This was fascinating! Thank you for your unique perspective. My son was very interested in learning computer programming when he saw me and my husband constantly doing this for work. I found him Scratch. He refused to even try it, because it was obviously for kids, with cartoon characters. He started working through a book I bought for my middle schooler niece called Python programming for Kids by Sande and Sande, and taught himself so much. I let him use my laptop (I supervised, with me being rather paranoid about the Internet as he was seven) and he taught himself so much. He typed in programs slowly and tinkered with them. Great start. He does research in computer science now after an undergrad in math and CS, and it sort of began with this day I just wrote about.
> What psychological damage would be done to a six year old from seeing a picture of two humans engaged in sexual intercourse that was not done, over the centuries, to six year old farm children observing cattle engaged in the same activity for real has never been explained to me.
The sexual images you see on the internet are not selected from the same distribution as those possibly seen by children in the past. They’ve gone through an evolutionary process selecting for the most extreme forms of emotional arousal.
Watching an act of voluntary loving intercourse may not be too bad for a kid. I’d still prefer they didn’t, and yeah maybe I’m just squeamish. I trust my instincts on this one. But what about watching a simulated, or real rape? Definitely not something I want my kids exposed to.
I agree that the walled garden idea is bad and much of school is a series of exercises in absurdity. But I still care about what my kids see on the internet, because of the algorithms designed to attract and addict them.
Overall, I want them to have experiences that will help prepare them to be functional adults. I think what happens in the physical world, when they pursue their own interests, is much more likely to be of value than exposing them a machine evolved to keep people emotionally aroused and perpetually glued to it.
Families lived in single roomed homes, children grew up in brothels,etc, they were just fine. In Hawaii, grandmother's would ritualistically given their prepubescent grandchildren blowjobs daily to ensure they grew up viral. Kids generally start "sex play" around kindergarten. No harm to be found. The problem isn't the act, it's their parents and teachers causing the harm by making them feel bad about something no different than giving a high five.
At six every girl in my trailer park has already had "sex" as had every boy playing "house" to simply emulating what adults to grow up, no different than any other emulated behavior.
And yet Native Hawaiian culture survived and thrived just fine until they met the West. Masturbating small boys was a trick used by nannies for centuries to get them to sleep or stop crying, the Brits turned out fine and even build a global spanning empire. Someone everyone in my neighborhood all grew up just fine.
You are missing the point. Abuse of any sort is generally a social construct, it's not an objective thing. The harm is not in the act, the harm is done by the third party observer who victimizes them. But yeah feel free to condemn the entire Native Hawaiian culture, Islam, Judaism, and Shakespeare from your view way up there.
What sexual act performed by an adult towards a child would you consider objectively wrong, regardless of circumstances? None? Is it all just a social construct in your view?
You didn't answer the critique. You have yet to explain how those ritualistic acts objectively harmed Native Hawaiians practicing them, likewise how St. Mary was objectively harmed having sex with God at 14. Cleopatra was a child prostitute, she turned out just fine and by all accounts, better for it.
Peter, if it isn't obvious to you that child prostitution causes psychological trauma to the child, then we have nothing in common. Further discussion will achieve nothing and is not worthwhile to me.
I agree with what you say about modern pornographic images being from a different distribution.
Also, I'm wondering if children in the past would've seen animals at it often enough that they would've become desensitized from that angle. Might a pubescent child seeing a pornographic picture today react differently because of its unusualness, even aside from anything else?
I am often surprised at how little work children are expected to do, or to be able to do. I suspect part of the problem is that parents find it easier to just do things themselves than teach children to do it and clean up the mess when it inevitably goes wrong. Particularly if the kid isn't really into doing the work. In some ways I suspect the issue is one of in the moment laziness, not wanting to teach/force the kids to do the work, and part is a misunderstanding of the long term effects, that time spent teaching now will save time later as the kid can be of use, and that much later being of use to themselves will be the most valuable.
Relatedly, when my kids were a bit younger they would sometimes ask why some parents let their kids do whatever that I was telling mine not to, or telling mine they had to do something other kids weren't required, I often would say "Those parents must not love their kids enough to teach them how to behave." Admittedly it was just a nicer sounding version of "You are three; just shut up and do what I say," at first, but I realized over time it was probably literally true. Teaching your kids how to behave isn't easy, but they really benefit from it when they are habitually the kind of decent people people other people like to be around. Those parents who can't be bothered to actually identify and enforce rules for the kids are not doing them any favors, but just letting them wander lost in the maze of social interactions. Likewise, I don't think parents who keep their kids away from being capable of doing work and expecting to do some are doing them any favors.
I think the walled garden metaphor is wrong, but I also think that children should not be thrown into the cesspool of the internet and not given a flotation device to assist.
There's a happy medium somewhere.
Children need (IMHO) boundaries to keep them mostly safe and to allow them to mature by pushing at those boundaries.
Many people my age worked menial jobs when they were teenagers, which exposed them to adults other than their parents. Todays, teenagers mostly don’t work and don’t have that exposure. I think that is why they don’t grow up as fast.
You might be surprised at what orthodox Jewish boys learn in Talmud.
And as for the other thing - totally agree. One thing I love about my kids school is that the kids naturally do stuff and don't wait around for adults to do it for them. I saw this by lunch, the tables and chairs had been pushed to one side, and the kids - without any adult direction whatsoever- set them up properly. And they have gardening as a subject. Having some impact on real things is so healthy for kids.
(Holding a screechy baby so apologies if even less quality than usu)
I’ve been a teacher for a long time. You are right that kids want to do things, and they value highly the growth of competence they experience when authentic learning actually happens in a classroom. Art, my undergrad major, is my preferred subject and one of the rewards of teaching it in secondary school is being able to openly attempt to harness this for motivational purposes. It doesn’t take much, because the desire is common and widespread among kids of very different backgrounds. I try to judiciously trot out familiar, well-worn references to broadly shared experiences- the frustration of trying to learn watercolor at 7 years old without any useful guidance, and the fact that kids with good shading skills acquire a rep as talented artists in jr. high are two of my most frequently repeated ones - to remind them that durable misconceptions can limit them. And, now that I’m about to retire and am headed rapidly for my dotage, the hoops and obstacles my old man compelled me to navigate in my youth are increasingly appreciated as the best blessings available from the old coot. At 18 I extracted and replaced a broken engine out of the clanking jalopy he’d gifted me. For a kid with rudimentary mechanical skills it was a good piece of work. I wanted to prove something to him and ultimately he wasn’t as impressed as I had hoped. But I knew what I was capable of, and that was worth the effort. It still is.
It is surely true that parents who are well enough off don't push their children to work for wages. Well and good. But children learn also through imitation. If parents work hard, at least some kids want to work. Wife and I grew up that way, and so has our daughter. We all jumped at the chance to earn money, knowing also that it made one more independent.
As for seeing things, it's important to let kids go out and explore on their own. My wife and I were lucky in that regard, and we made sure our daughter would be.
It's always good to look back a little to get some perspective. Until perhaps the mid 19th century urban kids learned about sex by sleeping in the same bed with each other or with their parents. Many of our worries are the worries of the well off.
A distant cousin wrote a book, No Life For A Lady, about her childhood growing up in remote New Mexico in the late 1800, the ultimate free range kids. Spending all day riding to a distant post office and back at age 8 or 10, starting your day by tracking down your horse because if you tied them up at night, foraging was so scarce they'd starve, and one time stretching it out to come back around midnight because the horse had strayed to an Indian camp -- at age 8 or 10.
I don't like horses, cows, deserts, or heat. I ought to despise that life. But I could not help envying her, and her family, such an incredible free range childhood.
There is an article in the recent Economist on how GenZ isn't lost forever. I had just read the Anxious Generation and vowed that if I had any more kids I would have to put them in a Skinner box. I'm glad to read you and the Economist doubting that this new wired generation is lost forever.
There were two themes in the book: encourage free play and control the kid's access to digital media. The Skinner box might have been a poor analogy, but I envisioned all the battles trying to raise kids shielded from the world as it is.
Ah yes, I was wondering. It seemed to me that the Skinner Box is exactly what you want to do everything to keep them away from, as it is the functional core of pretty much every addictive online process. I see a lot of people using the term lately, and I don't think they actually know what it means.
Totally agree. I lived in Japan for a while doing judo daily at a big dojo that mainly teaches kids. The standard of the boys' judo was incredible: most boys over 7 were better than me. What struck me was that in Japan children's judo classes consist of... wait for it... judo. Meanwhile in the UK, where I'm from, kids judo instructors are all determined to find any possible way to avoid doing actual judo. It's all stupid games. But judo itself IS a game, and is fun and rewarding. Childhood is a brief window of opportunity in which people (yes, people) can acquire mastery, or lay the foundations for mastery, in a great variety of skills that are essentially impossible to excel in if not treated seriously until later in life. I think part of the problem is that people fail to grasp the extent of human excellence. Go watch Yuja Wang performing a piano concerto. Try to inwardly digest the level of mastery she possesses. How do you think she spent her childhood? Now ask yourself this: does she seem deprived? Does she seem emotionally stunted? Do you think she would be happier had she been coddled as a kid?
My view is that parents often wall their children off not because they fear for their children, but because they fear for themselves. They fear the potentially uncomfortable conversations their children may start.
When my kids were young, my wife and I decided that they'd have unfettered internet access from a young age. I think that worked out well overall, but it did have some unfortunate side effects.
One of the worst effects is that it allowed my kids (nerdy and quiet) to join online peer groups without my observation. They ended up in some groups that I think had a negative effect on them.
Children should be considered a type of hybrid, a cross between a wild animal and a mad scientist. For a time, the wall makes sense and then after a time, the wall can come down. The trick, I suppose, is to know the time.
Could it possibly be that the 6 year old seeing the picture of humans would connect it to mom and dad, while seeing two animals engaging in the act would not. Mom and dad probably don't want to either lie to the child or try to explain the action to someone incapable of understanding the words in the explanation.
But then, I wouldn't be surprised if most medieval children were aware of their parents engaging in the act. Most medieval families slept in the same room, if not the same bed (when they even had a bed).
I visited a family of 20+ in Mexico who slept in their one room house on sheets of well worn cardboard. I saw no signs they were damaged by their parents' activities. The older girls would raise the younger ones... the mother liked to drink.
I think part of the problem is getting kids to understand that they want babies, but not to have them early. It is always a little awkward, the whole "yes, sex is nice and babies are nice, but not before you are married." It is a little more awkward when they are too young to grasp the concepts without a lot of very... specific detail. Imagining explaining the whole situation to my five year old who asks questions like "What's your favorite building?" makes me hope it doesn't come up for a few more years. We explained it to our older daughters when they were around 6 or so through anatomy books (and having another kid on the way helps) but I doubt they really grasp the whole process.
This was fascinating! Thank you for your unique perspective. My son was very interested in learning computer programming when he saw me and my husband constantly doing this for work. I found him Scratch. He refused to even try it, because it was obviously for kids, with cartoon characters. He started working through a book I bought for my middle schooler niece called Python programming for Kids by Sande and Sande, and taught himself so much. I let him use my laptop (I supervised, with me being rather paranoid about the Internet as he was seven) and he taught himself so much. He typed in programs slowly and tinkered with them. Great start. He does research in computer science now after an undergrad in math and CS, and it sort of began with this day I just wrote about.
> What psychological damage would be done to a six year old from seeing a picture of two humans engaged in sexual intercourse that was not done, over the centuries, to six year old farm children observing cattle engaged in the same activity for real has never been explained to me.
The sexual images you see on the internet are not selected from the same distribution as those possibly seen by children in the past. They’ve gone through an evolutionary process selecting for the most extreme forms of emotional arousal.
Watching an act of voluntary loving intercourse may not be too bad for a kid. I’d still prefer they didn’t, and yeah maybe I’m just squeamish. I trust my instincts on this one. But what about watching a simulated, or real rape? Definitely not something I want my kids exposed to.
I agree that the walled garden idea is bad and much of school is a series of exercises in absurdity. But I still care about what my kids see on the internet, because of the algorithms designed to attract and addict them.
Overall, I want them to have experiences that will help prepare them to be functional adults. I think what happens in the physical world, when they pursue their own interests, is much more likely to be of value than exposing them a machine evolved to keep people emotionally aroused and perpetually glued to it.
Families lived in single roomed homes, children grew up in brothels,etc, they were just fine. In Hawaii, grandmother's would ritualistically given their prepubescent grandchildren blowjobs daily to ensure they grew up viral. Kids generally start "sex play" around kindergarten. No harm to be found. The problem isn't the act, it's their parents and teachers causing the harm by making them feel bad about something no different than giving a high five.
At six every girl in my trailer park has already had "sex" as had every boy playing "house" to simply emulating what adults to grow up, no different than any other emulated behavior.
Peter, it's not ok for grown women to perform oral sex on children. That's sexual assault and pedophilia.
And little children routinely performing sexual roleplay with each other is a sign of sexual abuse. https://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/warning-signs-of-sexual-abuse-teens-young-adults
And yet Native Hawaiian culture survived and thrived just fine until they met the West. Masturbating small boys was a trick used by nannies for centuries to get them to sleep or stop crying, the Brits turned out fine and even build a global spanning empire. Someone everyone in my neighborhood all grew up just fine.
You are missing the point. Abuse of any sort is generally a social construct, it's not an objective thing. The harm is not in the act, the harm is done by the third party observer who victimizes them. But yeah feel free to condemn the entire Native Hawaiian culture, Islam, Judaism, and Shakespeare from your view way up there.
I've never heard of nannies wanking off children. Sounds like bullshit to me.
What sexual act performed by an adult towards a child would you consider objectively wrong, regardless of circumstances? None? Is it all just a social construct in your view?
You didn't answer the critique. You have yet to explain how those ritualistic acts objectively harmed Native Hawaiians practicing them, likewise how St. Mary was objectively harmed having sex with God at 14. Cleopatra was a child prostitute, she turned out just fine and by all accounts, better for it.
Peter, if it isn't obvious to you that child prostitution causes psychological trauma to the child, then we have nothing in common. Further discussion will achieve nothing and is not worthwhile to me.
I agree with what you say about modern pornographic images being from a different distribution.
Also, I'm wondering if children in the past would've seen animals at it often enough that they would've become desensitized from that angle. Might a pubescent child seeing a pornographic picture today react differently because of its unusualness, even aside from anything else?
I am often surprised at how little work children are expected to do, or to be able to do. I suspect part of the problem is that parents find it easier to just do things themselves than teach children to do it and clean up the mess when it inevitably goes wrong. Particularly if the kid isn't really into doing the work. In some ways I suspect the issue is one of in the moment laziness, not wanting to teach/force the kids to do the work, and part is a misunderstanding of the long term effects, that time spent teaching now will save time later as the kid can be of use, and that much later being of use to themselves will be the most valuable.
Relatedly, when my kids were a bit younger they would sometimes ask why some parents let their kids do whatever that I was telling mine not to, or telling mine they had to do something other kids weren't required, I often would say "Those parents must not love their kids enough to teach them how to behave." Admittedly it was just a nicer sounding version of "You are three; just shut up and do what I say," at first, but I realized over time it was probably literally true. Teaching your kids how to behave isn't easy, but they really benefit from it when they are habitually the kind of decent people people other people like to be around. Those parents who can't be bothered to actually identify and enforce rules for the kids are not doing them any favors, but just letting them wander lost in the maze of social interactions. Likewise, I don't think parents who keep their kids away from being capable of doing work and expecting to do some are doing them any favors.
I think the walled garden metaphor is wrong, but I also think that children should not be thrown into the cesspool of the internet and not given a flotation device to assist.
There's a happy medium somewhere.
Children need (IMHO) boundaries to keep them mostly safe and to allow them to mature by pushing at those boundaries.
What do you mean by a flotation device? The usual pattern is more like blinders on a horse.
Many people my age worked menial jobs when they were teenagers, which exposed them to adults other than their parents. Todays, teenagers mostly don’t work and don’t have that exposure. I think that is why they don’t grow up as fast.
You might be surprised at what orthodox Jewish boys learn in Talmud.
And as for the other thing - totally agree. One thing I love about my kids school is that the kids naturally do stuff and don't wait around for adults to do it for them. I saw this by lunch, the tables and chairs had been pushed to one side, and the kids - without any adult direction whatsoever- set them up properly. And they have gardening as a subject. Having some impact on real things is so healthy for kids.
(Holding a screechy baby so apologies if even less quality than usu)
I’ve been a teacher for a long time. You are right that kids want to do things, and they value highly the growth of competence they experience when authentic learning actually happens in a classroom. Art, my undergrad major, is my preferred subject and one of the rewards of teaching it in secondary school is being able to openly attempt to harness this for motivational purposes. It doesn’t take much, because the desire is common and widespread among kids of very different backgrounds. I try to judiciously trot out familiar, well-worn references to broadly shared experiences- the frustration of trying to learn watercolor at 7 years old without any useful guidance, and the fact that kids with good shading skills acquire a rep as talented artists in jr. high are two of my most frequently repeated ones - to remind them that durable misconceptions can limit them. And, now that I’m about to retire and am headed rapidly for my dotage, the hoops and obstacles my old man compelled me to navigate in my youth are increasingly appreciated as the best blessings available from the old coot. At 18 I extracted and replaced a broken engine out of the clanking jalopy he’d gifted me. For a kid with rudimentary mechanical skills it was a good piece of work. I wanted to prove something to him and ultimately he wasn’t as impressed as I had hoped. But I knew what I was capable of, and that was worth the effort. It still is.
Wonderful post! Generalizes the cocoon.
It is surely true that parents who are well enough off don't push their children to work for wages. Well and good. But children learn also through imitation. If parents work hard, at least some kids want to work. Wife and I grew up that way, and so has our daughter. We all jumped at the chance to earn money, knowing also that it made one more independent.
As for seeing things, it's important to let kids go out and explore on their own. My wife and I were lucky in that regard, and we made sure our daughter would be.
It's always good to look back a little to get some perspective. Until perhaps the mid 19th century urban kids learned about sex by sleeping in the same bed with each other or with their parents. Many of our worries are the worries of the well off.
A distant cousin wrote a book, No Life For A Lady, about her childhood growing up in remote New Mexico in the late 1800, the ultimate free range kids. Spending all day riding to a distant post office and back at age 8 or 10, starting your day by tracking down your horse because if you tied them up at night, foraging was so scarce they'd starve, and one time stretching it out to come back around midnight because the horse had strayed to an Indian camp -- at age 8 or 10.
I don't like horses, cows, deserts, or heat. I ought to despise that life. But I could not help envying her, and her family, such an incredible free range childhood.
The book has been in print since 1940.
There is an article in the recent Economist on how GenZ isn't lost forever. I had just read the Anxious Generation and vowed that if I had any more kids I would have to put them in a Skinner box. I'm glad to read you and the Economist doubting that this new wired generation is lost forever.
What do you mean by "I would have to put them in a Skinner box"? I am not sure how that follows from having read the Anxious Generation.
There were two themes in the book: encourage free play and control the kid's access to digital media. The Skinner box might have been a poor analogy, but I envisioned all the battles trying to raise kids shielded from the world as it is.
Ah yes, I was wondering. It seemed to me that the Skinner Box is exactly what you want to do everything to keep them away from, as it is the functional core of pretty much every addictive online process. I see a lot of people using the term lately, and I don't think they actually know what it means.
Totally agree. I lived in Japan for a while doing judo daily at a big dojo that mainly teaches kids. The standard of the boys' judo was incredible: most boys over 7 were better than me. What struck me was that in Japan children's judo classes consist of... wait for it... judo. Meanwhile in the UK, where I'm from, kids judo instructors are all determined to find any possible way to avoid doing actual judo. It's all stupid games. But judo itself IS a game, and is fun and rewarding. Childhood is a brief window of opportunity in which people (yes, people) can acquire mastery, or lay the foundations for mastery, in a great variety of skills that are essentially impossible to excel in if not treated seriously until later in life. I think part of the problem is that people fail to grasp the extent of human excellence. Go watch Yuja Wang performing a piano concerto. Try to inwardly digest the level of mastery she possesses. How do you think she spent her childhood? Now ask yourself this: does she seem deprived? Does she seem emotionally stunted? Do you think she would be happier had she been coddled as a kid?
My view is that parents often wall their children off not because they fear for their children, but because they fear for themselves. They fear the potentially uncomfortable conversations their children may start.
When my kids were young, my wife and I decided that they'd have unfettered internet access from a young age. I think that worked out well overall, but it did have some unfortunate side effects.
One of the worst effects is that it allowed my kids (nerdy and quiet) to join online peer groups without my observation. They ended up in some groups that I think had a negative effect on them.
Children should be considered a type of hybrid, a cross between a wild animal and a mad scientist. For a time, the wall makes sense and then after a time, the wall can come down. The trick, I suppose, is to know the time.
Could it possibly be that the 6 year old seeing the picture of humans would connect it to mom and dad, while seeing two animals engaging in the act would not. Mom and dad probably don't want to either lie to the child or try to explain the action to someone incapable of understanding the words in the explanation.
But then, I wouldn't be surprised if most medieval children were aware of their parents engaging in the act. Most medieval families slept in the same room, if not the same bed (when they even had a bed).
I visited a family of 20+ in Mexico who slept in their one room house on sheets of well worn cardboard. I saw no signs they were damaged by their parents' activities. The older girls would raise the younger ones... the mother liked to drink.
I think part of the problem is getting kids to understand that they want babies, but not to have them early. It is always a little awkward, the whole "yes, sex is nice and babies are nice, but not before you are married." It is a little more awkward when they are too young to grasp the concepts without a lot of very... specific detail. Imagining explaining the whole situation to my five year old who asks questions like "What's your favorite building?" makes me hope it doesn't come up for a few more years. We explained it to our older daughters when they were around 6 or so through anatomy books (and having another kid on the way helps) but I doubt they really grasp the whole process.