Report Suggests That Nanny State Might Actually Not Be For the Best 430
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."
UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:3, Interesting)
Hypocritical much?
Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities (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-year-old girl from the Cumbria area was taken into care because she weighed nine stone."
dear god, 126 pounds! My son is 10 and very tall for his age and he weighs 90 pounds.
Terrorists are people outside a formal government, so no it is not terrorism.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm all for protecting childrens (Score:3, Interesting)
SO they fit in socially. In my house there is no such thing as 'Bad Words' only impolite words. Which is strictly enforced.
Now, I don't knwo what you mean by 'adult'. Exposure to sexual situations buy young children have a negative impact later in life.
As I'm sure you know, kids are not little adults.
"Treat them like children.. they'll act like children..."
treat them like adults.. they'll act like confused children and develop issue.
Now, the care about these situation for a 2 year old is different then an 11 year old.
Re:Life is dangerous: that's why it's fun (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, take it a step further. You choose to wear your seatbelt and it helped. But why do you feel you have the right to tell someone else they must do so, especially given that a third of the time a seatbelt could kill you, not save you? Take it even further, and why shouldn't I be able to choose if I buy a car with seatbelts or without?
I'm not sure if you agree with my conclusions, based on your post's closing it sounds like you could go either way.
Re:Oh really (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
I've said this for years (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm all for protecting childrens (Score:1, Interesting)
Things such as R-rated movies. They would explain to me that what they wanted to watch was probably very violent and would have such-and-such monster or something in it, and I could watch if I wanted to, but it'd be my fault if I got scared. (I didn't watch a horror movie until I was 13, yay. |D)
Very few things were ever hidden/withheld from me, and I think I'm a pretty balanced human being.
Humbug (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wouldn't breeding licenses be more effective? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Middle ground (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm all for protecting childrens (Score:3, Interesting)
My mom told me all about the birds and the bees shortly after my eighth birthday at my request. I remember thinking that the descriptions of sex in her words and in the books all seemed quite hairy. Didn't seem very appealing at the time. But when others had questions years down the road, I was usually the one answering.
My own daughter will find out about the birds and the bees before puberty. I do hope she asks her mom, though...
Re:Farm raised kids vs. City raised kids. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm all for protecting childrens (Score:2, Interesting)
They do?
I suppose it's a matter of degree. I have some pretty fond memories as a 5-year-old of feeling up some girls in their teens. I didn't know why I liked it, I just did. A lot.
Re:Middle ground (Score:5, Interesting)
Bingo.
Insert Ferris's monologue from "Atlas Shrugged" here.
(Oh, alright, here:
-- Ayn Rand, 'Atlas Shrugged' (1957))
Re:children aren't computers (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course children are not adults, either physically, mentally, or experientially. Children are not idiots either, and neither should they be treated like retarded adults or like trained dogs. Children should not be leashed or fenced in like pets. Children are human and need to be treated individually based on their own personalities and intelligence. There is no catch-all parenting method or law that will make children safe, healthy, intelligent or socially upright. Simplistic solutions and ideals are often the worst because they undermine the complexity of the human mind.
And in your last paragraph in regards to teaching algebra too early:
Nope, there is no "too early". If a child can't get it, then don't force it upon him and cause frustration. If a child can get it, and shows an interest and aptitude, then by all means teach it. The problem with Western educational systems is that they are largely not geared to the individual needs of a child, and so we see the success of home schooling. Anecdotally, I also did very poorly throughout school, but in my final year of high school I went to a special public high school (that only let in gifted students, and intellectual misfits like myself). The independent and non-structured studies allowed me to get University offers (and even an unsolicited scholarship offer). So yes children of all ages can succeed if we don't impose artificial barriers on their achievement. The funny thing is that I have never told my parents I went to an alternative school or that I received a scholarship offer. Perhaps they were reading too many Readers Digest articles on parenting, because I never did respect the simple solutions that were offered by these articles, nor the people naive enough to implement them.
So my educated (and non-expert opinion) sways me to put more emphasis on the arguments of the Parent poster than too your own. While I value cognitive development textbooks and all other tools of learning, I will not use them to merely promote my own belief systems.
Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, by describing this as an act of terrorism, you show yourself as a true devotee of the Mail school of hyperbole. So well done you.
Re:its kinda sad. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not just the mothers you have to fear. My wife let my 11 year old walk to the shop around the corner on her own after school. We live in a quiet suburban neighbourhood, but someone reported 'a child roaming the streets unattended'. After a full Child Protection investigation, we're now listed child abusers.
It's really terrifying, we can't explain to anyone, they keep saying that we must be lying, that there must be more to it than that for us to called child abusers. But there really isn't. In this district, it's illegal for a child under the age of 14 to be out of sight of adult supervision outside the home. When I pointed out that I'd been walking to friends houses alone from the age of 9, as long as the parents at each end knew were I was going, I got a lecture on how abused children grow into abusive parents, and that they were there to break the cycle of abuse.
Just remember that, when you hear all the stories about "1 in 4 children grows up abused".
Re:Farm raised kids vs. City raised kids. (Score:3, Interesting)
But I guess if I need a titanium rod up my back to make me not be a creampuff, so be it.
-b
Re:Wouldn't breeding licenses be more effective? (Score:3, Interesting)
So when a society takes on that more humane and social role, it should also consider the burdens placed upon the rest of society, especially when people who are genuinely unfit to raise children are allowed to get in that position. Once you are provided with the protection of a social welfare net and all of it's support services you are bound by the reasonable rules of that social welfare net. You absolutely do not have the right, to reproduce children and then treat them in any manner you wish.
So genetics and overpopulation being what they both definably are, society is forced to wake up to itself and consider the difference between the freedom of an individual and the burdens of the next generation, the next individual, they do not have freedom of choice of genetics or choice over the excesses of their parents. Children are not pets, they are citizens with limited rights and limited only in their expression of their control and not in the right to care and protection.
Nanny State (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanny_state [wikipedia.org]