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Seems to be a meme that "back in my day kids just played and that was good!" Yeah, sure I played with Lawn Darts that were basically 12" long pieces of flying

by qdog 12y ago

Seems to be a meme that "back in my day kids just played and that was good!" Yeah, sure I played with Lawn Darts that were basically 12" long pieces of flying death, but I'm pretty sure I was lucky not to get injured. I try and get my son off the computer to do things, but I feel all these articles are more anecdotal than factual. I let my son fire of fireworks and what have you, but having had to rush the neighbor's kid "who doesn't get much supervision" to the hospital, I can say there is no invulnerability shield around children. They should play and have some risks, but as I was recounting just yesterday how I engulfed my childhood best friend in a giant fireball from a a gasoline fire, I was thinking maybe there are some things kids don't need to be doing...

meric 12y ago
Either way, it's likely that reducing the child mortality rate down to zero might have more consequences than just having a bigger percentage of children being able to grow into adults.
A_COMPUTER 12y ago
You're right, you were lucky. Kids who do stuff sometimes die. Life is a deeply, profoundly unfair thing, in ways that cannot be fixed. If you want to have a life worth living, you have to do stuff, but that entails risk that something terrible might happen. I was tempted to say "but that doesn't mean you should take stupid risks like playing with gasoline" but then I realized even that was wrong. We took away chemistry sets and only later did somebody ask a bunch of scientists what got them interested in science, and it seems like quite a few of them say things like "burning/blowing stuff up." http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html "Vint Cerf – who became one of the architects of the Internet – spent months blowing up thermite volcanoes and launching backyard rockets. Growing up in Colorado, David Packard – the late cofounder of Hewlett-Packard – concocted new recipes for gunpowder. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about his adolescent love affair with “stinks and bangs” in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science,” says Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981. “Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.”" Maybe you don't get these great people if you remove their freedom to explore in their formative years. But that freedom also meant a bunch of kids blew their hands off or worse, and if your kid dies in a gasoline accident, it's your fault as a parent and nobody says "well he just wanted his kid to be Nobel Prize material, valiant effort." It's unfair, but reality doesn't care. All you can possibly change is the societal attitude, not the actual fact that freedom means some unsupervised kids always are gonna die and it might be yours.
probably_wrong 12y ago
I think this article argues a bit too strong. I personally prefer Leonore Skenazy's blog[1], which argues for the same idea, but with simpler arguments. As a side note, Skenazy was called "World's worst mom" for allowing her son to ride the subway by himself[2]. [1] http://www.freerangekids.com/ http://www.freerangekids.com/ [2] http://theweek.com/article/index/96342/the-last-word-advice-from-americas-worst-mom http://theweek.com/article/index/96342/the-last-word-advice-...

by qdog 12y ago

meric 12y ago

Either way, it's likely that reducing the child mortality rate down to zero might have more consequences than just having a bigger percentage of children being able to grow into adults.

A_COMPUTER 12y ago

You're right, you were lucky. Kids who do stuff sometimes die. Life is a deeply, profoundly unfair thing, in ways that cannot be fixed. If you want to have a life worth living, you have to do stuff, but that entails risk that something terrible might happen. I was tempted to say "but that doesn't mean you should take stupid risks like playing with gasoline" but then I realized even that was wrong. We took away chemistry sets and only later did somebody ask a bunch of scientists what got them interested in science, and it seems like quite a few of them say things like "burning/blowing stuff up." http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html "Vint Cerf – who became one of the architects of the Internet – spent months blowing up thermite volcanoes and launching backyard rockets. Growing up in Colorado, David Packard – the late cofounder of Hewlett-Packard – concocted new recipes for gunpowder. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about his adolescent love affair with “stinks and bangs” in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science,” says Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981. “Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.”" Maybe you don't get these great people if you remove their freedom to explore in their formative years. But that freedom also meant a bunch of kids blew their hands off or worse, and if your kid dies in a gasoline accident, it's your fault as a parent and nobody says "well he just wanted his kid to be Nobel Prize material, valiant effort." It's unfair, but reality doesn't care. All you can possibly change is the societal attitude, not the actual fact that freedom means some unsupervised kids always are gonna die and it might be yours.

probably_wrong 12y ago

I think this article argues a bit too strong. I personally prefer Leonore Skenazy's blog[1], which argues for the same idea, but with simpler arguments. As a side note, Skenazy was called "World's worst mom" for allowing her son to ride the subway by himself[2]. [1] http://www.freerangekids.com/ http://www.freerangekids.com/ [2] http://theweek.com/article/index/96342/the-last-word-advice-from-americas-worst-mom http://theweek.com/article/index/96342/the-last-word-advice-...