Reply to "I lived the happiest childhood a child could possibly know”

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Don't base your life around a book of fiction about the 1890s which was probably written with nostalgia and selective memory after the two world wars.

My grandparents lived then; while in some ways they had an simpler life, in many ways they did not. Kids often didn't graduate from high school and went to work in cities or on farms, there was a lot of death of siblings and parents from childhood diseases and bacterial infections.

I remember reading Caddie Woodlawn at 12 and longing for that life. It was a sweet story but it wasn't mine.[/quote]

As someone who reads a lot of books from the 1890s and earlier — it’s funny how OP’s sentiment is a constant.  Louisa May Alcott’s “good” parents are always worrying about how kids are growing up too fast and how the fast pace of modern life is bad for their nerves.  Someday maybe I’ll do a retelling of Little Women in the media of a parenting forum.[/quote]

Yeah, but what if they are right?  Maria Montessori had a theory that the more we build up civilization, the more we restrict the movement of children.  As cars and buses take over roads and communities, children have less freedom to run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread, carton of milk and stick of butter (70s Sesame Street reference). They also have less freedom to explore the outdoors, and to some extent the indoors (electricity, TVs, etc have taken over). Kids do fewer chores now and have less opportunity to see how the world works (where food comes from, clothing is made etc).  As the world gets more complicated, we are further removed from the very things kids need to see to understand how the world works and what is really important to keep the world going.
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Do you grow your own food and make your own clothes? Do you really understand how life saving medicines work, or what the Internet is? Do you feel worse off from people living a hundred years ago because of it, or like you have a lesser understanding of how the works works overall?

I'm all for unstructured time spent exploring, etc, but let's not pretend that the past hundred+ years has been a net negative for childhood and society. [/quote]

It hasn’t been a net negative for society but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a net negative for childhood. I’m not saying reverse time, but that adults should be very thoughtful about how they explain and show things to kids. This was one of the fascinating pieces of reading rainbow and mister Rodger’s - they explained to kids how the world works to spark curiosity. I think kids tv and entertainment now with the nick jr and cartoons miss out on that opportunity. As parents we also need to explain factories and systems (both social/economic and scientific) not to say we know stuff but so kids can find their interests and build knowledge. If all you focus on is extra activities like sports, music and math/theatre you and your kid miss out on the coolness of the world and the massive global civilization people have created. [/quote]

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