Measuring the Increase In The Homeless Population

Coping with life is a skill that is learned. Certainly some people have a more natural gift for learning coping skills. Still without those skills our lives run amok.

What all is involved in learning life's coping skills? Just about everything, in one way or another, but our experiences and the conditions in which those experiences happen play a major role.

Parents have the first and most important influence on coping skill development. Children mimic as a way of learning. How parents respond to the world is how children attempt to respond, as well. Direct instruction of children is also important, but children also watch what their parents and others do. And to a child, what a person does is even more influential than what a person says, especially in terms of coping with the world. Extended family, teachers, neighbors - they all have an impact on the skills a child learns.

As adults, the influences of other people effects our abilities to cope. Being treated with love an respect builds person's coping skills, while a lake thereof diminishes a person's coping skills. Treat a person badly enough and they will develop mental health issues. And a lack of a healthy mental state negatively effects a person's ability to cope with the world.

Then there are more global issues, like the economy, wars, drought and famine, etc.

Of course there are many other factors involved affecting a person's ability to cope with life, but you get the picture.

Now, if we were to survey all people and assign their ability to cope with the world a place on a graph, on the horizontal line, we would find something similar to a bell curve - with the majority of people having average abilities to cope with life. On the far extremes of the line, we would find fewer people with either tremendous lack, or tremendous wealth, of these skills.

But more importantly is the vertical line on this scale that moves to the left or right, depending on the stress levels of living. The more stressful life becomes, the farther to the right the vertical line moves. And as has been chronicled time and again, life is becoming increasingly more stressful. So the vertical line is on a slow and steady march to the right.

This vertical line divides the people on the horizontal stress level bell curved line into two distinct groups. To the left of the line are all the people whose coping skills are unable to match life's stress, and thus become homeless, and on the right are all the people whose coping skills allow them to maintain a home.

As that vertical line continues to move to the right, our homeless population grows. And yes, regardless of what some people may say, even the government, the truth is, the homeless population in this country continues to grow.

Now, there are two ways to attempt to reduce homelessness. You can either give people more coping skills, so that their position on the graph moves farther to the right. Or, society can take deliberate steps to lessen the stresses of live, and thus move the vertical line farther to the left - meaning that more people will be able cope with it.

I do believe that there is a saturation point whereby a person has more than enough skills naturally necessary to survival and yet the stresses of life are even too much for him/her. And I think we are getting to that point very quickly. I say this because I see that people are having to make even greater sacrifices to cope with the stresses of life - mainly family sacrifices. And as families suffer, the chances for people in these families to develop proper coping skills becomes greatly diminished.

We would be much better off, and it would also be much more plausible, to concentrate our efforts on moving the vertical line back to the left. Once that line moves too far to the right, we will all be in trouble.