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Fun. Now there's a slippery slope that can lead to over-indulgence. As a parent your job is to protect your children, impart discipline, and teach them how to g

Fun. Now there's a slippery slope that can lead to over-indulgence. As a parent your job is to protect your children, impart discipline, and teach them how to get along in this world. Keeping them entertained doesn't factor in in the grand scheme of things.

evilduck 15y ago
Neglecting their mental state does them no favors either. Entertainment and enjoying an activity absolutely plays into the grand scheme of things with younger children.
Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
Everything is a slippery slope - discipline is a slippery slope to bullying, protection to mollycoddling, teaching to preaching. Research has shown that play is how children learn. Not hard things like cash flow, but vital investigatory, reasoning and communication skills, as well as building confidence and independence. The parent who forgets fun is going to be forgetting a major part of their child's education.
- samatman 15y ago
  Did we read the same blog post? The OP was clearly recalling some of the best memories of his youth, driving around with his father buying sodas for his very own vending machine. I had/have a good relationship with my father and I still wish we'd done something that cool.
  - Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
    I agree and all my comments have stressed that his dad was a great dad. My point is that what made this great was that he got to spend time with his dad, doing something together that they were both enjoying, NOT that he learned about cash flow. The lesson here is that kids love doing stuff with the parents, proper stuff, not that we should be teaching kids about business skills.
derefr 15y ago
"Teaching them how to get along" and "keeping them entertained" are basically the same thing, in an abstract sense. If you take "entertainment" as utility (which it basically is, disregarding baseline needs like food), then your job as a parent is to give your child the tools they need to most efficiently optimize toward their own utility function. Teaching someone how to be good at business is just the second derivative of entertaining them; you're teaching them to leverage skills to optimize their resource-leveraging capabilities to then optimize their experience of the world.

evilduck 15y ago

Neglecting their mental state does them no favors either. Entertainment and enjoying an activity absolutely plays into the grand scheme of things with younger children.

Tyrannosaurs 15y ago

Everything is a slippery slope - discipline is a slippery slope to bullying, protection to mollycoddling, teaching to preaching. Research has shown that play is how children learn. Not hard things like cash flow, but vital investigatory, reasoning and communication skills, as well as building confidence and independence. The parent who forgets fun is going to be forgetting a major part of their child's education.

samatman 15y ago
Did we read the same blog post? The OP was clearly recalling some of the best memories of his youth, driving around with his father buying sodas for his very own vending machine. I had/have a good relationship with my father and I still wish we'd done something that cool.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
  I agree and all my comments have stressed that his dad was a great dad. My point is that what made this great was that he got to spend time with his dad, doing something together that they were both enjoying, NOT that he learned about cash flow. The lesson here is that kids love doing stuff with the parents, proper stuff, not that we should be teaching kids about business skills.

derefr 15y ago

"Teaching them how to get along" and "keeping them entertained" are basically the same thing, in an abstract sense. If you take "entertainment" as utility (which it basically is, disregarding baseline needs like food), then your job as a parent is to give your child the tools they need to most efficiently optimize toward their own utility function. Teaching someone how to be good at business is just the second derivative of entertaining them; you're teaching them to leverage skills to optimize their resource-leveraging capabilities to then optimize their experience of the world.