Report Suggests That Nanny State Might Actually Not Be For the Best

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."

"Top down approach","children will be childern"?

I always thought it was called either "culling the herd" or "being a Darwin Award recipient".

The needs of the US are different from the UK.

At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim

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.

Please elaborate...I'm intrigued about this idea of storing politicians in the septic tank.

Middle ground

Starting off by calling it the "nanny state" is already trying to frame the debate in a way that reinforces particular biases.

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:Middle ground

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.

Re:Middle ground

I don't see anywhere it says we should throw children into dangerous situations they can't cope with.

...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....

Re:Middle ground

I agree with you. Too often parents feel that they need to plan out their child's life, whereas it's probably better in the end to let the child figure out as much of it as is reasonable. Ease them in to decision-making, first on simple activities, like what they're going to do in the backyard, then further into what they're going to eat in restaurants, and further and further. I know for my own sake, my parents always asked me what I was going to do during the summer, not them telling me (unless there was a family event or something of course).

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!"

Re:Middle ground

I ran across a very insightful article a few years back, which is still just as true today:

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.

Re:Middle ground

If you make everything a crime, then everyone is a criminal.

Bingo.

Insert Ferris's monologue from "Atlas Shrugged" here.

(Oh, alright, here:

"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris.

"We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it...

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

"Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.

"Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

-- Ayn Rand, 'Atlas Shrugged' (1957))

I'm all for protecting childrens

But sometimes I confuse myself. I mean, sure, don't show children "adult" things, and make sure they don't swear... but why? Why exactly do we embrace an arbitrary concept of "innocence" in children? I believe being honest is the best way to raise children. Of course my child has already seen breasts, he was breast fed. Why deny their existance just months later? Why not explain how society works and give them the honest scoop?

"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:I'm all for protecting childrens

Agreed w/ almost every word. BUT swear words exist for a reason. You need a way to be rude in society. If someone is a real jerk to you being able to say "fuck off asshole" gives it weight. If there were no swear-words or they were used without notice they could not serve this purpose.

Exactly.

We're protecting the swear words, not the kids.

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.

children aren't computers

The problem with your thinking is that it seems to assume that children are just like adults, that they think the same way, have similar value systems, et cetera -- they just lack experience, so they should be "brought up to speed" in much the same way an ignorant adult would be.

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.

Requires Further Study

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.

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.

Re:I'm all for protecting childrens

Your logic and facts have no place in politically charged public discourse.

Not only that...

At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.

Most importantly, nobody suggest that swimming pools should be outlawed.

Funny...Even Mark Twain Warned About This

In "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," Mark Twain warned about this kind of thing. The town was so proud of their righteousness that they wanted to keep that reputation so they made sure kids were never subjected to temptation so they'd never do bad things, then a stranger comes by, gets fed up with their self righteousness that all he does is tempt all the leading citizens. Since none of them have had much experience with temptation or resisting greed, they all fall in his trap and he shows how corruptible they are.

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.

Life is dangerous: that's why it's fun

People like risk because the thrill of danger followed by the realization of success pushes our pleasure buttons.
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.

Oh really

I was confused there. I could have sworn that creating a risk-averse society was going to lead to a more daring and entrepeneurial economy, a government with balls of steel that stands up for the principles its society claims to hold dear, and a society of people who are independent and capable of functioning on their own without cradle-to-grave hand holding.

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.

Great idea -- Let's put the gummint on it

I think it's a great idea to warn people about the danger of the nanny state. I showed that article to a friend of mine, who is a Congress staffer in Washington D.C. He was enthusiastic. His boss will present it in commission. They'll form a committee to formalize these recommandation and will draft a bill.

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.

Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities

Cutting your child is a crime; why should making them fat and giving them life threatening illnesses be fine?

Wouldn't breeding licenses be more effective?

It seems like this is all just an attempt to deal with the symptoms of the original cause, which is unqualified parents. We require licenses and tests to be able to drive or fly. Licenses to fish or check out library books, yet we allow any drone or sheep-person to enter into the commitment to raise and rear a human being for the next 18 years without so much as a second glance. This is like trying to clean up pollution while hawking hummers to every soccer mom. -W

Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities

Terrorists are people outside a formal government, so no it is not terrorism.

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.

Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities

EVERYTHING is a matter of debate, like it should be. Some things obviously qualify as terrorism, other things not. The debate is mostly about things that lie in the grey area. It is a way of reflecting: "what these guys over there did was pretty heinous... but could it be that some of the things WE do might be just as bad or almost as bad?"

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...

Re:UK Government has Multiple Personalities

Terrorists are people outside a formal government, so no it is not terrorism.

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