[OBJ Snakebite]

I know that some of you here are actually married and have children. To me the point of marriage has always been children.
But how do you raise a child when government does this ? When child protective services (CPS) will arrest you for letting your kid play unsupervised?
More importantly, how do you raise a boy to become a man in this environment?

[Lizard King]

No television, or very minimal TV, is a good place to start.

[IvanDrago]

Don't. Not much more needs to be said.

[Kickb]

It's seems like an awful time to raise kids.

Most kids these days are growing up with tablets in their hands. I visited my brother and his wife and their three year old daughter was buried in a tablet device the whole time.

It seems like even if you can insulate your kid from all this stuff, they will still be surrounded by androids.

[Foolsgo1d]

(09-20-2014 09:20 AM)Kickb Wrote:  

Most kids these days are growing up with tablets in their hands. I visited my brother and his wife and their three year old daughter was buried in a tablet device the whole time.

My nephew and niece do this. My nephew is 9 and has an xbox to play on too. They go to my parents house twice a week, sit down and use those tablets and do fuck all with the toys they have been given for birthdays.

Everytime someone buys them something new they play all but once with them then go back to the tablets. I laugh when this happens because I get proven right 100% of the time.

Literally £1000 worth of shit at my parents house not being used.

[The Beast1]

I don't remember when my parents started letting me do things by myself. I think i was either 9 or 10 when they started letting me stay home alone and ride my bike places on my own.

The 9 year old report is a bit annoying, but 7 or 8 years old seems a bit too young to go out on their own.

Get a good lawyer on your speed dial and tell your kid to to not answer a question from the police. Basically, tell them to not trust the police at all unless something bad is happening to you. Then call in the blue boys.

[roberto]

I was raised with no TV, and I can't thank my folks enough.

Aged ten we would cycle miles on our own with no mobiles.

Aged twelve or thirteen we would camp in the woods all night. Shoot a rabbit and make a fire. No mobiles.

Happy days. Technology is changing this world forever, it was only a 14 years ago that I was a kid doing those things. It's unheard of now.

[MrLemon]

Oh come on. This is one of the easiest environments ever for raising kids.

During the 1930s we had a depression that makes our current problems look tame. 40s---world war. 50s-- McCarthyism 60s---cuban missile crisis and Vietnam war. Etc etc.

Then lets look at the thousands of years before 1900...most of human history... half of the children born would be dead or crippled from disease before they were 3. Starvation, disease, slavery were normal and accepted parts of life.

Yes somehow for hundreds of thousands of years, men and women have managed to have kids.

The only decade better than now was the 1970s and 80s. Well, that was a golden time and now it's gone. Get over it. We're still way better off than 99.9% of history.

Yes modern women are shit. Well, find the one that isn't shit and wife her up. Be prepared to sacrifice everything you have, to lay your own life on the line, to raise kids.

Or, don't do it. The human race no longer needs to grow to survive. We are post-expansion phase. So never having kids is perfectly acceptable.

Just don't whine.

[jamaicabound]

When I was a kid my parents didnt allow me to have a tv in my bedroom, had limits on how much tv watching and videogames I could play, encouraged me to go outside, etc.

Id like to think Ill raise my kids kinda old school like that but with the rest of the world on dofferent shit who are my kids gonna play a pickup football game with? Etc. It almost seems if you dont cave to modern life and parenting your kids will be outcasts. Also from the twchnology perspective the kids without an ipad and gadgets are gonna be behind the curve.

[puckerman]

It certainly helps if you actually get to know your neighbors. The fact is that a woman who called the police in such a situation would have been tarred and feathered 100 years ago.

[OBJ Snakebite]

(09-20-2014 05:10 PM)puckerman Wrote:  

It certainly helps if you actually get to know your neighbors. The fact is that a woman who called the police in such a situation would have been tarred and feathered 100 years ago.

I think tar and feathers should be brought back. I think that a lot of crap in this world today is happening due to it falling out of fashion.
It is reasonable response to such cases.

[Dr. Howard]

(09-20-2014 02:12 PM)MrLemon Wrote:  

Oh come on. This is one of the easiest environments ever for raising kids.

During the 1930s we had a depression that makes our current problems look tame. 40s---world war. 50s-- McCarthyism 60s---cuban missile crisis and Vietnam war. Etc etc.

Then lets look at the thousands of years before 1900...most of human history... half of the children born would be dead or crippled from disease before they were 3. Starvation, disease, slavery were normal and accepted parts of life.

Yes somehow for hundreds of thousands of years, men and women have managed to have kids.

The only decade better than now was the 1970s and 80s. Well, that was a golden time and now it's gone. Get over it. We're still way better off than 99.9% of history.

Yes modern women are shit. Well, find the one that isn't shit and wife her up. Be prepared to sacrifice everything you have, to lay your own life on the line, to raise kids.

Or, don't do it. The human race no longer needs to grow to survive. We are post-expansion phase. So never having kids is perfectly acceptable.

Just don't whine.

eh, I don't know. I think that the risk of your kids dying or being crippled by polio is gone or much less than what it was. I think the challenge being referred to is how to raise your kids not to be the self interested consumer mush they are programmed to be these days.

[Emancipator]

I won't have to worry about this for another 20-30 years but I'm going to limit technology for my kids. Even big time tech leaders don't let their kids have much tech time.

http://business.financialpost.com/2014/0...=6def-2e6a

I'll probably be more inclined to let my future sons use more tech then daughters. Of course tech usage when used for content creation rather then absorption would be encouraged.

[SteveMcMahon]

(09-20-2014 08:32 AM)OBJ Snakebite Wrote:  

I know that some of you here are actually married and have children. To me the point of marriage has always been children.
But how do you raise a child when government does this ? When child protective services (CPS) will arrest you for letting your kid play unsupervised?
More importantly, how do you raise a boy to become a man in this environment?

I'm married and have two boys. One is a baby and the other is still a toddler. They're the greatest things that have ever happened to me, and also the hardest challenge of my life.

I'm not that old but it's astonishing how different things are for kids now compared to when I was a boy in the 1980's.

I walked to school by myself from the age of 4. Parents didn't drive their kids to school in my town, they let them make their way by foot or bus.

At Halloween, the streets were full of children and you rarely saw an adult outdoors. We children owned the night. We'd go into dozens of our neighbour's houses, sing them a song or tell a joke or say a poem to earn "our Halloween", then fill up our plastic carrier bags with mostly monkey nuts and tangerines, and the odd chocolate bar or sweetie.

In the summer holidays, it was expected that you'd go out and play all day, only coming home for a meal or a sandwich. We stayed out till it got dark, nearly midnight at the height of summer.

We knew about pedophiles, or "bad men", but parents weren't paranoid about them. We could roam for miles. Nobody thought it was wrong or dangerous if you carried a pocket knife for whittling sticks into makeshift toy rifles.

Nobody wore a helmet when riding a bike or skateboard.

If you got hurt playing sports at school, and I saw 11 year old boys getting broken bones playing rugby, it was seen as a learning experience to toughen you up. Not a drama involving safety lessons or lawsuits.

Bullying was common but you were expected to learn to stand up to bullies and hit back. Nobody suggested you try to reason with them! If there were more of them than you, the answer was to get your bigger brother to help fight them. If you didn't have a big brother, get your friends to help you fight it out on the playground. Unless it ended in a trip to the hospital, grown up authority figures generally didn't want to know.

Playground taunting was mercilessly cruel. If your family was poor, or you had some sort of disability, or you were too stupid or too smart, you'd be teased. Adults didn't expect kids to learn "sensitivity", the motto you learned was "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me".

Parental discipline was real. Fists, belts, and shoes were the favoured tools to show a wayward boy the error of challenging his Dad's authority. You could expect to be hit by any adult family member who caught you up to no good, and your parents would thank them for their vigilance. This was the norm, not "abuse".

There was about an hour or two a day of childrens programmes on the TV. If you were lucky, you might have an old black and white portable television in your room. Parents didn't see it as their duty to entertain kids. You made your own amusement. It was an adult world that children were expected to grow into, not like today where kids are endlessly cossetted and pandered to.

Raising boys to be men is harder today. I have a few ideas I'm going to try out though:

* Never, ever take the side of teachers or other authority figures against your child. If my kids act out, I'll deal with it at home. But I won't help the school system build a disciplinary file on them.

* Let boys be boys. Playing rough, fighting, and mischief are normal for boys. They need clear boundaries, not medication or feminine lectures on being sensitive to each others' feelings.

* Don't leave education to school hours. Challenge the kids through debate at the dinner table, teaching them to question what they think they know, and to articulate logical rebuttals based on facts. Introduce them to books. Let them help when I'm doing man stuff like using tools.

* Teach them game when they're old enough to learn. And lead by example by being a Patriarch. It's my house and my rules. I love my wife and expect the children to respect and obey her, but I'll be damned if I'm going to behave like one of those pussywhipped Dads you see on TV. The family is not a democracy, it is a benevolent dictatorship and I'm Il Duce.

[OBJ Snakebite]

(09-21-2014 03:17 AM)SteveMcMahon Wrote:  

...

Steve,
This is my point. What you described is how I grew up as well. Sans Halloween. We didn't have that in my country.
Most of all this is now reason to sue and for State to take away your children.
I hope your plan works out for you.

[Lizard King]

(09-21-2014 03:17 AM)SteveMcMahon Wrote:  

(09-20-2014 08:32 AM)OBJ Snakebite Wrote:  

I know that some of you here are actually married and have children. To me the point of marriage has always been children.
But how do you raise a child when government does this ? When child protective services (CPS) will arrest you for letting your kid play unsupervised?
More importantly, how do you raise a boy to become a man in this environment?

I'm married and have two boys. One is a baby and the other is still a toddler. They're the greatest things that have ever happened to me, and also the hardest challenge of my life.

I'm not that old but it's astonishing how different things are for kids now compared to when I was a boy in the 1980's.

I walked to school by myself from the age of 4. Parents didn't drive their kids to school in my town, they let them make their way by foot or bus.

At Halloween, the streets were full of children and you rarely saw an adult outdoors. We children owned the night. We'd go into dozens of our neighbour's houses, sing them a song or tell a joke or say a poem to earn "our Halloween", then fill up our plastic carrier bags with mostly monkey nuts and tangerines, and the odd chocolate bar or sweetie.

In the summer holidays, it was expected that you'd go out and play all day, only coming home for a meal or a sandwich. We stayed out till it got dark, nearly midnight at the height of summer.

We knew about pedophiles, or "bad men", but parents weren't paranoid about them. We could roam for miles. Nobody thought it was wrong or dangerous if you carried a pocket knife for whittling sticks into makeshift toy rifles.

Nobody wore a helmet when riding a bike or skateboard.

If you got hurt playing sports at school, and I saw 11 year old boys getting broken bones playing rugby, it was seen as a learning experience to toughen you up. Not a drama involving safety lessons or lawsuits.

Bullying was common but you were expected to learn to stand up to bullies and hit back. Nobody suggested you try to reason with them! If there were more of them than you, the answer was to get your bigger brother to help fight them. If you didn't have a big brother, get your friends to help you fight it out on the playground. Unless it ended in a trip to the hospital, grown up authority figures generally didn't want to know.

Playground taunting was mercilessly cruel. If your family was poor, or you had some sort of disability, or you were too stupid or too smart, you'd be teased. Adults didn't expect kids to learn "sensitivity", the motto you learned was "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me".

Parental discipline was real. Fists, belts, and shoes were the favoured tools to show a wayward boy the error of challenging his Dad's authority. You could expect to be hit by any adult family member who caught you up to no good, and your parents would thank them for their vigilance. This was the norm, not "abuse".

There was about an hour or two a day of childrens programmes on the TV. If you were lucky, you might have an old black and white portable television in your room. Parents didn't see it as their duty to entertain kids. You made your own amusement. It was an adult world that children were expected to grow into, not like today where kids are endlessly cossetted and pandered to.

Raising boys to be men is harder today. I have a few ideas I'm going to try out though:

* Never, ever take the side of teachers or other authority figures against your child. If my kids act out, I'll deal with it at home. But I won't help the school system build a disciplinary file on them.

* Let boys be boys. Playing rough, fighting, and mischief are normal for boys. They need clear boundaries, not medication or feminine lectures on being sensitive to each others' feelings.

* Don't leave education to school hours. Challenge the kids through debate at the dinner table, teaching them to question what they think they know, and to articulate logical rebuttals based on facts. Introduce them to books. Let them help when I'm doing man stuff like using tools.

* Teach them game when they're old enough to learn. And lead by example by being a Patriarch. It's my house and my rules. I love my wife and expect the children to respect and obey her, but I'll be damned if I'm going to behave like one of those pussywhipped Dads you see on TV. The family is not a democracy, it is a benevolent dictatorship and I'm Il Duce.

[MrLemon]

(09-20-2014 07:06 PM)Dr. Howard Wrote:  

(09-20-2014 02:12 PM)MrLemon Wrote:  

Oh come on. ...

Just don't whine.

eh, I don't know. I think that the risk of your kids dying or being crippled by polio is gone or much less than what it was. I think the challenge being referred to is how to raise your kids not to be the self interested consumer mush they are programmed to be these days.

Yes I understand. Fine, work with your kids on it.

I'm just saying, ultimately, it's a puny challenge. It's a first-world problem. Please don't whine about it: "Oh, whah, whah, whah, my kids have too much technology. They don't run around in the streets enough".

[The Lizard of Oz]

(09-20-2014 02:12 PM)MrLemon Wrote:  

The only decade better than now was the 1970s and 80s. Well, that was a golden time and now it's gone. Get over it. We're still way better off than 99.9% of history.

That is beautifully observed.

Indeed, those growing up in the America of the 1970s and 1980s -- particularly in its middle class suburbs -- experienced a unique and unprecedented golden age. They grew up in the midst of a secured and shared environment of comfort and prosperity, but also with a limitless sense of adventure, possibility and freedom. They could roam suburban streets just before the advent of "24 hour America" that were already safe and well kept, but still felt thrilling and unexplored and limitless. And they had the greatest music the world has ever known to serve as their daily soundtrack.

That is why movies from that period that depict growing up in suburban America can rise to a pitch of exquisite and virtually unbearable beauty:

However, as you also said, not everyone gets to grow up in paradise, and not every age can be a golden age. Ours is still better than almost any other; and there are also many things of value that kids growing up today have that the kids of the 70s and 80s did not.

[kbell]

If you ban or limit tablet usage, you still have to deal with realities, teachers and friends that have them. A coworker of mine complained that she and her daughter had set up a no ipad policy for a 3 year old. However he still gets to play with them at school and will constantly bother both for one.

[Barry Scrotada]

(09-20-2014 03:19 PM)jamaicabound Wrote:  

Id like to think Ill raise my kids kinda old school like that but with the rest of the world on dofferent shit who are my kids gonna play a pickup football game with? Etc.

Was driving around the other day and saw a dozen or so kids playing pickup football. Not on a football field either, but just a random patch of land. I realized it was like seeing a bald eagle now.

Fortunately when I grew up the only tech vices available to kids were too much TV, making crank calls or stupid home movies before 'Jackass' was a thing.
Even younger, my brothers and I would wander on our own in and around giant storm drains, frozen lakes, construction sites, 45 degree hills with concrete paths at the bottom, and streams that were not yet manicured 'designated nature reserves'.
Both looking forward to, and dreading, raising a teenager when my time comes. It is an absolute necessity, as one poster mentioned, to not leave the education up to the schools (education in this case meaning more than just book smarts). Start early.

[BadWolf]

My parents raised me on a solid diet of Commodore 64 and Nintendo and I loved everyday of it. Don't be so quick to judge computer use/game time as negative. I've ranted about this before but I still believe playing an RTS like Starcraft carries a lot more value than playing kick the can outdoors.

How about adding some family board game time after dinner:

http://boardgamegeek.com/

There are 10's of thousands to choose from and many educate on the importance of business, world history, computers, you name it. With current developments on the Oculus Rift, pretty soon kids will be able to live through World War 2, see Rome being built or walk across the surface of Mars. What an awesome time it is to be a kid.

I for one, can't wait to introduce my kids to Nintendo... a lot of good memories there playing through Dragon Warrior or trying to locate my princess in another castle. I had major allergies and asthma as a kid so most of my time was spent on my computer and infront of a console system. I honestly never wanted to play football or soccer when a game of chess or TFC was far more stimulating. Football has a few rules but there is really only one way to win the game, kick the ball into the net. Videogames offer a world of possibilities and victory conditions and I think that is very beneficial for children to learn. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

As a kid's teacher, I can tell you that THE MAJORITY of Chinese children are growing up, by your definition, completely NORMAL (lots of excercise/loads of group activities). So maybe just a change of location would do your kids wonders.

[OBJ Snakebite]

The thread deviated from it's original topic--it is not about technology ruining your childhood, but the state criminalizing autonomous parenthood.

[HawkWrites]

I know there's a lot of good information here since I browse it at work occasionally.