Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to get kids to pay attention

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 283 posts

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#61

Post by lgregg »

tomohawk wrote: post #43

This is pretty much how I was raised in a small midwestern farming community. I was in charge of the laundry by the time I was 6, and the lawn when I was 8 or 9, and summers were pretty much filled with activities that my friends and I could organize. Moving to the burbs where play was organized sports and kids had everything done for them was a really big shock. It was hard to believe how inept at life most of my pe…

I can relate, I was born/grew up overseas and was raised this way before my parents moved back to the states. I moved back with them, and it was surprising how little my friends had in life skills. I had learned to cook (from watching/learning) already and would cook for myself after school for example, while most of my friends would have zero ideas on what to do.

It's sad how the U.S. Government prevents native American kids to have this experience in populated areas. There's a cultural vibe of individualism preventing overwatch of kids by adults which has led, in part, to the prohibitive autonomy that I had as a kid.

I was told by my mom that at the age of 4 years old, I hailed a taxi cab alone in the Philippines while she went to the bathroom in a McDonalds. That would never happen here in America.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#62

Post by irrational »

mhb wrote: post #47
nickjj wrote: post #5

What's really interesting to me is this same thing can be applied to adults too. The article writes: > For starters, he says, ask your kid this question: 'What would you do if you didn't have to do anything else?' I often wonder what civilization would be like if adults asked the same question to themselves and then lead a life where they focused on that instead of being pressured into "making a living".

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.

Yeah, I'd spend all day every day just reading.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#63

Post by closeparen »

Izkata wrote: post #46
seibelj wrote: post #11

My father was short tempered, very loud, and an unusually large man in stature and presence. Additionally he worked nights, got a couple hours of sleep, and then woke up and took care of my brother and I for breakfast / school before sleeping more. He was not someone to mess with in general, let alone at 630am on a Tuesday. I think the threat of being screamed at and intimidated made my brother and I two of the most…

> And the view of children as mini adults who could be useful, if properly trained, has been the default parenting style for thousands of years. I remember reading a theory, long ago, that the absence of this is the entire source of teenage rebellion. Like the children from Guatemala in this article, it also said that this phenomenon pretty much only exists in "westernized" countries. Basically, the theory is that pu…

Old-style parenting gives the child responsibility but definitely not control.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#65

Post by [deleted] »

nickjj wrote: post #5

What's really interesting to me is this same thing can be applied to adults too. The article writes: > For starters, he says, ask your kid this question: 'What would you do if you didn't have to do anything else?' I often wonder what civilization would be like if adults asked the same question to themselves and then lead a life where they focused on that instead of being pressured into "making a living".

[deleted]

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#66

Post by mmt »

I'm disappointed to see this article trot out the "unsafe" trope, especially after, earlier in the article, citing the Maya mother stating her child knows how to avoid traffic.

> Now, many parents in the U.S. can't go full-on Maya to motivate kids. It's often not practical — or safe — to give kids that much autonomy in many places, for instance.

I'm not asserting that traffic is the only US safety concern (or that it's even comparable for that example), but I would have hoped the authors would at least put in a link to an article regarding safety concerns or the controversy, without implicitly taking sides.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#67

Post by closeparen »

subjectsigma wrote: post #50
seibelj wrote: post #11

My father was short tempered, very loud, and an unusually large man in stature and presence. Additionally he worked nights, got a couple hours of sleep, and then woke up and took care of my brother and I for breakfast / school before sleeping more. He was not someone to mess with in general, let alone at 630am on a Tuesday. I think the threat of being screamed at and intimidated made my brother and I two of the most…

Another anecdote people might not like: Sunday school was an amazing form of early-childhood education for me. Some of my first experiences with music, art, and reading were in Sunday school. It taught me to love drawing and singing which I still like to this day. We were taught to obey our parents or go to Hell, to pay attention or go to Hell, to share and be kind and to empathize... or go to Hell... Which everyone…

Essentially everyone where I grew up was nominally Christian (we were highly unusual as an atheist family), and it was the churchiest pillar-of-the-community families whose kids acted out the worst.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#68

Post by wu-ikkyu »

It's amazing how so many in our society wonder why kids naturally don't want to be forced to sit down, shut up, and passively consume arbitrary, impractical, and obsolete information. Our teaching and testing methods are stuck in the 19th century. Children who don't fit the mold of a cog in the industrial machine are drugged into submission.

>We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

-Buckminster Fuller

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#69

Post by dugditches »

tonyarkles wrote: post #18
maltalex wrote: post #4

> For starters, he says, ask your kid this question: 'What would you do if you didn't have to do anything else?' In the western world the answer to that question is often some addictive activity such as playing video games, or watching videos on youtube.

> In the western world the answer to that question is often some addictive activity such as playing video games, watching videos on youtube or something similar. I was a relatively free-range child. I had a bike, I had a pocket full of quarters to call home if I needed to, and if I wanted to I could stay home and play video games (we had an NES, followed by a SNES, but not that many games). What did I do? I rode my b…

The screens of your past aren't close to the ones of today.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#70

Post by qznc »

So it comes down to the choice of the kids. Apparently, making an origami jumping mouse is interesting for mayan kids, but not for american ones. The article doesn't even try to convince me that autonomy is the critical factor.

When a professor starts a sentence with "It may be the case that" it is clearly just personal opinion and not published scientific fact. The professor intentionally makes the disclaimer that she has no proof for the hypothesis.

Post reply on HN