What's your point? This is a pointless esssay, and ignores the reality and the complexity of the real world. Children are not equiped to understand everything. So simplify.
This is a pointless esssay, and ignores the reality and the complexity of the real world.
It seems to me that the point of the essay was that it is possible to tell children the truth, even though the truth is complex. The author's childhood and parenthood, as described in the essay, provide at least one example that it can work.
Yes, but the wisdom of thousands of years of human cultural evolution as well as our instincts tell us not to do this. If it worked in one case that is no reason to also do it.
My dad recently told a story about how he got scammed out of practically all his heavy machinery when I was 8 years old. He was completely broke, his machines were in another town, the scammer had run off and he had no means of earning money without transporting his machines back. But he had no money to do this. So for 6 months, he ran around trying to borrow money so he could transport the machines back and start earning money.
I remember when the machines were gone. But I did not associate it with anything, I thought they were out on a job. If my Dad had told me that he had been scammed, and the machines were stuck and he had no income, and that debts were piling up every single day, I would have understood the problem, and to god, that would have been the most terrible thing that I could have imagined.
I would have wondered how someone could scam my dad. I would have come up with ways of trying to get the machines home. I would have worried that we would become poor.
Knowing that information would have been a terrible thing for me to know as an 8 year old, exactly because I would have understood what it meant. If any one of you claims that telling an 8 year old that type of stuff is good for the child, then you are damn idiots who have no place raising a child.
For me as a child, lightning was already very scary, even though I understood how unlikely it was to happen. Compare an event like my father losing his money to something abstract and unlikely to lightning, and you understand by how much more it would have worried me.
Anyone who advocates telling children that type of information is completely unfit to raise children.
Well, I agree that you should not be 100% truthful to your kids since our role is to slowly introduce them to the real world, but you should hear the stuff that my mother-in-law comes up with to convince my 3 year old to do things: "I have to leave your house now because my doggy is lonely and misses me" or "we can't play with that toy right now because the toy is tired and wants to go to bed" or "its time to leave the playground because the policeman just called me up and said its time to go."
