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How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)

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Re: How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)

#101
post #16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair to the concept, it's a pretty benign sea monster (as far as sea monsters go..) >Jaw says Inuit parents take a pre-emptive approach and tell kids a special story about what's inside the water. "It's the sea monster," Jaw says, with a giant pouch on its back just for little kids. >"If a child walks too close to the water, the monster will put you in his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to…

The story of the monster is technically the truth. Being near the sea is dangerous and requires respect and understanding. There will be a transition period between realizing the story is fake, and the real reason why small people need to stay away from the water. However, this realization will be at a point when the kids are bigger and more co-ordinated to get away from a rogue wave/whatever danger. The other fact i…

> Being near the sea is dangerous and requires respect and understanding.

Very much so. In the Pacific North West, it's sneaker waves. I got caught by one of those with my 9 or 10 year old at the time step daughter. We were walking along a rocky outcrop several feet above the wave line, and then there's just this ... surge. I found the surest footing I could, she jumped up and clung on to me, and I put one arm around her, and the other locked on to a rock so hard it made my fingers bleed. The water kept coming up, and up, and up, eventually slowing at my belt line.

That... was terrifying.

And then you have the Artic Circle. Maybe no sneaker waves, but the water temperature is around 28-29F. Immerse in that, and you're dealing with hypothermia very quickly, especially as a toddler, young child.

Re: How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it necessary? Why do you need to lie to your children? I prefer to be straight with my young kids when possible, but even I have to admit that mythical type stories carry a lot more staying power with young kids than a stern warning about real danger from their parents. The context we have as adults about the consequences of things like death are not fully developed in young children. However, they pick up o…

I agree with you, it's one thing to be lying for 'fanciful' things - "Santa is bringing you presents" versus "We're your family and love you very much and want to give you things", the Easter bunny, etc, versus "We're in the Artic Circle. If you fall and trip in this water, it means hypothermia, near drowning, or death." As you say, children struggle with the concept of death, as any parent who has had to explain the…

My first child called cemeteries “zombie farms.”

Re: How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)

#104
post #4

I’m not sure lying to your kids about sea monsters to the point that your children are so petrified of the water they don’t go near it is quite as benign as they believe.

So it is wrong to warn kids about strangers with vans offering candy or entertainment?

Re: How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)

#105
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/world/canada/canada-schoo... And, in the end, the conclusion of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission was unambiguous: “Children were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world.” From the 1880s through the 1990s, the Canadian government forcibly r…

There’s things that are left out that are important Many indigenous wanted their kids to go to these schools There was abuse in the school system everywhere and it seems like catholic schooling has been sexually abusive everywhere Rural canada was extremely poor Viruses like influenza ravaged everyone The media reporting on the matter makes it seem like everything bad of the past was exclusively done to indigenous wh…

It sounds like you should read the report.

"Life sucking for everyone" is not equal to the government of the day targeting a racial group for the multiple negative policies that were enacted. What level of injustice do you ascribe to taking children away from families if not extreme?

Re: How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)

#106
post #80
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say irrational. They are inexperienced. They don't know the risks, and they don't know what they are risking with some kind of behavior. If you place someone who never set foot outside of a major urban center and place them in a forest, they will do a lot of stupid things that can get them killed. If you take someone who always lived in a temperate climate and place them in either subzero temperatures then…

> I wouldn't say irrational. They are inexperienced. They don't know the risks, and they don't know what they are risking with some kind of behavior. “Inexperienced” is the wrong word. That suggests that what they lack is experiential knowledge. That’s incorrect. Instead, children and adolescents have lower capacity for acting rationally even based on the same knowledge, because the frontal cortex isn’t fully develop…

That link is strangely misleading for a medical authority. Yes, the prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped in youth, but saying its responsible for rational decision making is wrong - our current knowledge is that it handles long-term decision making and impulse regulation. While children generally are fundamentally more impulsive than adults, rationality and impulsivity aren't inversely related. For example, dogmatic thinking is a very common form of non-impulsive, attentive, yet irrational decision making.

And yes, children obviously are inexperienced. It takes ALOT of sensory data to achieve general intelligence, and gathering that data (or what the kids these days call "touching grass") simply takes alot of time.

Re: How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)

#107

I'm with the Inuit and Jedi on this one: anger is pretty useless[0], and if you must[1] take revenge, that's best served cold. Sometimes I wonder if the typical Hollywood W-plot, in which the hero's best friend/significant relation is shown partying/getting the girl/otherwise living well at the top of the middle ∧ then killed by the villain at the bottom of the right ∨, after which the hero gets angry and wins the da…

Every day I become more convinced that Hanlon’s razor is an example of malice.

Re: How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)

#109
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anger is not at all useless, it is a powerful and extremely useful emotion. When we witness injustice, when our loved ones are threatened or harmed, when someone treats us with contempt or disrespect, anger is our signal that we must take action, and it gives us the energy and courage to do what must be done. Understanding your anger and not letting it control your behaviour (ie not giving in to blind rage), is impor…

> Anger is not at all useless, it is a powerful and extremely useful emotion. A while ago I had a loved one both harmed and threatened. I called my insurance, who gave me a lawyer, who got the facts from my loved one and combined them with the law, giving the case to a judge, who gave us a court order which allowed us to both (a) remedy the harm, and (b) get law enforcement backup. For this outcome, very little energ…

> How would anger —or even moral outrage— have improved the situation?

If at any point the chain of actions had broken down, anger would have granted the motivation to pursue through the roadblock.

You do understand that this very system implicitly disadvantages those who do not have such straightforward access to it, right?

Re: How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)

#110
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anger is not at all useless, it is a powerful and extremely useful emotion. When we witness injustice, when our loved ones are threatened or harmed, when someone treats us with contempt or disrespect, anger is our signal that we must take action, and it gives us the energy and courage to do what must be done. Understanding your anger and not letting it control your behaviour (ie not giving in to blind rage), is impor…

You are describing moral outrage. The other poster is talking about what academics associate with the fight or flight instinct. I agree with the other poster anger and other extreme emotions are usually negatively correlated with long term success. Extreme emotions engages our primal brain which prevents our more advanced brain from engaging.

> anger and other extreme emotions are usually negatively correlated with long term success.

But historically when they did not result in negative long term success, they paid off big time.

Anger is not an extreme emotion. It's used all of the time to good purpose. You're thinking about rage. If the "other poster" failed to make this distinction then it's really important to make it now so that we don't start strawmanning or ad homineming based on a misunderstanding.

Personally Joy has been an extreme emotion that has done me bad. As when I experience Joy I start to stop paying attention. On one occasion I suffered a broken bone because of it.

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