Of course I am joking. I am pointing out just how stupid people are for thinking that a few minutes alone IN THEIR OWN HOME is child abuse, but sending them out on the street is perfectly OK.
They will claim that they don't believe it, but when you take situations that they think are 'safe', and the situations that they think are 'child abuse', that is basically what they describe.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the US, it is so bad that by the age of three, I had to teach my son that he had to have a secret identity. Like Superman. That when the other kids come over to play, we put away the electronics projects, we don't tell them that the computer is yours, you don't suggest chess, or read books to them. Pull out the simple toys when they come over. The toy kitchen, the balls, the hot wheels. It's still fun, and it doesn't make their parents feel uncomfortable.
People will flat out accuse you of abusing your child if your child is too smart, and you don't try to stifle them. Just look at many of the comments in this thread.
If a child is bashing in a laptop at the age of four, the parent has failed the child. For those children that simply must know what happens, the parent has failed by not picking up an already broken laptop, taking their kid outside and bashing in a laptop with their child in an appropriate fashion.
True, we now live in a world where we silently do long term harm to all of our children so that we are not the ones made an example of if we turn out to be the unfortunate case of an extremely rare visible harm.
Suggesting that people not let their kids use computers makes as much sense as suggesting people not let their children learn to read. Sure, they will pick either one up eventually, but the sooner they can effortlessly doe either one, the larger and richer their world becomes.
In our house, the youngest recommended age has been considered the oldest that you can expect a child to be interested in a toy. The ages on toys are like the warnings on coffee cups declaring the contents hot. They are to prevent lawsuit when the slowest of our society injure themselves doing something that they should know better than doing. Although sometimes it is still fun to play with toys that don't challenge you intellectually.
I would agree. I used Ubuntu with my son when he was one. Actually formatted his drive and made him reinstall it himself when he turned two. This was just before Edubuntu was released. gCompris was awesome for him. It is probably below the level of a bright 4 year old, but if the kid hasn't got at least a couple of years of computer use under his belt by 4, it might be just right for him. It has some nice programs for teaching kids how to use a mouse by letting them uncover pictures. It starts off with just moving the mouse over large tiles, and works it's way down to double clicking on small tiles to show the pictures.
As for the "fear of the boobies", I tend to agree, and have never restricted my child from seeing nudity. I don't put porn in front of him, and at 6, he hasn't gone looking for it. Naked people just don't faze him though. He does understand that there are appropriate times to be naked, and inappropriate times. While he was figuring it out, there were many times that he would ask if something on tv was inappropriate or not, and where he could run around in his underwear, and where he could not.
That being said, the idea that violence is OK to see, and sex is not OK, isn't entirely crazy. Violence is a natural human urge that we learn to control so that we can live in and have the benefit of society. This urge is displayed in children from pretty much as soon as they are mobile enough to bang things together. If not taught about violence, a child will be vicious by the age of 2. The urge for sex on the other hand is something that most humans don't start to feel until they become adults, generally between the ages of 8 and 15. 13 being the classic age that many cultures across the planet recognize as being average.
One of the big problems is that our culture doesn't recognize the difference between nudity and sex. Nudity is something that is perfectly normal for prepubescent kids. Sex, not so much. Our screwed up culture has this backwards. You can't have a naked woman on TV, or even worse, a naked man, but you can have anthropomorphizing characters performing auto-fellatio in Shrek 2, and Man/Dozen woman orgies in Happy Feet, and people that would be horrified by a naked body are perfectly happy.
Even more bizarre than no nudity unless it has a knife in it, is the idea that nudity is bad for children, but tranny jokes, and giving oneself oral in the town square and huge orgies are good clean kiddie fun.
The reality is that if found at home at that age, the parents will likely be arrested. If the kids is outside, or half way home from school, everything is considered just fine. There is this bizarre disassociation that goes on with kids and being alone.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in the US, kids are being retarded more and more, so they have the mentality of a 5 year old at the age of 10, and they have the mentality of a 13 year old at the age of 26. Kids here are not growing up quicker, they just keep getting slower and slower.
An 8 or 9 year old that cannot spend the night alone is simply retarded. I recognize that we have codified in law that all citizens must now be retarded, but the only irresponsible thing about leaving an non-retarded 8 or 9 year old alone is that men with guns will come and victimize them. The men with guns will just happen to also have badges.
It is a police state when parents are not able to teach their children responsibility by giving them time to care for themselves in appropriate doses. What is the pinnacle of irresponsibility is never leaving your child alone until they hit the age of 18, and then sending them off to live unsupervised for the first time in a place that is infamous for alcohol abuse. Of course, in our screwed up society, having a child who has never spent a weekend alone until they are shipped off to college is considered "good parenting".
You seem to only be familiar with retarded children. I gave my son his first computer a couple of weeks after his first birthday. 5 minutes showing him how the mouse and keyboard work and loading gCompris for him, and a couple of hours later showing him how to properly shut down the machine, and how to load gCompris himself, and he was off and running. By the end of the first day, he was perfectly competent at using the computer for the applications he wanted to run. On his second birthday, I formatted his hard drive and gave him a copy of Ubuntu on CD. He had no problem installing it. No, he couldn't read, but it didn't take a 3 year old to figure out which button was the "Next" button.
By the time he was three, he had started looking up what he wanted on the internet. So, while you are aghast at the idea of giving a 4-year old his own computer, I am aghast that you wouldn't expect children to be raised well enough not to destroy things by the age of 4, and aghast that the level of retardation that you seem to think is normal. If I am wrong about what is normal for a 4 year old, and you are right, then I will have to severely lower my view of humanity.
Your right. It isn't child abuse for them to be outside by themselves, so everyone should remember that if they want to make a quick run down to the corner store, they should lock the kid outside. It will keep the parent out of trouble.
Seriously, just a generation ago, it was simply no big deal for a 5 year old to spend a short amount of time alone. By 10 or 11, they could spend the night alone, and by 12 or 13, they were babysitting other kids for the weekend. I don't know what kind of mass genetic disease has spread through the populations, but for those kids whose genetic code is still in tact, leaving a 5 year old at home is NOT child abuse. No matter what most state agencies say.
You don't have to even watch a movie or TV show with a "hero". Just watch something like Americas Funniest Home Videos. You will see people cheering the sight of small children and innocent bystanders being attacked by animals, and bludgeoned by heavy objects. These won't even be fake videos. These will be real live injuries.
No, it isn't. Sears in the early 1900s, easily was a big a percentage of all retail as Amazon is today. Keep in mind that at one time Sears mail order was so big, and so ingrained into US society that people bought their cars and even houses through the Sears catalog.
Mail order "On The Internet" is still mail-order. Pretending like "internet merchants" are different from any mail order business for the last hundred years is starting the debate with a lie. Either we have a 100 year tradition of having an "unlevel playing field", or we have a 100 year tradition of considering it perfectly fair.
In fact, a quick look via Google, and we can find that mail order has existed for the entire time that our country has. So, at no time in our countries history has mail order ever been taxed. If you think that it has always been unfair, fine. That doesn't change the fact that "internet sales" ARE mail order "On A Computer".
It is an unlevel playing field that has existed for over 100 years, and the brick and mortar stores have dominated most markets. That might not invalidate your argument, but it is a factor that people seem to conveniently ignore.
What do you mean outdated? Mail-order is easily over a hundred years old. We were not up in arms when people didn't pay sales tax on the car they bought from Sears via mail order a hundred years ago. How is it any different now with a product from Amazon?
Honestly, the whole practice of even calling it "online" sales is a misnomer that confuses the argument. "Online" sales have existed long before "Online" existed. "Online" sales ARE mail-order sales. Arguing about Amazon mail-order is no different then arguing about people buying mail-order in 1900. Just as with everything else, "On a computer" does not make mail-order some completely new thing that is somehow magically different from what has been going on for the last 100 years.
That is missing key point when people talk about "scientists".
Is a scientist someone who was accredited by particular institutions that have only existed for a few hundred years?
Is a scientist someone who formally employs one of the "Scientific Methods" that have only existed for a few hundred years?
Is a scientist anyone who seeks out information?
etc, etc, etc...
You have obviously never met many 'bad guys'. Most of them want nothing to do with guns. They want to get in and get out without any conflict. The ones that are looking to shoot someone are not going to be slowed down my the "good guys" being unarmed. In fact, instead of the "bad guys" being able to shoot "good guy" after "good guy", unhindered, they will very quickly have their "bad guy" career ended if "good guys" are armed.
Honestly, I don't even know what you are talking about with an "arms-race". Do you think that the guy that robs little old ladies are going to start carrying missile launchers or something?
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Of course I am joking. I am pointing out just how stupid people are for thinking that a few minutes alone IN THEIR OWN HOME is child abuse, but sending them out on the street is perfectly OK.
They will claim that they don't believe it, but when you take situations that they think are 'safe', and the situations that they think are 'child abuse', that is basically what they describe.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the US, it is so bad that by the age of three, I had to teach my son that he had to have a secret identity. Like Superman. That when the other kids come over to play, we put away the electronics projects, we don't tell them that the computer is yours, you don't suggest chess, or read books to them. Pull out the simple toys when they come over. The toy kitchen, the balls, the hot wheels. It's still fun, and it doesn't make their parents feel uncomfortable.
People will flat out accuse you of abusing your child if your child is too smart, and you don't try to stifle them. Just look at many of the comments in this thread.
Ahhh... Then instead of it being half as fast, make it a quarter as fast.
If a child is bashing in a laptop at the age of four, the parent has failed the child. For those children that simply must know what happens, the parent has failed by not picking up an already broken laptop, taking their kid outside and bashing in a laptop with their child in an appropriate fashion.
True, we now live in a world where we silently do long term harm to all of our children so that we are not the ones made an example of if we turn out to be the unfortunate case of an extremely rare visible harm.
Suggesting that people not let their kids use computers makes as much sense as suggesting people not let their children learn to read. Sure, they will pick either one up eventually, but the sooner they can effortlessly doe either one, the larger and richer their world becomes.
In our house, the youngest recommended age has been considered the oldest that you can expect a child to be interested in a toy. The ages on toys are like the warnings on coffee cups declaring the contents hot. They are to prevent lawsuit when the slowest of our society injure themselves doing something that they should know better than doing. Although sometimes it is still fun to play with toys that don't challenge you intellectually.
Yeah! Why would anyone want their 4 year old thinking. They should be learning that sports is what the world is about!
I would agree. I used Ubuntu with my son when he was one. Actually formatted his drive and made him reinstall it himself when he turned two. This was just before Edubuntu was released. gCompris was awesome for him. It is probably below the level of a bright 4 year old, but if the kid hasn't got at least a couple of years of computer use under his belt by 4, it might be just right for him. It has some nice programs for teaching kids how to use a mouse by letting them uncover pictures. It starts off with just moving the mouse over large tiles, and works it's way down to double clicking on small tiles to show the pictures.
As for the "fear of the boobies", I tend to agree, and have never restricted my child from seeing nudity. I don't put porn in front of him, and at 6, he hasn't gone looking for it. Naked people just don't faze him though. He does understand that there are appropriate times to be naked, and inappropriate times. While he was figuring it out, there were many times that he would ask if something on tv was inappropriate or not, and where he could run around in his underwear, and where he could not.
That being said, the idea that violence is OK to see, and sex is not OK, isn't entirely crazy. Violence is a natural human urge that we learn to control so that we can live in and have the benefit of society. This urge is displayed in children from pretty much as soon as they are mobile enough to bang things together. If not taught about violence, a child will be vicious by the age of 2. The urge for sex on the other hand is something that most humans don't start to feel until they become adults, generally between the ages of 8 and 15. 13 being the classic age that many cultures across the planet recognize as being average.
One of the big problems is that our culture doesn't recognize the difference between nudity and sex. Nudity is something that is perfectly normal for prepubescent kids. Sex, not so much. Our screwed up culture has this backwards. You can't have a naked woman on TV, or even worse, a naked man, but you can have anthropomorphizing characters performing auto-fellatio in Shrek 2, and Man/Dozen woman orgies in Happy Feet, and people that would be horrified by a naked body are perfectly happy.
Even more bizarre than no nudity unless it has a knife in it, is the idea that nudity is bad for children, but tranny jokes, and giving oneself oral in the town square and huge orgies are good clean kiddie fun.
While I am sorry for your child's disablement, it is probably wise given the current legal climate.
The reality is that if found at home at that age, the parents will likely be arrested. If the kids is outside, or half way home from school, everything is considered just fine. There is this bizarre disassociation that goes on with kids and being alone.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in the US, kids are being retarded more and more, so they have the mentality of a 5 year old at the age of 10, and they have the mentality of a 13 year old at the age of 26. Kids here are not growing up quicker, they just keep getting slower and slower.
An 8 or 9 year old that cannot spend the night alone is simply retarded. I recognize that we have codified in law that all citizens must now be retarded, but the only irresponsible thing about leaving an non-retarded 8 or 9 year old alone is that men with guns will come and victimize them. The men with guns will just happen to also have badges.
It is a police state when parents are not able to teach their children responsibility by giving them time to care for themselves in appropriate doses. What is the pinnacle of irresponsibility is never leaving your child alone until they hit the age of 18, and then sending them off to live unsupervised for the first time in a place that is infamous for alcohol abuse. Of course, in our screwed up society, having a child who has never spent a weekend alone until they are shipped off to college is considered "good parenting".
You seem to only be familiar with retarded children. I gave my son his first computer a couple of weeks after his first birthday. 5 minutes showing him how the mouse and keyboard work and loading gCompris for him, and a couple of hours later showing him how to properly shut down the machine, and how to load gCompris himself, and he was off and running. By the end of the first day, he was perfectly competent at using the computer for the applications he wanted to run. On his second birthday, I formatted his hard drive and gave him a copy of Ubuntu on CD. He had no problem installing it. No, he couldn't read, but it didn't take a 3 year old to figure out which button was the "Next" button.
By the time he was three, he had started looking up what he wanted on the internet. So, while you are aghast at the idea of giving a 4-year old his own computer, I am aghast that you wouldn't expect children to be raised well enough not to destroy things by the age of 4, and aghast that the level of retardation that you seem to think is normal. If I am wrong about what is normal for a 4 year old, and you are right, then I will have to severely lower my view of humanity.
Your right. It isn't child abuse for them to be outside by themselves, so everyone should remember that if they want to make a quick run down to the corner store, they should lock the kid outside. It will keep the parent out of trouble.
Seriously, just a generation ago, it was simply no big deal for a 5 year old to spend a short amount of time alone. By 10 or 11, they could spend the night alone, and by 12 or 13, they were babysitting other kids for the weekend. I don't know what kind of mass genetic disease has spread through the populations, but for those kids whose genetic code is still in tact, leaving a 5 year old at home is NOT child abuse. No matter what most state agencies say.
You don't have to even watch a movie or TV show with a "hero". Just watch something like Americas Funniest Home Videos. You will see people cheering the sight of small children and innocent bystanders being attacked by animals, and bludgeoned by heavy objects. These won't even be fake videos. These will be real live injuries.
No, it isn't. Sears in the early 1900s, easily was a big a percentage of all retail as Amazon is today. Keep in mind that at one time Sears mail order was so big, and so ingrained into US society that people bought their cars and even houses through the Sears catalog.
Mail order "On The Internet" is still mail-order. Pretending like "internet merchants" are different from any mail order business for the last hundred years is starting the debate with a lie. Either we have a 100 year tradition of having an "unlevel playing field", or we have a 100 year tradition of considering it perfectly fair.
In fact, a quick look via Google, and we can find that mail order has existed for the entire time that our country has. So, at no time in our countries history has mail order ever been taxed. If you think that it has always been unfair, fine. That doesn't change the fact that "internet sales" ARE mail order "On A Computer".
It is an unlevel playing field that has existed for over 100 years, and the brick and mortar stores have dominated most markets. That might not invalidate your argument, but it is a factor that people seem to conveniently ignore.
What do you mean outdated? Mail-order is easily over a hundred years old. We were not up in arms when people didn't pay sales tax on the car they bought from Sears via mail order a hundred years ago. How is it any different now with a product from Amazon?
Honestly, the whole practice of even calling it "online" sales is a misnomer that confuses the argument. "Online" sales have existed long before "Online" existed. "Online" sales ARE mail-order sales. Arguing about Amazon mail-order is no different then arguing about people buying mail-order in 1900. Just as with everything else, "On a computer" does not make mail-order some completely new thing that is somehow magically different from what has been going on for the last 100 years.
That is missing key point when people talk about "scientists".
Is a scientist someone who was accredited by particular institutions that have only existed for a few hundred years?
Is a scientist someone who formally employs one of the "Scientific Methods" that have only existed for a few hundred years?
Is a scientist anyone who seeks out information?
etc, etc, etc...
You have obviously never met many 'bad guys'. Most of them want nothing to do with guns. They want to get in and get out without any conflict. The ones that are looking to shoot someone are not going to be slowed down my the "good guys" being unarmed. In fact, instead of the "bad guys" being able to shoot "good guy" after "good guy", unhindered, they will very quickly have their "bad guy" career ended if "good guys" are armed.
Honestly, I don't even know what you are talking about with an "arms-race". Do you think that the guy that robs little old ladies are going to start carrying missile launchers or something?
10% maybe?
You do realize that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are arguments FOR 'terrorism' don't you? They just happen to have been on our side.