Reply to Super Fudge book outs Santa as fake

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it's so backwards that so many parents/schools/society in general now force reading and writing on kids well before it is age appropriate for them to be doing sit down academic work (age 4- when it's more appropriate to start that around age 6 or even 7 according to most child development experts, and let children learn almost entirely by play before that)... yet we've also started infantilizing them in other ways, like with pretending it's normal for a 9 year old neurotypical kid to believe in Santa Claus.  Is it to make up for the fact that we're forcing them to grow up earlier in other ways?  Or are the children pushing back on being forced to grow up earlier in other ways by now lagging behind in critical thinking/ problem solving skills that would usually allow them to naturally outgrow Santa much earlier?  I've heard that kids are showing delays in things like sensory skills, etc because of forced early academic work taking up brain space that should be spent playing outdoors and learning to play with friends.  It is an interesting thought. [/quote]

Exactly.  I feel this way about playgrounds ... we have to take tetherballs away because they're too dangerous, but we'll put 500 kids onto a 100 sq ft playground with 30 ft tall slides and 5 ft of foam padding to break their falls.  I think what it comes down to is that it's all parent-directed, not kid-directed, but in a weird way based on small areas of personal belief that all combine into a nonsensical whole.  [/quote]

That's exactly it- early and even middle childhood are so parent directed that it takes away things kids actually need- free play, outdoor play, unstructured play without adults nearby to referee/ direct- and replacing it with things we THINK kids should enjoy, like soccer teams for 3 year olds or "fun workbooks" or a trampoline park with a million rules (as opposed to just a real, actual playground without all of the "dangerous" things taken out of it so that kids can actually play freely and learn their body's boundaries like they were meant to).  Part of this is adults deciding that kids need to believe in Santa until they are 10 years old in order to have a "magical childhood" when really, magical christmas memories come from so much more than that if we just step back and let kids experience things the way their own bodies and brains want to. [/quote]

Okay, but there is nothing inherently natural about a dangerous playground as opposed to a safer one. Both of them are constructed by parents and are therefore the result of micromanaging. [/quote]

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