While I'm all about involved parenting, I think that this headline is hyperbole. I read the documentation and watched the video and I didn't get the impression that they were actually promoting child neglect. Furthermore, the whole thesis of this post is based on an argument from silence that relies upon the premise that parents are "habitually" absent. In fact, in many of the scenes the parents are present and there to receive and applaud the child after she'd done something on her own. Additionally, the author's definition of neglect is quite aggressive and, as above, based on missing information from the project and not on the information provided.
While I appreciate and understand the author's desire to protect children, the post itself seems overly alarmist and based more on opinion than fact.
So, you're one of those anti-free range children/helicopter parents I read so much about?
"A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im4GwUD1UY8 . That's what the US was like when I was a kid. Were they all bad parents then?
As https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7YrN8Q2PDU points out, "By Western standards, Japanese culture emphasises independence and self-reliance from an extraordinarily young age." Do you think all of Japan practices child neglect?
Sending a kid to a store has absolutely nothing to do with routinely relying on an electronic device to manage all of their daily activities.
Kids COULD do a lot of things. They might be fine living alone in a box and learning everything online, for example. But that doesn't make it a good idea.
I'm actually glad you bring up Japanese culture. Japan has several forms of institutionalized child abuse, as well as a culture with extreme conformism and too much social pressure for anyone to be vocal about dissent. So yeah, probably a product of the way kids are raised. Also, with the extreme xenophobia and non-acceptance of outsiders, it's probably safer on the streets there than an average US city.
Providing your kid with day-to-day love and attention isn't really related to whether they leave the house or not.
You're still speaking in extremes and failing to see the middle ground. It's another logical fallacy. You're saying that they're relying on an electronic device to manage _all_ of the daily activities. You also take it to an extreme by saying that they "might be find living alone in a box." I don't think that anyone is proposing this, so now you're attacking a strawman.
Providing your kid with day-to-day love and attention isn't really related to whether or not you give them a device to help them begin to manage their lives and schedules in bite-sized pieces in a digital age doesn't constitute abuse.
Why is it that we've gone about grossly abusing terms that imply harm to the point that their real meaning is almost entirely lost?
The other day there was a big thing about how, "Twitter is Fucked" because the platform only allows for "violent" speech. The trivial falsifiability of the claim aside, it was a gross overstatement of the term "violent". The correct term, based on the content of that article, would have been more like "insipid", "vapid", or "derogatory".
Here we have the same thing with the term "neglect", the well-defined construct "child neglect", and the concept of "promotes" with respect to either of those things, and the application of all of them to content that is mundane and innocuous at worst, and can only even border on a depiction of "neglect", let alone the promotion of it, with the most perverse and intentionally inflammatory interpretation of the video.
Are we so distanced from what real "harm", "neglect", and "violence" actually look like that as denizens of tech-culture we must redefine them to instead represent "minor annoyance", "occasionally tended to", and "somewhat offensive"? It just seems like such an unnecessary expression of effete privilege and insularity.
I just made the connection that the OP of this link is the author. They seem to post links to their own Medium posts so it's not surprising that this is clickbait.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 35.5 ms ] threadWhile I appreciate and understand the author's desire to protect children, the post itself seems overly alarmist and based more on opinion than fact.
"A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im4GwUD1UY8 . That's what the US was like when I was a kid. Were they all bad parents then?
As https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7YrN8Q2PDU points out, "By Western standards, Japanese culture emphasises independence and self-reliance from an extraordinarily young age." Do you think all of Japan practices child neglect?
Sending a kid to a store has absolutely nothing to do with routinely relying on an electronic device to manage all of their daily activities.
Kids COULD do a lot of things. They might be fine living alone in a box and learning everything online, for example. But that doesn't make it a good idea.
I'm actually glad you bring up Japanese culture. Japan has several forms of institutionalized child abuse, as well as a culture with extreme conformism and too much social pressure for anyone to be vocal about dissent. So yeah, probably a product of the way kids are raised. Also, with the extreme xenophobia and non-acceptance of outsiders, it's probably safer on the streets there than an average US city.
Providing your kid with day-to-day love and attention isn't really related to whether they leave the house or not.
Providing your kid with day-to-day love and attention isn't really related to whether or not you give them a device to help them begin to manage their lives and schedules in bite-sized pieces in a digital age doesn't constitute abuse.
The other day there was a big thing about how, "Twitter is Fucked" because the platform only allows for "violent" speech. The trivial falsifiability of the claim aside, it was a gross overstatement of the term "violent". The correct term, based on the content of that article, would have been more like "insipid", "vapid", or "derogatory".
Here we have the same thing with the term "neglect", the well-defined construct "child neglect", and the concept of "promotes" with respect to either of those things, and the application of all of them to content that is mundane and innocuous at worst, and can only even border on a depiction of "neglect", let alone the promotion of it, with the most perverse and intentionally inflammatory interpretation of the video.
Are we so distanced from what real "harm", "neglect", and "violence" actually look like that as denizens of tech-culture we must redefine them to instead represent "minor annoyance", "occasionally tended to", and "somewhat offensive"? It just seems like such an unnecessary expression of effete privilege and insularity.