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The Weedy Garden of Familyhood « Easily Distracted
On the other hand, I think he’s missing something new about contemporary middle-class childhood. Sometimes, yes, it’s about ferrying the kids between contained, safe experiences. But also, I think that a lot of middle-class family life is now about the simultaneous adventures of children and adults, that children and adults are sharing far more of their experiences.
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood - The New York Review of Books
There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness.
The Valve - A Literary Organ | Emotion Recollected in Tranquility
Parents tell stories to children in a setting that is comfortable and safe and those stories are generally calibrated with a sense of what interests and pleases the child, but is not too frightening. Children hear stories in which characters are hungry or thirsty, but eventually find food and water, in which characters are lost and frightened, but then found, in which important relationships are imperiled, but restored, in which new relationships are formed and, in time, in which important relationships may be lost forever. They are allowed to experience a wide range of emotional behavior in a context where they are safe.
digital digs: the joys of failure
We ought to be able to say to those kids that striking out is an acceptable risk. It doesn't feel good. It isn't a desirable outcome. But if you can't accept the risk of striking out, you can never get a hit. Maybe 8 year-olds can't understand these risks, but watching my kids I think they are already making more sophisticated calculations about risk in their social interactions with friends.
The Hero Workshop
I’m Matt Langdon, creator of the Hero Workshop program...
I started the Hero Workshop in 2006 with the goal of using the skills I’d developed through living the camp life of “learn everything, just in case”. At camp I worked with people aged from five to “don’t ask” in sometimes wildly different circumstances and environments. They helped me realise what a real hero is.
America's Tough Love Habit | Mother Jones
For decades, Americans have tolerated "tough love" treatment not just for terrorists, but for vulnerable youth.
Orcinus - Blame It On the Parents
But Hannah Arendt, Alice Miller, David Hackett Fischer, and George Lakoff have all argued persuasively that what our parents teach us about power has a resounding effect on how we relate to power as adults. If we want to create a progressive world, we have to start by teaching the kids that they have the right to listen to their own voices, recognize and defend their own boundaries, and choose which authorities they will invest with their respect and submission. Democracy, like everything else, starts at home.
Neuroscience and social deprivation | I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told | The Economist
How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain
Falling for Science - The MIT Press
In this collection, distinguished scientists, engineers, and designers as well as twenty-five years of MIT students describe how objects encountered in childhood became part of the fabric of their scientific selves. In two major essays that frame the collection, Turkle tells a story of inspiration and connection through objects that is often neglected in standard science education and in our preoccupation with the virtual.
Sense and Sensibility « Easily Distracted
So why is there such an intense commitment from the medical establishment to “breast is best”, a rhetoric that seems to outweigh the modest positives of exclusive breastfeeding? I think this kind of rhetorical overcompensation is typical of a lot of practices that have expert consensus behind them but where their rate of adoption by the general public or their incorporation into policy lags behind that consensus.
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I think this kind of overemphasis also has a corrosive effect on the formation of expert knowledge itself. For one, it underwrites a dangerous sense of inside and outside within an expert community, that you can only talk about proportional benefits and harms when you’re with fellow experts, and when strangers come in the room, you have to switch on the megaphones. For another, this sensibility encourages experts to isolate and amplify the causal force of single variables, which is a basic problem with much social and behavioral science. You get rewarded in various ways for a finding that disaggregates one small aspect of a hugely multivariable outcome because that’s where the feeder streams to public health, policy formation and the like are, it’s what produces findings that can be implemented, encouraged, advocated. You get shunted aside if you firmly insist that the life outcomes for children are a massively complex consequence of income, family stability, physical environment, feeding practices, genetics, influential peers and inspirational models, education, luck, complex-systems interactions between institutions and events, and the mysterious alchemy of the human condition.
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What I really want is for us to get to a place where modest incremental benefits can be argued for using modest incremental rhetoric, where experts don’t feel the need for overcompensatory alarmism or feel they have to circle the wagons in order to get attention or bludgeon an uncooperative public into change. But the burden of making that change is not all on them. Some of it rests on the mainstream media and the way they report on scientific or expert findings.
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Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? Gene Weingarten Reports.
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Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.
In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. "We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters."
Basics - In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue - NYTimes.com
"In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human."
Matthew Yglesias » Jindal’s Debt Analogy
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The first thing to observe is that this doesn’t even begin to resemble a macroeconomic argument. The moral of Jindal’s parable, is basically that’s it’s per se wrong to implement policies that increase the national debt. That doing is “irresponsible” due to the burden it places on “our children.” But of course someone who actually believed that it’s per se wrong to implement policies that increase the national debt would have opposed the 2001 Bush tax cuts.
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Which leaves us with the narrower point that “things we do not need” is actually doing all the work in the analogy. But which things? People who get laid off at a time of generally contracting employment really do need unemployment insurance money. I’m sure these people would prefer to get a job, but when the total number of jobs is decreasing that’s just very difficult.
FrontPage Magazine - Remembering Sarah By David Horowitz.
Remembering Sarah By David Horowitz.
Sympathetic portrait of his decesased daughter. via Rick Perlstein
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