature of early life experiences, we dedicate few resources to this time of life. We do not educate our children about child development, parenting, or the impact of neglect and trauma on children.”

—Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Ph.D. & Dr. John Marcellus

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When I asked a BC Teachers’ Federation official over the phone whether there is any childrearing or child-development science curriculum taught in any of B.C.’s school districts, he immediately replied there is not. When I asked the reason for its absence and whether it may be due to the subject matter being too controversial, he replied with a simple “Yes”.

This strongly suggests there are philosophical thus political obstacles to teaching students such crucial life skills as nourishingly parenting one’s children. To me, it’s difficult to imagine that teaching parenting curriculum would be considered more controversial than, say, teaching students Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) curriculum, beginning in Kindergarten, as is currently taught in B.C. public schools.

I believe that too many people will procreate regardless of their questionable ability to raise their children in a psychologically functional/healthy manner.

Being free nations, society cannot prevent anyone from bearing children; society can, however, educate all young people for the most important job ever, even those who plan to remain childless. I would like to see child-development science curriculum implemented for secondary high school students, and it would also include neurodiversity, albeit not overly complicated. It would be mandatory course material, however, and considerably more detailed than what’s already covered by home economics, etcetera, curriculum: e.g. diaper changing, baby feeding and so forth.

I don’t think the latter is anywhere near sufficient (at least not how I experienced it) when it comes to the proper development of a child’s mind. For one thing, the curriculum could/would make available to students potentially valuable/useful knowledge about their own psyches and why they are the way they are.

Additionally, besides their own nature, students can also learn about the natures of their peers, which might foster greater tolerance for atypical personalities. If nothing else, the curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood.

There’s so much to know and understand about child development (science) in order to properly/functionally rear a child to his/her full potential in life. I once read an ironic quote from a children’s health academic that, “You have to pass a test to drive a car or to become a … citizen, but there’s no exam required to become a parent. And yet child abuse can stem from a lack of awareness about child development.”

By not teaching child-development science to high school students, is it not as though societally we’re implying that anyone can comfortably enough go forth with unconditionally bearing children with whatever minute amount, if any at all, of such vital knowledge they happen to have acquired over time? It's like we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to fully understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs.

I can’t help wondering how many instances there have been wherein immense long-term suffering by children of dysfunctional rearing might have been prevented had the parent(s) received, as high school students, some crucial child development science education by way of mandatory curriculum. After all, dysfunctional and/or abusive parents, for example, may not have had the chance to be anything else due to their lack of such education and their own dysfunctional/abusive rearing as children.

Since so much of our lifelong health comes from our childhood experiences, childhood mental health-care should generate as much societal concern and government funding as does physical health, even though psychological illness/dysfunction typically is not immediately visually observable.

A psychologically and emotionally sound (as well as a physically healthy) future should be every child’s foremost right, especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.

Sadly, due to the common OIIIMOBY mindset (Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard), the prevailing collective attitude, however implicit or subconscious, basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or ‘What is in it for me, the taxpayer, if I support programs for other people’s troubled children?’

The wellbeing of all children — and not just what other parents’ children might/will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — should be of great importance to us all, regardless of whether we’re doing a great job with our own developing children.

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“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.”

—Childhood Disrupted, pg.228