5 dangerous things you should let your kids do..#4- carry a pocket knife

I just watched the video and owning a pocket knife was #2 not #4?

I'm proud to say that my father thought very much along the same lines as the guy in the video. If I experiment and play with dangerous things under his supervision, I will not be forced to do so behind his back.

From a very young age I was encouraged to take apart broken electronics (and occasionally fix and put back together), play with fire, electricity, and have been carrying a pocket knife from a very young age.

When will people learn that you have to TEACH children how to interact with the world, not try to protect them from EVERYTHING.

GREAT video, thanks for the link!
 
Excellent video all the way around. I can say that my parentrs allowed me to do everything on there (other than the digital media copyright protection- it was before my childhood, however they did buy me a book on learning BASIC so that I could hack my commodore 64 games ;) )
 
ditto on all the comments so far. my parents almost invariably let me learn by experience, especially when i was being stubborn. it's how i learned that you should't touch the stove when your parents tell you not to.
 
play with fire (specifically, learn how to properly control and use it)
own a pocketknife
throw a spear
deconstruct appliances
break the DMCA
drive a car
 
I have to say I totally agree with his philosophy, kids are far to sheltered and protected.The best way to learn is through doing, and so long as they don't die in the process, it should be fine.
 
I love "break the DCMA". Since I was a young lad, I've always had a healthy contempt for rules. My feeling is that dumb laws need to be broken.
 
How about play outside in the woods or yard by themselves

It makes me sad that I have to arrange "play dates" with other parents for my kids to play with their kids usually under adult supervision.

I remember exploring in the woods was great part of my childhood.
 
IMHO, kids are a bit more sheltered than when I was a kid. I thing kids need to have the freedom to make some mistakes and learn from them, but still with some guidance...if that makes any sense.
 
I am a living example of the childhood to be avoided, my family never let me play with anything dangerous, unless it was under close adult supervision. I can shoot (barely) only because A- I had a great jr. high teacher who taught an air rifles class, and B- I got my grandma to buy me a BB gun. I had to argue with my parents for over a year to get a rubber band gun.
Nowadays I just do things behind their back. But at least I'm learning how to survive.
 
In my childhood I was 4/5 or 5/6 depending on how you look at it. Just never got around to the spear...
 
Have a pocket knife
Shoot guns
Climb trees
Ride bikes
Ride skateboards

In addition:
Play with a bull whip
Make black power rockets
Play with fire
Use a hatchet
Archery

All the fun stuff I got to do when I was a kid. :)
 
Wrist-rockets and potato guns are fun. BMX and dirt bikes, good clean fun. Broken bones are better than kids on drugs..
 
Man is he so right!

I remember when i was a kid around 10 years old my dad bought me a wrist rocket and handed it to me and just said " Have fun and be careful" so of course i run outside and start hitting everything, and one time my hand slipped the strap and it flew back and knocked both my front teeth out.

Dad came running out of the house and just said.."well..i guess you wont do that again, Hugh?".

Some of my cousins who are 8 and 5 years old cant even go outside in a fenced in backyard without " adult supervision" and they are not allowed to play in the mud because they might get germs!?!

It just makes me sick that kids cant just be kids anymore. I had to learn stuff the hard way, and I'm glad i did..because otherwise i wouldn't of learned to respect things such as knives, wrist rockets, guns..etc.
 
"They're gonna learn things out of it that they won't get playing with 'Dora The Explorer' toys."


Oh, don't get me started.... you got me started: The idea that kids should learn things for themselves first-hand by experience instead of just believing what they see others do is very important.

We see more and more of this going away. When I was in highschool, we actually dissected animals in biology class. Today, many schools have replaced this with computer simulations. The computer simulation may adequately teach anatomy, true. But it doesn't give the hands-on experience of discovering something is a real experience, of trying doing something for yourself. Learning that experience and a child cultivates that thirst for first-hand knowledge in adults too. You just learn so much more when you get out and do the exploring yourself rather than watching Dora do it for you.




"They're young; they heal fast."

Seven years running a parochial elementary school taught me a lot of things; one being that children are made of amazing stuff. They literally bounce back. I've seen a kid running and playing and said, "Didn't you break your arm the other day?"

"That was three weeks ago, Mr. Gollnick. It's all healed now! See."

Amazing... the paperwork isn't done yet and the kid is already healed.

Obviously, you want to supervise children a bit and protect them from serious injuries, but it is not necessary to protect children from every possible ouch. In fact, ouch is sometimes good. In live in general, there will be ouch; you'll have that. It's important for children to learn that ouch is not a big deal but a fact of life and you put a bandaide or some ice on it and you get on with life.



"It's a sense of 'knowability,' that something is knowable.... that you can know them."

This sense of "knowability" is so important. It's important for children to learn -- so that they will know as adults -- that there is no magic inside the TV set... or the computer or the video game console or the car or the dishwasher or an airplane or anything. If you take the back off of the TV set, there's parts inside there, not magic. We may not understand all of the parts... today. But they are parts and they can be understood and, if you want to and are willing to put the effort into it, YOU can understand them. It's important that children be taught -- so that adults will know -- that there is nothing in this world that you can't, if you want to, figure out and know.

I remember several years ago sitting down on an airplane next to a woman and her five or six year old daughter. The daugher turned to her mother and asked, "Mommy, how do airplanes fly?"

The woman answered, "Magic."

I just had to interject myself: "No! They don't fly by magic. The fly by physics. It's really very simple. The air on top of the wing has to move faster to keep up with the air on the bottom of the wing since the shape of the wing makes the path of the air on top longer. When air moves faster, the pressure is lower. The pressure on the top of the wing is lower and the plane is literally sucked up into air.* It's not magic at all."

Imagine if someone had told Wilbur and Orville Wright that everthing around them was just "magic" and couldn't be understood. They were brought up with this idea of "knowability" and so they set out to understand airflow and flight because they believed they could.





* Technically, this explaination is simplistic and imperfect, true. It's close enough, though, and it imparts that sense of "knowability" that this speaker talks about, that things don't just happen because of magic but because of simple forces and understandable mechanism.
 
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