221–230 of 413 posts
The kid that does really well in school, makes it big is going to have an opportunity for a lot more play later in life. The kid who does nothing but play will probably end up having very little opportunity and have to work long hours later in life to barely make ends meet with lots of stress and little opportunity for play. So its a trade off. Obviously if the kid comes from a rich family that is willing to support…
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I never understand this view, but admittedly I don't have children. I have a cat though. She's the first pet I've ever had in my life. I got lots of warnings from lots of people. Don't let her out or she'll cry all the time to go out. Keep her away from the door or she'll run out and you won't see her again. It sounded very difficult. However I didn't follow this advice and let my cat out in my backyard. And I found…
> I'm sure children are a lot different They are. Beating them into submission because you are the boss and they are just a child is not a long term solution. They are a lot more complex than cats. > I don't understand how children can have that much power over an adult. Oh I can easily just lock my son in his room, make him dance to get fed, anything really. It'd be abuse and wouldn't result in him growing into a we…
I set ground rules and gave her safe ways to be upset. If she misbehaved she lost privileges she enjoys.
I never neglected her if that's what you're trying to get at. That's a pretty low-blow to accuse me of based on what I wrote. Be better.
Obviously locking children in rooms isn't right. How about this, instead of locking kids in a room, you could try making a toy room and locking them OUT if they're misbehaving. Is that inhumane torture? That's basically what I did with my cat.
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Whenever this kind of opinion props up I wonder how far would you let your child to "fail"? Clearly we need our children to stumble and fail in a low-stake environment before they actually experience them later on in life. This naturally involves taking some risk. I remember being able to walk freely around the village pretty much without any supervision, I did get hurt a lot either from running into walls or getting…
> modern society can't seem to tolerate even a single dead children You mean parents can't seem to tolerate even a single dead child. And that's true, especially when most parents only ever have one or two children. Obviously they don't want them to die. To parents, their children aren't an abstract idea or a number that they can rationalize away.
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I wholeheartedly agree based on my own kids, but want to add a caution lest someone misunderstand: this testing, learning, and growing is of a kind that can only be done without adult supervision. It's not something that you can give them with a private lesson. It's not something that can be taught in a classroom. It's not something that can happen at all without adults letting the kids figure it out on their own by…
You can definitely enrich & join play. You just have to also enjoy & play and not supervise.
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According to this poll: https://reason.com/2014/08/19/august-2014-reason-rupe-nation... Americans are split regarding whether there should be a law requiring 12-year-olds be supervised when playing in a park - no cars there. As an European, to me this is absurd. At twelve I had a bus card and the privilege to go wherever, as long as I respected curfew.
Well that's my point, the parents thinks its a dude in a white van to be scared off. But the numbers say its the actual white van going too fast on a four lane road (speed limit 45mph) next to the park. This isn't that much of a problem in older European cities.
The OP said that everyone is walled off by cars so they have a mindset of controlling their children, lest they get run over. You're saying that they're actually afraid of kidnappers etc., while they should be of cars. To me these points are contradictory.
In any case do you think removing cars will solve the problem? My guess is that no, because this mindset appeared decades after cars took over, and these things are actually not related.
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> I blame other parents Ah, the mantra of our parental lives! These classes kids go to aren’t always some kind of arduous, academic overachiever factory. My kid goes to a Spanish immersion after school program once a week and she loves it. She’s made a ton of friends there. We’re not shoving her through the door. Don’t get me wrong, some parents do go over the top with it, no doubt. But a lot of these activities are…
It's not about your kid going to a Spanish class once a week, and the objection isn't that doing that isn't enriching for your kid. The problem is over the holidays when all your kid's friends have been sent to camps and summer schools (mostly as a form of holiday childcare for working parents presumably) or taken away on holiday, leaving your kid with nobody to play with. It presumably varies a lot but it's a real t…
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This makes it sound like the adult pains of holding friendships alive as you grow older. Everybody is busy with their lives and coordinating even with your closest friends leads to 'agenda conflicts' that push your time together weeks or months ahead. It's sad to see that this is happening to kids (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too.
> (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too. Gotta say though, this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures. Apart from sport and maybe an instrument, extracurriculars aren't a thing in most european countries. Extracurriculars are so peculiar that our ministry of education deems it necessary to make it a mandatory point for teachers to discuss wh…
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Where I grew up people still do pop ins. You get around your problem by helping the person out with what they were doing when you popped in. Doing the dishes when you pop in? Cool, you get to dry them as I wash. Everyone basically follows this rule. There’s no expectation of entertaining guests if you pop in for a visit.
That works if someone isn’t frantically trying to get from point A to point B, or so overwhelmed they are trying to find some time to stop and think. That’s the challenge for most Suburban parents around here anyway.
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That goes back to a time when most homes had a stay-at-home homemaker. Today, I'm not really crazy about the idea of a random pop-in, having to cut the few hours of time that I do have for laundry, dishes, or just a bit of down time, to have to make coffee and find snacks and sit down for a chat. If I were home all day that would be quite different, or so I think.
Where I grew up people still do pop ins. You get around your problem by helping the person out with what they were doing when you popped in. Doing the dishes when you pop in? Cool, you get to dry them as I wash. Everyone basically follows this rule. There’s no expectation of entertaining guests if you pop in for a visit.