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Lies We Tell Kids

paulgraham.com

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Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#61

Post by sanj »

sanj wrote: post #35

Does PG have kids? I'm not advocating ignoring the essay if he doesn't. But just as I'm leery of taking startup advice from someone who hasn't done one, I'd be tempted to discount this a bit. The issue is that there are forces afoot in your brain when you have kids which are deep, powerful and extraordinarily difficult to ignore. Pre-mammalian lower-reptilian brain stuff. Wanting to protect them is one of those.

As a followup, it'd be interesting to know if any of the reviewers have raised kids.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#62

Post by Prrometheus »

>Don't all 18 year olds think they know how to run the world? Actually this seems to be a recent innovation, no more than about 100 years old. In preindustrial times teenage kids were junior members of the adult world and comparatively well aware of their shortcomings.

This idea is fleshed out in the writing of John Taylor Gatto, a former Teacher of the Year who disagrees with near everything about modern education.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#63

Post by jkkramer »

jamess wrote: post #26
dgabriel wrote: post #4

My least favorite pg essay. It's too easy to generalize about parenting, and so little of this essay applies to me. 1. Raising a kid in the city, and quite happily. 2. No prohibitions on swears in my house. Just at Grandma's, and only because it would offend her, not because swearing is inherently bad. 3. He goes to a school where they only teach you how to read, write, and do basic math. Everything else is a child-l…

For their own sake, don't let your kids be vegetarian until they're at least 16, that's the worst disservice you could ever do them. I speak as a vegetarian myself, but you've got to be pragmatic. Your kids need animal protein right up until their brains are done developing. It doesn't have to be very much animal protein, as little as a teaspoon a day does the trick, but there is no artificial or vegetable substitute…

Cite? I've never seen any evidence that kids need animal protein to develop. I was raised vegetarian from birth and have no mental or physical defects to speak of. I have siblings and cousins and friends that are the same.

Vitamin B12 is the only thing that can be a challenge to get from non-animal sources, but that's only a concern if you're vegan. The whole "vegetarians don't get enough protein" thing is an overblown myth.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#64

Post by goodgoblin »

Regarding the horrible nature of some things in the world - pollution, the pain and suffering our lunch goes through, etc. - I think one of the reasons people don't always tell the truth is their own comfort with the way things are might be upended. I have a 5 year old who naturally is opposed to eating meat and who is shocked by the thought of killing something to eat it. I personally don't think I would eat something if I had to kill it first, yet I enjoy a bacon cheeseburger very much. I find my own rationalizations becoming thinner and thinner the more I live with him and notice his innate repulsion to meat. I can see the influence packaging has on his thinking - chicken nuggets are acceptable to him - as far removed from an actual walking, clucking feathered chicken as you can get and still be chicken - and by reference can see the influence packaging has had on my own ability to quickly dismiss thoughts of desperate cows clambering to avoid the stun bolt as I bite into my bacon cheeseburger. I can do it quite easily, but would never kill a cow.

I think another reason we don't tell kids the truth about some of the horrible things in the world is that we ourselves shy away from them. Its as if we are all stepping over the dead horse on our way into our house, and the children point and notice the smell, but we hurry them along, anxious to be past the nastiness. Its part of our sanitized world, but I wonder if staring at the dead horse all day long isn't a kind of trap in itself. Where does it end? Can you spend your life pitying the lives of others? Thoreau makes an interesting observation:

“There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another. . . . The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.”

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#65

Post by edw519 »

Einstein, like many people, felt differently about religion at different times in his life, throughout which he maintained his Jewish identity.

Young Einstein's observation about religion cited in the article should probably be balanced by older Einstein's insight, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#66

Post by greendestiny »

astine wrote: post #22

Does it count as a 'lie' if it is believed by the parent? The reason that parents don't want kids to swear is because they genuinely believe that it is wrong for some reason. The don't know the reason themselves, and so break the rule and become hypocrites, but they still believe that it is wrong and want their children to do better than they did. With regard to group identity (and religion,) most parents actually ad…

I don't know that I've ever read a really good account of the hows and whys of swearing. It seems to me the idea that we're mistaken that swear words are taboo completely misses the fact that we defined these words as taboo to start with. I think restricting children from swearing is in part to give more power to swear words, because as adults we find it useful to have these powerful words. Teaching children that swear words aren't taboo seems to be teaching them a definition at odds with rest of society and would deprive them of a useful set of words if it succeeded, which I doubt it would. In fact teaching kids that swear words are just words is exactly the kind of lie this essay is talking about.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#67

Post by Xichekolas »

brlewis wrote: post #51
Xichekolas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah to me suburb means tract housing. Does Boston have suburbs that aren't tract housing? (I said tree related because every suburban neighborhood I can think of has a tree related name... "Willow Springs" "Lone Elm Estates" "Pine Ridge" etc.)

Suburb means a city or town near a large city. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suburb Those names sound like housing projects, not cities or towns. Boston has a lot of suburbs accessibly by public transportation that have walkable city centers.

> accessible by public transportation that have walkable city centers.

Well that is good for Boston, but my experiences in the midwest and south are that suburbs = tract housing and schools.

And yeah, the names were definitely of housing projects... in my original post I was referring to "neighborhoods with tree-related names" ... I simply misspoke in my second post (hope you don't mind but I'm going to correct that).

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#68

Post by astine »

jamess wrote: post #57
astine wrote: post #22

Does it count as a 'lie' if it is believed by the parent? The reason that parents don't want kids to swear is because they genuinely believe that it is wrong for some reason. The don't know the reason themselves, and so break the rule and become hypocrites, but they still believe that it is wrong and want their children to do better than they did. With regard to group identity (and religion,) most parents actually ad…

I don't think this is true. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone under the age of 40 (that is, approximately of breeding age) who is genuinely offended by most words that are designated taboo. Any offence that is publicly displayed is most likely a put-on to illustrate they are more cultured that the offender. What's worse is that it's entirely subjective what words a culture counts as taboo. I've seen US TV…

I personally know quite a few people who are offended by foul language.

What constitutes foul language may be cultural but that's beside the issue. Imagine, a child from 1950s American suburbs was raised in that belief that certain words were wrong to use. The child was consistently reinforced in this belief throughout his childhood by all adults he met but never had it explained to him. Later, as an adult, he finds many friends who swear freely, and, not knowing the reason it is supposedly wrong, adopts the practice himself. Yet, in the back of his mind he still remembers his entire childhood telling him it was wrong and he know that those people genuinely believed that it was wrong. Clearly there was a reason for this taboo to begin, but without knowledge of the reason, how is he supposed to know whether it is still relevant? It doesn't matter whether there is any intrinsic property of the words that is wrong, what matters is thet there is a taboo and whose to say that the taboo isn't still relevant?

Teaching kids not to swear as a rule is especially important when one remembers that there are still places in society where the taboo holds strong and for the children to succeed in those places, they must not accidentally say anything that will offend someone.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#69

Post by robg »

hugh wrote: post #55
robg wrote: post #29

I'd love to see the sequel: Lies We Tell Ourselves. Seems like many of the things discussed have their origin in lies we continue to tell ourselves. Kids just get special versions. But if anything those instances provide a window into what we don't discuss honestly - sex, death, identity, formal education, and obeying authority.

I dunno, "lies we tell ourselves" doesn't sound like a very good essay. Since we don't know about the lies we tell ourselves, it would have to be "lies I see other people telling themselves". And that pretty much translates to "Things that other people believe that I disagree with", which is a fairly boring topic for an essay.

When's the last time you had an honest discussion with anyone about:

a) Sex (e.g., Do you satisfy your partner?) b) Death (e.g., Was your life meaningful?) c) Formal Education (e.g., If not, then what?) d) Identity (e.g., Who are you?) e) Authority (e.g., Who tells you what to do?)

I don't know, honesty seems much harder than settling on lies to tell ourselves.

Re: Lies We Tell Kids

#70

Post by jamess »

cia_plant wrote: post #54
jamess wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For their own sake, don't let your kids be vegetarian until they're at least 16, that's the worst disservice you could ever do them. I speak as a vegetarian myself, but you've got to be pragmatic. Your kids need animal protein right up until their brains are done developing. It doesn't have to be very much animal protein, as little as a teaspoon a day does the trick, but there is no artificial or vegetable substitute…

The American Dietetic Association, at least, disagrees: "Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence." http://www.eatright.org/cps/rde/xchg/ada/hs.xsl/advocacy_933... Can you at least offer a source for your shocking claims?

Erm, hardly shocking. It has been established since at least the 80s that vitamin B12 is essential for brain development, and any number of large scale developmental studies have been carried out to that effect.There are no non-animal sources for vitamin B12. If you find any doctor of medicine who will recommend a vegan or vegetarian diet to either a breast feeding mother or to a child, then they ought to be struck off.

Simply Googling for "vitamin B12 brain development" will return you any number of papers on the subject, but most of them are behind their respective journal's paywalls unfortunately. However, the fact their abstracts include works like "cerebral atrophy" might give you some idea of their content.

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