Adonis Diaries

“Too bad, or Too good to be true?” Orphaned children

Losing a parent in childhood has the potential of driving people into extreme behaviors that “psychologically healthy” kids tend not to cross.

For example, 3 folds the numbers of prisoners have lost a parent before reaching 16 of age.

Illustrious geniuses such as inventors, poets, writers, statesmen… 45% of them had been orphaned .  Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Swift, Gibbon, Thackeray…

Marvin Eisenstadt selected 699 of these illustrious personalities who had credible biographies, and he spent 10 years analyzing these personalities.

Do you know that:

1. Twelve of the 44 US presidents have lost a parent in childhood? Most of them were of the early presidents such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson… because of low life expectancy in those periods.  Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been orphaned too.

2. British prime ministers who exclusively came from upper classes, 67% of them lost a parent early on. This is twice the rate of parental loss in the upper classes in those times. A study by Lucille Iremonger.

“it appears that gifted and prodigy children are likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions”

Apparently, courage and consistency in carrying out a project is an acquired attitude, resulting from “remote misses” occurrences that failed to handicap you, physically or mentally. It means that if frequent bombing save you from being a “near miss” casualty, you eventually conquer your fear and start feeling invulnerable, a feeling of exhilaration that death cannot touch you any time soon.

If you had the opportunity of going through  a few tough episodes, you discover that “It’s not that tough after all”

These orphaned kids break “out of the community Frame”

The diverse frames we are locked in are shattered when childhood frame ceases to exist.

Note 1: Read Malcolm Gladwell’s “David and Goliath”

Note 2: It would be an excellent idea to study whether separated parents in childhood have the same effect on the kids

Note 3: For every remote miss person who becomes stronger to face the difficulties of life, there are countless near misses who are crushed and remain disabled to function properly as normal people do.