Child rearing.

[bluestarultor]

Since this has become an issue in the thread about the 14-year-old boy's arrest, I figured maybe a dedicated thread might be useful to see what page we're all on or maybe for the mods to dump that part of the conversation into if they see fit.

Some highlights:

*post dump*

Originally Posted by Funka Genocide

I can describe most parents I run across in one word. "Defeated."

It takes gusto to raise a child, if you don't have that then don't even try!

Originally Posted by Seil

You know, I can't find a story just like this to prove a point I had about people getting far too worked up about pedophilia in today's society.

It was a story about a father at a fairground, and his kids (along with several others) were going down a big slide, or something like that. Anyways, the father took a few pictures of his kids having fun while some other parents asked him to stop taking pictures. He asked why, and they told him they thought he was a pedophile. A comment which caused the guy to find the cops, or the nearest security guard, and get the guard to affirm that the father was in the right.

Originally Posted by Invisible Queen

As someone who was raised in a small community where the concept of strangers, let alone of not trusting them, never really came up, I can say it's pretty awesome to be "far too trusting". Yeah, you get hurt some, and some people take advantage of you, but it's worth that as it turns out people in general are pretty good, and trust makes it easy to build very close friendships.

Just thought I'd throw that in with the parenting debate.

Originally Posted by Yumil

The problem is without teaching them not to trust strangers, if one of those child rapists does show up and the kid trusts him, the kid's fucked(both literally and figuratively).

Teaching your kids not to trust someone till they've earned it(in particular, at that age, pretty much just people you trust yourself) is not a bad thing and will probably help them in life later on when people like to take advantage of people who are far too trusting.

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

While that's partly true, there's a difference between teaching them to be discerning and paralyzing them with fear. What happens when they actually need to ask for help? Maybe it doesn't come up much, but then neither do kidnappings. By teaching them to be discerning, as in knowing what is and isn't appropriate, kind of like we used to when I was a kid, it's more for them to absorb, but it's ultimately better for them because they're not crying themselves to sleep every night over all the bad, bad men that are out to get them.


Edit: Actually, thinking more on it, no, that's not true at all. Not only are you paralyzing them with fear, but you're breeding a policy of mistrust, which probably makes for a very jaded individual and could hamper their ability to make connections for the rest of their lives. After all, if they're taught people are all assholes, they hold no faith in them and you end up with someone like (oh, the irony) me*. The fact of the matter is that pedophiles are incredibly rare, and they don't just stumble across kids to molest. They molest kids in their own families or neighborhoods, or go to places where kids congregate. A kid is more likely to get hit by a bus than meet one randomly walking down the street. By teaching kids when NOT to trust people instead of teaching them when TO trust them, you open up many more possibilities for them to interact, where if you close that all off, you likewise impose a limit on how far they can reach out to other people.


*note: I had other things teach me people could be jerks. My parents actually got the strangers thing right.

Originally Posted by pocheros

QFT

Caution is what kids should be taught. By insulating your children they won't be able to tell the difference between a safe and an unsafe situation, and will either end up trusting everyone or no one. The differences between these situations can be very subtle and if you aren't given an idea of what normal behaviour is, you have nothing to compare them against. Potentially you will blindly walk into danger because of your failure to recognize these cues. On the other end of the spectrum, you will potentially be fearful of people when 99.9% of them don't have ill intentions.

I could go on and on about how this relates to women specifically- about weird mixed messages that tell women to feel guilty if they are not polite and complacent, yet ever vigilant about the variety of rapists and serial killers that lurk around the corner. A common reaction among raped women isn't "how did this happen to me?" but "how did I let this happen to me?" Pretty fucked up that the blame is placed on the woman. Then they (the media) point out that she accepted a drink from a stranger, or wore a skirt on the bus, or whatever, so now it's HER fault for not heeding the sage advice of society to be fearful of everyone and never leave the house. Not very good tools to work with, yeah?

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

I think this was referenced before, but since Seil was kind enough to provide a link, I'm just going to drop this follow-up essay on the woman who let her kid ride the subway alone:

http://theweek.com/article/index/963...icas-worst-mom

Not an issue: his rape and murder after a year of doing so.

It's probably clear where I stand on the issue of child freedom. Kids can't be protected forever, because when they lose that protection, they can't function.

I also believe in spankings (pain is a good educator and spankings aren't exactly lethal), letting them go out and get scraped knees, and generally letting them be kids. I think we're doing far too much to protect them from bogeymen that aren't really there and letting lawyers decide how we can raise them. And I think that's utterly wrong.



But what do you all think? For current parents, how are you raising your kids every day? For future parents, what are your plans?