Text version for EU users https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=621752789 , since declining tracking does not redirect to the correct article. It should work well with your browser's reading mode.
Thanks, now I understand what reading mode is for :-)
How to get kids to pay attention
211–220 of 283 posts
Re: How to get kids to pay attention
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would mean raising prices, and thus the toilet cleaner him/herself wouldn't be able to buy the things that you want them to reach anyways.
Rather, the toilet cleaner would be able to buy things previously unattainable, and the person who hired the cleaner would have less free cash to spend on other objectives, which would cause a slight drop in the price of those other objectives. Raising the income of a toilet cleaner doesn't correspond to a general rise in prices. It might mean the development of self-cleaning toilets, which isn't a bad idea.
Margins aren't as generous in other fields as in IT.
Re: How to get kids to pay attention
#213I often wonder whether this has a lot to do with how we treat our kids. I often catch myself acting uninterested in my daughter's interests (she's two and often wants to show me things for the 50th time that were pretty boring in the first place.) She doesn't have any attention or behavioral issues in general, but I was amazed when a friend of mine came to visit who is an early music educator. They didn't do anything…
An indirect way of encouraging this is including kids in what you are doing, as opposed to engineering activities for them.
A lot of kids' world these days is an artificial reality, made for them. School, soccer, art class, play dates. The reason the activity exists is to give kids an experience. We're not interested in it, because it's kid stuff.
When I was a kid, some of the most formative activities were fishing, sheep farming & vegetables gardening (grandparents on a farm), home repair jobs like painting or brickwork.
When I was very small (2-4), if my parents were painting a room, I was also in old clothes with a paintbrush "helping". Same with spring cleaning or whatnot. I had a little hammer I could bang, to help my dad assemble IKEA furniture.
You don't have to conciously "engage" in their stuff, just let them engage in your stuff.
Re: How to get kids to pay attention
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the research is pretty clear on this. From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3447048/ : > Although some studies have found no relation between physical punishment and negative outcomes, and others have found the relation to be moderated by other factors, no study has found physical punishment to have a long-term positive effect, and most studies have found negative effects.
The research is pretty poor. The main problem is that all physical punishment is landed into a single pot, but there is clearly a world of difference slapping a fifteen year old in the face and slapping the bottom of a four year old. See here for a useful meta-analysis: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10567-005-2340-z
Many people who hit kids aren't making fine distinctions like that. The whole point of the research is to address the general practice.
Re: How to get kids to pay attention
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and then pay the toilet cleaners even more, raise prices again, and so on. A virtuous upward cycle which would eventually bring their lives more in line with everyone else's.
How did it bring someone's life in line with everyone else when they're still unable to buy the things other people can buy? Do you realise that once the cleaner is more expensive than a Japanese toilet is to maintain, the cleaner will be fired and will have nothing instead?
So the toilet cleaner retrains to become the toilet repair person? What's wrong with that? We all get better toilets out of the deal, too.
The public bathroom still needs cleaning itself, though. Unless you're suggesting that a Japanese toilet is a robot that cleans the whole bathroom? That would be interesting!
Re: How to get kids to pay attention
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There's a cultural vibe of individualism [where?] preventing overwatch of kids [whose kids?] by adults which has led, in part, to the prohibitive [prohibiting what?] autonomy that I had as a kid. I don't quite understand what you're saying here, but I'm genuinely interested. Could you clarify? Active listening: What I thought you said is that in, say, the Philippines, there is a culture of individualism that prevent…
Not OP but I read it as prohibition of the autonomy (of children by today's culture) that they used to have. I can relate, as a child I was expected to be self-sufficient in a way that would be unrecognisable to modern children. Rather than being ferried by car to the school, and taxied to a series of child appointments, I walked to school alone or with friends. That including crossing a 4 lane highway, at the lights…
When playing out I was often told not to come back until dinner, so we'd go off and do stuff.
When I try that with my daughter there is a 97% chance she'll end up at a friends house playing Minecraft or something similar (or she'll just end up in her room playing computer games). Personally I don't think the problem is so much that we don't let kids out, rather that there are so many other, screen based, things competing for kids attention. We don't have to ban kids from playing in the streets since we couldn't convince to do something that boring if we tried.
Re: How to get kids to pay attention
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> watch commercial TV, play video games, look at nonsense on Facebook. It wouldn't be pretty Because that's all most people can do after 8-10 hours (+ commute) of soul-draining work, and then some household chores. Let's not assume that this is the default of human leisure just because it's all people have energy for after hard day of work.
But how come that's what most of jobless people do, too?
First off, that sounds like baseless speculation. Second, there might be a causal relation between lacking motivation/interests and being jobless. It's not a representative sample of the population at large.
Re: How to get kids to pay attention
#218> "Of course she can go shopping," Tun Burgos says. "She can buy some eggs or tomatoes for us. She knows the way and how to stay out of traffic." I wonder how much this has to do with the value of child life. What are the statistics of Mayan children being run over / kidnapped? I can't imagine it's somehow safer in Mexico, just somehow parents are more willing / less informed to take this risk.
If people believed in statistics they would let their kids roam free like their parents and grandparents did. It's much safer than it used to be. Alas, US parents are overly protective.
I believe it's because parents and grandparents never looked at statistics and so because in communities where there wasn't a story of children getting kidnapped or being killed on the road then they just never thought about the chance happening.
Re: How to get kids to pay attention
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this really so hard to figure out? Very few people would do things which are useful to keep civilization running if they have a choice. Look at what people do with their leisure time - watch commercial TV, play video games, look at nonsense on Facebook. It wouldn't be pretty.
I don't think it would be as bad as you think. If you wanted to remain living in your ideal world, you would make adjustments to your life for the sole purpose of maintaining your lifestyle instead of just thinking "meh, someone else will do it". I have to think if this were built into how we lived for hundreds of generations, then your mindset would even change from "maintaining my lifestyle" to "this is what we do…
The world you describe, that's the problem with all those wishful thinking like communism. Just a tiny detail, like 'if people wouldn't be selfish but work for greater good', and all would be better. On that I agree.
Where we would probably disagree is how realistic this is - to me, on truly global scale (not some isolated ie swiss/swedish experiment but places with properly f*cked up work mentality and life attitude like russia or any post-war country), it's very, very far from reality. I won't live long enough to see even a glimpse of what we discuus.
Not that it makes me anyhow happy, but it's important to have a realistic view on important variables. Everybody has a dark side. I've seen even the best and brightest and hard workers to slack badly once they lose motivation, ie changing jobs. Better have a system that accepts these flaws and still extracts value for society even in non-ideal way, rather than working with some ideal human being that is simply not out there.
Re: How to get kids to pay attention
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I think there are more people than you think who would be perfectly happy to clean toilets as their contribution, so long as they were compensated fairly for it.
Isn't that the entire point of the free market? To find the price that incentivizes the necessary level of production of a good/service? The alternative is a central authority setting prices, which has historically had disastrous results.
The "necessary" level of production as far as people are able to pay for it. In the iterated free market game power is not equally distributed, which directly affects people's ability to negotiate pay for their work.
Another way is to keep the free market as a price discovery mechanism, but introduce a mechanism that counteracts the tendency to accumulate wealth.