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Report Suggests That Nanny State Might Actually Not Be For the Best
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Mar 28, 2008 03:08 PM
from the slowly-catching-on dept.
from the slowly-catching-on dept.
tonyreadsnews writes "Usually, 'thinking of the children' is a starting point to impose limitations on video games and internet in general. For once, a study requested by UK's Prime Minister seems to be a bit more objective than most. In the Executive Summary (PDF) 'Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe — this isn't just about a top-down approach. Children will be children — pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and
shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.' I think that is an important point that most studies miss, that just 'thinking of the children' and locking the bad stuff away is actually setting them up for failure later in life. A direct link to the full PDF is also available."
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UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:3, Interesting)
Hypocritical much?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, in this case the children really have no choice in their diet, so it doesn't apply.
I read that article and thought how terrible...then I looked up how much a ston weighs(14 pounds)(6.35Kilo)
An 11 year old weighing 168 pounds has health issues, and it's not 'Baby fat'.
Clearly the parents need educating, and no there children shouldn't be taken away unless they are being fed a dangers dies and the parents refuse to change.
".' Last year, an eight-ye
Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a very limited definition of terrorism.
A more reasonable definition of terrorism is any group attempting political change through an attack on a civilian target. That includes governments or quasi-governmental groups.
Parent
Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:5, Insightful)
A way of being enlightened is to not stop debating. I'm not necessarily implying that the "enlightened west" is right in its war on terror (let that be a part of the debate, for now), but that it being a matter of debate is normal. And I want to maintain that what most of us already consider to be terrorism will still be considered terrorism, however the debate turns out.
Hope that made sense...
Parent
Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:5, Insightful)
Very convenient definition... uh. I'll place it on my bookshelf along with
- It's not fascim when we do it
- It's illegal so it's wrong
- The government can do it because it said it was legal
Parent
Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Wouldn't breeding licenses be more effective? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Wouldn't breeding licenses be more effective? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Wouldn't breeding licenses be more effective? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think about it more in depth for a second, the answer as to why not is clear: there is no easy way to evaluate the 'worthiness' of anyone. There may not even be any way to do it whatsoever. For instance,
It's highly unfeasible to try issuing licences for people to exercise their biology.
Parent
"Top down approach","children will be childern"? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"Top down approach","children will be childern" (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
The needs of the US are different from the UK. (Score:5, Funny)
The needs of the US are different from the UK.
Obese people just naturally float, just like the really big chunks in the septic tank (and politicians) always rise to the top ...
Re:The needs of the US are different from the UK. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Middle ground (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we should not attempt to foam pad the entire world so the precious little ones don't get hurt, but that doesn't mean we should just toss them out in the woods and let them fend for themselves either. Certain safety regulations are required for the functioning of an advanced society, many of which are created at least in part to keep children safe (school zones, crosswalks, etc).
The debate should be about which regulations and safety precautions make sense, not about creating a false dichotomy by calling any regulation the imposition of a "nanny state".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Middle ground (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless I missed something, the entire report is basically arguing for such a middle ground. I don't see anywhere it says we should throw children into dangerous situations they can't cope with. Rather, it seems (from a first quick scan at least) to be advocating throwing children into somewhat dangerous situations carefully so they can learn to handle them safely in their own right.
This sounds like the kind of common sense you'd get from someone who actually deals with children professionally and sorts out problems in real life. Oh, wait, she is. :-)
Sadly, I gather she's decided that her television programmes weren't necessarily in the interests of the children participating and discontinued them now. That's a pity; they were very informative and seemed to be done quite responsibly from a naive but interested observer's point of view.
Parent
Re:Middle ground (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Middle ground (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Middle ground (Score:5, Insightful)
...and I'm sick of self-righteous soccer moms telling me what is "too dangerous" for MY kids. They don't want their crotch-fruit to catch sight of a tit until they're 18, fine. They've no right to make that determination for the rest of us under the guise of "it'll warp their poor lil' minds!".
The problem, IMHO, is that ANY simple childhood pleasure can be dangerous. I'll bet our older users can remember merry-go-rounds, and quite possibly being flung from one. A good real-world physics lesson, lost to time and litigation... all because a kid or three lost a baby-tooth after tumbling from one. Are they dangerous? Not especially... but shrill, overprotective parents will invariably make them out to be kid-killers. Ditto for see-saws.
We need a better definition of "dangerous", not more protection from that which isn't....
Parent
Re:Middle ground (Score:4, Insightful)
Where does this idea that tits are inappropriate for children come from, anyway? They're MADE FOR CHILDREN!!
Parent
Re:Middle ground (Score:5, Insightful)
Be involved with your children's lives, but be there as a "sanity check" and not as the one that directs every little thing they do. And LET them get hurt a bit. Not seriously of course, but hey, that skinned knee really DOES teach them something. Or as Calvin said, "If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you haven't been living!"
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, we should not attempt to foam pad the entire world so the precious little ones don't get hurt, but that doesn't mean we should just toss them out in the woods and let them fend for themselves either. Certain safety regulations are required for the functioning of an advanced society, many of which are created at least in part to keep children safe (school zones, crosswalks, etc).
Most of the things talked about aren't safety. Is the kid going to get hurt if they see something that scares them? Or if they see violence and no way should they ever be exposed to swear words. While some things are for safety this article isn't one of them.
Humbug (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Middle ground (Score:5, Insightful)
A Nation of Wimps [psychologytoday.com]
The idea is that by over-protecting our children, we deprive them of the opportunity to learn for themselves, to learn to assess a situation and choose an appropriate course of action. In the long run, it actually hurts them, because they haven't had the chance to develop those skills.
Parent
Re:Middle ground (Score:4, Insightful)
It's that SCARED PARENTS will eagerly pay lots of money for products to make the scaries go away, and they are easy to manipulate into watching (and staying tuned to) scary TV filled with advertising, and they can easily be manipulated into voting for/against any candidate in the voting booth.
*BOO!*
-
Parent
Re:Middle ground (Score:5, Interesting)
Bingo.
Insert Ferris's monologue from "Atlas Shrugged" here.
(Oh, alright, here:
-- Ayn Rand, 'Atlas Shrugged' (1957))
Parent
I'm all for protecting childrens (Score:5, Insightful)
"Sex is only for adults, but since you asked..."
Sometimes I hear a young kid swear in public and it always catches me off guard, thinking "geez, kids these days have no respect." But then I think- what is inherently bad about swear words anyhow? We're just safegarding them from things that we've deemed innapropriate in our society- that they don't even realize is inappropriate, because they're new to society. Why not be brutally honest with them instead?
"Son, Fuck is a bad word that people don't like. Try not to say it in public or around your teacher. Also, don't use it around your parents, it's disrespectful."
Treat them like children.. they'll act like children...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm all for protecting childrens (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Exactly. (Score:5, Funny)
If we have six-year-olds running around saying "fuck" willy-nilly, all that does is ruin the shock value of a perfectly good swear word. At that point you might as well be saying "boink."
"Oh yeah, boink me harder, baby."
"If Johnson doesn't get that report in by Tuesday the whole department is boinked!"
Now where's the fun in that? We'd just have to come up with a NEW swear word so horrifying that no child would be able to pronounce it without immediately being swallowed by the jaws of Hell, and honestly, I don't really feel like digging that far into the Windows API documentation.
Parent
children aren't computers (Score:5, Interesting)
Not so. Children are fundamentally different from adults. They don't think the same way. They don't experience the world the same way. Check out any good textbook on cognitive development and couple it with close, unprejudiced observation of your own children.
Most importantly, the way children think changes fairly rapidly as they grow. How a child reacts to a naked tit, for example, completely changes from age 1 to school-age, and again in middle school, and once again at sexual maturity. A wise parent considers these changes, and does not try to use the same reasoning and the same solutions at all ages.
And, in recognition of the fact that children don't think the same way at the same age, society tends to say that certain experiences should be shoved into certain age ranges, when they are easiest to successfully understand and cope with (either for the child or for the adults around him). It's among our oldest traditions as a species, the idea that certain experiences are best at certain ages, and it would generally be gross folly to overturn them without damn good reason. ("Gee! Tt seems reasonable to me! What could possibly go wrong?" doesn't qualify, by the way.)
The same arguments apply to purely intellectual stuff, too. For example, the present trend to teach algebra skills as early as grade 5 or 6 is almost certainly badly misguided. The mental circuitry required to easily learn algebra is usually (although not in every case) not "hooked up" until early adolescence. That means kids are tortured with stuff that is very hard to get, when waiting a few years would make it a piece of cake. Again, a failure to understand that children are not merely miniaturized, ignorant adults.
Parent
Requires Further Study (Score:5, Insightful)
It's true. My daughter (4.5 yrs) knows that a baby comes from a sperm from the Daddy and an egg from the Mommy and grows in her baby factory, but it has never occurred to her to ask how those two came to be together. An adult would pursue the inquiry to reduction at each level.
The same arguments apply to purely intellectual stuff, too. For example, the present trend to teach algebra skills as early as grade 5 or 6 is almost certainly badly misguided. The mental circuitry required to easily learn algebra is usually (although not in every case) not "hooked up" until early adolescence.
I read this idea elswhere a few weeks ago, and so decided to test it out. On a 20 minute car ride, my daughter learned the idea of X+ and X-, and thinks it's fun to solve for X, for small numbers anyway.
Granted, that's not all of the study of algebra, but the idea of symbolic representation isn't beyond the grasp of a relatively intelligent preschooler (she's not a math savant). I think the right question to ask is, "what ideas from Algebra might be appropriate for a first grader?" Right now everybody is focused on whether Algebra I is appropriate for Age X.
I think we're doing a disservice to learners by teaching:
This is what math is.
[insert 6 years]
Actually, this is what math is.
[insert 4 years]
Turns out, no, this is what math is.
[insert 4 years]
Well, yeah, that's what one kind of math was, but here are a bunch of others.
[insert 2 years]
Turns out we're still figuring out what math is.
We should be figuring out the right way to integrate rather than constantly stratifying. Granted, that's harder, but there are plenty of folks who like to study this stuff, and those of us stumbling around in the dark for lack of it would appreciate some real research.
Parent
Re:I'm all for protecting childrens (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Not only that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most importantly, nobody suggest that swimming pools should be outlawed.
Funny...Even Mark Twain Warned About This (Score:5, Insightful)
They change the two motto from "Lead us not into temptation" to "Lead us into temptation" because they learn that only by dealing with temptation will they learn to fight it.
It's the same thing here, just took over 100 years later for anyone to actually have the guts to stand up and say it.
Definition of Objective (Score:3, Insightful)
Granted, I totally agree that a nanny state is a Very Bad Thing (tm), but it seems disingenuous to say that because the report doesn't glorify a nanny state, it is therefore more objective.
But... But... (Score:3, Funny)
Won't somebody think of the busybodies?
British Nanny State - obviously bad! (Score:4, Funny)
More importantly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now the situation would be reversed for a 16 year old teenager. He/she is expected to live independently in just two years, so supervision (on Internet or in the swimming pool) should only happen on voluntary discussion basis of if there is a reason to suspect problems.
Life is dangerous: that's why it's fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Life is dangerous. It's a terminal disease. We can't make everything safe no matter how much we try, because we're all going to die anyway. However, we can make life increasingly unpleasant by removing all the fun, interesting parts of it in the interests of a fundamentally unreachable goal of complete safety.
Thing is: it's a shifting goal. In the early 1900's, being able to buy dynamite at the hardware store made sense. Does it now, from a societal viewpoint? There *are* things that become increasingly dangerous as populations and technologic sophistication rise, so maybe we do need to change our rules over time, to deal with shifting situations. It's not like all safety laws and regulations are bunk. I'm living proof that seatbelts save lives, and if cars weren't legally required to have them, I might've been squished flat by a semi.
The thing is: we, as a culture, need to understand that 'safety' is not, by itself, sufficient reason to pass laws. A better understanding of the consequences is required, to prevent us ending up in a self-imposed prison.
Tags (Score:4, Funny)
Oh really (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the greater issue is how we got down this path in the first place. People don't want to admit it, but it's the feminization of society. It is offensive to modern values to suggest such a thing, but simple observation will show you that the outrage over these restrictions is far more common and fiercer in men than women. Women may disagree with the excesses, but they don't disagree with the principle nearly as much as men do because as voting records have shown countless times in many countries, women tend to value security over freedom. Ever wonder why most libertarians tend to be men?
I'm not trying to bash women here, I'm just saying that society as a whole has taken on an overtly feminized aura to it. There is no balance anymore, the way there used to be.
Re:Oh really (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
This and other findings brought to you.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides the nanny state, what about this concept that "everybody wins". Society needs mediocrity to reward the true winners. It also needs Darwin Award winners.
Great idea -- Let's put the gummint on it (Score:5, Funny)
The bill will create a new Federal agency, the Protection Against Nanny State Agency. This new Agency will monitor public behavior and watch for complacency and exaggerated reliance on the State. Its agents will have power to monitor private conversations and intervene in public or private places. Whenever someone will be heard saying "they oughta be a law" or "why doesn't Congress do something", the agents will intervene, battering down doors if needed, and vigorously wag an aseptic, non-latex-gloved finger in the face of the offender, who will be sternly warned: "That would be asking for a nanny state, Sonny".
The new Agency will cost an estimated $134 billion a year. But this is a small price to pay, considering the Federal government will protect us against the growing menace of the Nanny State.
The Nanny State (Score:4, Insightful)
its kinda sad. (Score:4, Interesting)
It was simply how children behaved.
Now mothers are frightened to let children out of their sight, and a whole generation is growing up mollycoddled and unable to think on their own or take risks. Worse, numerous studies show that without exposure to other people, children to play with etc., they grow up lacking many social traits they need to learn from their peers and with little immunity for many common viruses. And don't even get me started on education.
It's sad, and I wonder (a) how we got to this situations and (b) how to get out of it.