wizzard0, why didn't you use the original title, as per HN guidelines? Your title doesn't match what I read from the article at all. Environment is only mentioned once and culture isn't mentioned at all.
We've just updated the title from ‘A lot of teen risk-taking is environment/culture influence, not just “age”’ to part of the subtitle, which hopefully represents well the article without the “Sex and drugs...” bait.
Yep, I decided to submit under a more neutral tone because the "Sex and drugs" part felt too sensational, but the result got too opinionated. Will try better next time.
UPD: Also... isnt "when Steinberg told the adolescents that their friends were watching from an adjacent room, they took significantly more risks" an environment/culture influence? I don't mean environment like "nature", but the social one, and that includes peer pressure.
Yeah, the moderators should probably change the title. It would be one thing if the original title were more sensationalized than the title here, but it’s the opposite.
I like how they compare a teenager's risk of contracting AIDS with a 10 year old, but not with a 30 year old. Nice cherry-picking.
All I see is an article trying to explain risk-taking of the youth as a pathology. You might agree with that, but I think it's just retarded.
When I was 5, I knew it all. But I was wrong, and I realized how stupid I was at 5 when I was 10. Then, I thought I had it all figured out and I knew I was way smarter than the adults. Except, I realized at 15 how much of a stupid kid I was at 10, but I knew I had everything figured out by then...
Mark Twain did NOT say (apparently) this, but it remains a moving quote:
> When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
That said, I'm always bothered about "you think you know everything" speeches given to children, particularly teenagers.
(Note to poster: You triggered this semi-rant, but not because you are guilty of this. You just started the chain of logic that led me here)
I remember clearly getting that "think you know everything" speech often when I'd point out something was "stupid" or "why can't we just...". What I didn't get was any real attempt to disprove my arguments. Instead of learning "Wow, I thought this and I was legitimately wrong, I should be more cautious" I was taught "wow, adults don't listen and are content to look down on me and my ideas".
It's like the whole puberty speech. Don't tell me I have hormones raging and a changing body and I suddenly getting interested in a particular gender - I have no context for the first part and the last part is not a change but something that was true for my entire conscious life (though the importance may have changed). Instead understand that a teen has spent their life as a child and has only been asked to be a child. Trying to be an adult is something totally new. The risk of failure (loss of status among peers, loss of respect of superiors, loss of closer companionship) is high, the experience to help decide what to do is minimal, even the experience of seeing others face these challenges and NOT suffer is minimal to non-existent. Every adult that forgets their personal experiences when they were a teen and gives the above speech is just proving, not disproving, the common accusation that parents "just don't understand".
Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter (in the sense of capability to learn) than most of us. Blaming them for their lack of experience is not our best move. Telling them they'll "understand when (they're) older" is moronic if we don't give support to our claim. (NB: Concepts like the "it gets better" movement to encourage teens with non-traditional sexuality seem dramatically better at trying to do the right thing to me, though any teens involved might correct me - I'm cis-straight male, never heard such attempts when I was a kid, and haven't been a teen for decades)
Nothing will make the teenage years without drama for most people, but actually trying to relate, offering support that doesn't rely on having experiences they don't have, and dropping our own "I know everything" attitudes can do a lot.
Instead understand that a teen has spent their life as a child and has only been asked to be a child. Trying to be an adult is something totally new.
Supposedly, childhood was invented quite recently in our evolutionary history by our culture: http://a.co/34eSXPC I have read that children were once treated more like little adults who didn't know anything.
Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter (in the sense of capability to learn) than most of us. Blaming them for their lack of experience is not our best move.
Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter? I would agree. This is why kids should use their superior brain plasticity to get their heads around the implications of their lack of experience, and try to benefit from indirect experience and the store of human knowledge. Some kids are smart enough to do this. Some kids instead convince themselves of a narrative of superiority, as if they're the first truly "real" humans on the planet.
It's precisely because kids are so smart and imbued with so much potential, that I have to call them out. With great power, comes great responsibility.
> it's precisely because kids are so smart and imbued with so much potential, that I have to call them out.
If you're providing them with the tools to learn from, I'm all for it. When I'm learning something, I want to be told when I mess up, but the best advice also comes with an explanation, or at least counter evidence to examine. Just saying "WRONG!" and "You think you know this? Bah, you're an idiot" all the time makes me less likely to learn from you specifically AND less likely to learn in general.
There's nothing wrong and a lot right with giving these people with little experience the benefit of your own, to preventing them from making mistakes. We just need to make sure that's what we're doing. While the teen years will (literally) naturally involve a lot of questioning authority and testing boundaries and establishing a pecking order, I think we've magnified this by blaming the teenager rather than their lack of experience, by blaming their attitude while ignoring our own. Every "why do I have to..." and "Can't we just..." and "this isn't FAIR!" is an opportunity to engage them. Every "because I said so" and "you don't know what you're talking about" that involves no other data is teaching them there's no point in consulting us.
Put another way - I don't think most teens think they know everything. They just know little else, and too often we're telling them that they think they know everything, while not showing that they don't.
Just saying "WRONG!" and "You think you know this? Bah, you're an idiot" all the time makes me less likely to learn from you specifically AND less likely to learn in general.
Right. That's such a bad teaching strategy, it's more like a technique for fighting education.
Every "why do I have to..." and "Can't we just..." and "this isn't FAIR!" is an opportunity to engage them.
That is profound, actually. I may indeed use those as teaching moments. If my teen-aged kids can convincingly argue the other side, I might just raise their score a point, credit their account, then give them a chance to think out how they can make at least a part of their goal happen after all.
Every "because I said so"
Adults need to remember that "because I said so" only flies with little kids. (And even then not necessarily.) It certainly doesn't fly with adults, and teens are kids becoming adults.
But all that said, when someone brings up an idea with merit containing a potentially mental-model revising observation, there are two kinds of people in the world: People who consider the idea sincerely, and people who refuse to do so. In that case, be the smart one!
It's not so much that you learn something, it's that the lightbulb moment is so massive and sudden that you think "I finally understand everything!". Then the process repeats itself in 4-5 years. I thought I had it all figured at around the age of 16-17, then when I was 22 I looked back and realized I was still very young and stupid at 16.
When I was a pre-teen, my mother once told me "I never want to hear about you...". I expected to hear a sweeping restriction and my brain was already primed to file the next tidbit with other adult "advice" - material that had no supporting context in my experience (largely because my experiences were so few, though I didn't know that then).
Instead she finished with "...committing any crime you can't retire on". It was a game-changer for me. This advice...had context. It wasn't a absolute "no", nor did it rely solely on experiences I didn't have. It extended on experiences I _did_ have into a broader area.
Throughout most of my teenage years I avoided all the worst situations that peer pressure was steering me towards, not because I suddenly properly calculated the risks - I could no more visualize the impact on my life that any kind of conviction would have than I could before - but because I was better weighing the _gains_. Instead of "doing this will prevent me from losing ranking in my social hierarchy" it was "doing this will not gain me material improvement". Instead of "if I fail I will get in trouble" it was "I will be disappointing because I tried, regardless of success".
Eventually, of course, I built my own ethics structure about why crime/rudeness/unnecessary risk-taking were undesirable, but this one statement gave me time to do so that I might not have had.
I think it had a big (and net positive) impact on me, but anecdote is not data - If you think the advice would have been bad for you, I'd love to hear how - not because I think it's impossible or that you'd be wrong, but because I have no idea what is probable without more people weighing in.
I never thought of the CEO angle (not sure what that says about my intelligence, but hopefully it says something good about my morals). I know that my thinking as a 10 year old was that if I got caught robbing a bank, my mom wouldn't have been bothered that I tried to rob a bank, she'd have been bothered that I _failed_.
As an adult I realize that she'd not have been happy in either case. (I think. Probably.) But it was exactly that shift of thinking from "should I do this" (prone to peer pressure) to "is the payoff worth the risk" (which leads to "what is the risk?") that kept me from doing anything particularly stupid and why I brought the story up in relation to the article.
As adults we normally relate "should I do this" to "what is the payoff" and "what is the risk". As a preteen/teen the life experiences to encourage those connections aren't there, so the decisions will be different from the average adults'. This crazy advice (my mother doesn't remember making it, so it was probably an off-the-cuff attempt at humor that altered my life) created a temporary bridge between those concepts until I had the experiences to build my own bridges.
In retrospect it's actually similar to how certain religious doctrines provide reasons for moral decisions when you wouldn't necessarily have those morals on your own. mindblown.
Wait, what? What if you had a Coca-Cola and decided to have another every day for 30 years? Or have sex without a condom - why does it have to be marijuana leading to violent crime? Where are my laughter emoticons my adolescence has made me dependent upon! :)
I think you misread me. Smoking marijuana is committing a crime that one can't retire on (it's not even profitable, which doesn't really speak to whether it's a good idea but certainly means its not in line with the mother's advice). A bank robbery, at a large enough scale and if successful, could easily provide enough money to retire in some poorer non-extradition countries - but the attempt is almost certainly a worse idea than smoking marijuana with friends.
It is solid (albeit it strange) advice because that difficult goal is very hard to reach without getting caught. So essentially the advice is: "I never want to hear about you committing any crime" or "don't get caught."
Of course, it is questionable what is worse for a parent: learning their got caught committing a crime, or learning their child committed a crime. Its basically akin to defeatist attitude, or perfectionism (which is defeatist).
It also helps against self-incrimination (or well, incrimination by the parents). The idea is that if you cannot even tell your parents about it, you must keep it secret.
Of course the easier one is "I never want you to commit any crime" but once you go down the route you told there's evidence the child is already down that dark path, or might get influenced to walk it.
Instead, I'd rather give my child the required confidence that they have self respect, and that I am a listening ear when they need me.
Being able to engage and succeed in high risk endeavors was much more useful in the past than today. Getting pregnant and giving birth was a high risk/reward proposition, much less so today. For men there were other avenues to engage high risk for high reward activities.
Being in the hunting party for your tribe and being the one to go in close with a spear to make the killing thrust on a large animal. A bit closer to today: a poor young man with no prospects goes off on a two-three year whaling voyage. If he makes it back he would have enough experience to sign up from another two-three year voyage and get a decent share. If he returned from that one he would have enough capital to set himself up with a home and family.
These days taking risk in the physical realm is highly discouraged and there is almost no highly rewarding outcomes for taking physical risk in wealthier countries. A crew hand on a crabbing boat can make good money, with low skills for high risk, but that is so strange we televise them on TV for entertainment. And even that type of work is going away as people decided it is too high risk and introduce individual fishing quotas instead of short open fishing seasons. Many more people do high risk activities unrelated to any productive endeavor (mountaineering, BASE jumping, wingsuit flying, etc). Maybe human space travel with open up high risk/high reward opportunities for people again.
Oil rigs are a similar situation today - high pay, relatively high risk, and you'll be away from family living on the ocean for weeks or months at a time.
The difference is a lot of jobs in oil are manual labor that do not require a college degree and can be high paying if one is willing to go to where the jobs are, even on land.
I would really hesitate to make sweeping generalizations comparing the risk-return profiles of different periods in history. This is like trying to summarize all uncertainty (risk) of the entire world at a point in time into a single number: futile and meaningless.
Yes, generalizations can be very off. What is risk and what is return? From a genetic or cultural propagation and growth definition of risk and return, I think it is pretty clear that in 2018 America there are few activities where risking physical destruction (death) can pay off. You might agree that this is an unusual situation(last 50? years) in the history of humanity?
Maybe this is why the stock market has an appeal and younger people are investing in Bitcoin (only half joking here). It's a risk that humans are drawn to when physical risk is absent.
As a parent of a budding 5yr old.. I am starting to think about this upcoming phase in terms of where to raise him.
Currently the two options we are contemplating between is staying in a large major urban city (population ~10M) or moving to Bariloche, Patagonia (population ~150k)
I only have my own childhood experiences to work from growing up in NYC..and remembering vividly how I yearned to always play in nature. Going to summer camp was my only joy to escape the intensities of the city.
I noticed how pre-teens and teens are here in the big cities, and the kinds of activities they do ( which are quite varied naturally ) vs the kinds that Bariloche will have to offer.
On one side the kids from big cities never get bored.. but seem to always grow up very fast..and get into all sorts of night-life very early on.
On the other side, if you are teen bored in a small town then getting into trouble there with less stuff around that will kill you is very appealing to a parent.
I lived in the countryside and envied the kids that could walk home from school, walk to each others houses and hang out after school etc. I think you just always want what you don't have.
Grew up in the countryside, population 3K. Very happy about it, it has given me deep friendships, safety and a deep love of all things nature.
Moved to a big city to attend a good University. Worked for global corporations 15+ years, got more airmiles than I imagined possible and loved every second of it.
Now I've got kids and live in a mid-size city, work is 30 minutes walk, and I'm starting to think that I should move to the countryside to give the same chances I had to learn to love nature.
A while back I bumped into a friend and his family in Highlands, NC while I was out on a motorcycling day trip. Why are y'all here? Oh, the wife grew up over in Sapphire. What do kids in Sapphire do? Meth and get knocked up.
Or you could have a combination of both. I'm currently in high school. I live in a small town's school district but commute into a fairly large city to school (about a 35 minute drive). This gives me both access to nature (where I live) and the opportunities/resources of a city (where my friends live). While it may not be for everyone, I wouldn't want to have it another way. What I can also tell you is that significantly more people die at the small town school than in the city (almost all are vehicle-related deaths).
Parent of 3.5 year old here. In the US, I would consider socializing your kid in a city then taking two or three 'seasons' (read: years) out to sail around Caribbean countries. These wouldn't need to be consecutive - you could do year on/year off if required. Great language opportunities, lots of nature, good boats are very cheap in Florida, short hops in good weather in the area are perfectly suitable for less experienced sailors, and you are close enough that flying home for 6 months to stay connected to school is a non-issue.
I was a military wife. We moved a lot. Where you go is less important than your parenting policies.
My oldest has had sleep issues from birth and was a boatload of trouble in the form of curiosity killed the cat and you can't tell me no. He's a handful.
From age 2, he was taught to keep himself entertained and out if trouble so I could sleep a little while he was up nights. He was taught to tell me when he spilled stuff in the middle of the night so I could clean it up. He did not get in trouble. He only got asked what he spilled so I could clean it up properly.
I gave my kids a lot of latitude and worked with them to make sure their needs were adequately met. I did a whole lot of dealing with the woman in the mirror and trying to not hang my crap on them. I facilitated their interests and made sure they were reasonably safe.
I did things like rent Jurassic Park and watched it first, then watched it with them so I could pause it and warn them about icky surprise scenes. They very much wanted to see it they weren't that old. I made it as comfortable and not traumatic as I could and let them have their way.
I started with laying that foundation from birth. By the time they were teens, we had a good relationship. They never went through rebel teen crap. They didn't need to. There was nothing to rebel against.
Wow you were an awesome mom. I'm going through the same motions with my daughter. She's 4. Non-verbal autistic. Trying everything under the sun to get her to talk AND sleep. Feeling kind of hopeless right now but I am trying to be positive. She genuinely loves me though and wants me to hold her all the time.
I spent the first 12 years of my first child's life trying to make it possible for him to sleep decently. Off the top identity head:
ASD kids are picky. Try to keep foods on hand that are healthy and that the kid likes. Let them eat what they want from what is on hand.
Hey them a good multivitamin. Disney Princess Gummy vitamins worked well for my kids.
Make sure they get outside every single day for some physical activity. You may have to work at making sure this happens at the right time of day as well.
Kids need to be both physically tired and mentally tired to sleep. ASD kids have trouble getting the mental stimulation they need. Video tapes and video games sometimes serve them well.
Don't substitute physical exhaustion alone for physical tiredness plus mental tiredness. This can cause night terrors, where they wake up screaming after an hour.
Be accommodating of their weird preferences as much as possible. My oldest slept all kinds of weird places when he was little.
I have had a parenting blog in the past. I have fantasies I will eventually get back to that.
I grew up in an urban area, but was always rather keen on nature/animals though. I don't really know why as my parents are not especially versed in this, although they are huge sailing fans so I spent most of my vacations between sea and wind, probably better than being in various hostels... But then again I've had friends go hiking a lot with their families and still have a very light connection with nature.
In my opinion determining factors were that my parents were very lax so I could do as I pleased, that I was a single child and had to entertain myself a lot (I don't know if it has much to do with personality, but I think having no siblings to distract me from observing surroundings helped), paid for riding lessons which turned out to be my huge passion and which was social enough to bring and keep me outside much of my adolescence. A lot of friends were in scouting groups and that probably helps too.
As for my opinion on having children up in a big vs small city, I think it's too bad to pass up on all the opportunities you can have in a big urban area for a slim and uncertain gain as you have no guarantee your child will enjoy nature on his own and not prefer being on the internet. The cultural offer, education quality, elitist programs are in cities, also the friends he might have will be much more interesting (and their parents too), the network you can have from childhood friendships is unbelievable when you grew up in the right environment, and I can say without a doubt that had I not been in a special school, in the middle of kids smarter than me, with similar to better sociocultural backgrounds, I would not have pushed myself that hard.
>Currently the two options we are contemplating between is staying in a large major urban city (population ~10M) or moving to Bariloche, Patagonia (population ~150k)
Maybe have some shades of grey in there?
I live in the suburbs of Washington DC and yesterday I took the Metro in to go to a busy crowded Happy Hour with a bunch of dressed up, "important" people. It was fun.
If it wasn't raining today, I'd have plans to go on a beautiful nature hike on rugged terrain called the Billy Goat Trail. I regularly see deer in my back yard.
For my personal situation, I wish I lived closer in and plan to move this year. However I'll still be an hour drive max to somewhere that the air is fresh and scenery beautiful and calm.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadUPD: Also... isnt "when Steinberg told the adolescents that their friends were watching from an adjacent room, they took significantly more risks" an environment/culture influence? I don't mean environment like "nature", but the social one, and that includes peer pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#C...
> When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
That said, I'm always bothered about "you think you know everything" speeches given to children, particularly teenagers.
(Note to poster: You triggered this semi-rant, but not because you are guilty of this. You just started the chain of logic that led me here)
I remember clearly getting that "think you know everything" speech often when I'd point out something was "stupid" or "why can't we just...". What I didn't get was any real attempt to disprove my arguments. Instead of learning "Wow, I thought this and I was legitimately wrong, I should be more cautious" I was taught "wow, adults don't listen and are content to look down on me and my ideas".
It's like the whole puberty speech. Don't tell me I have hormones raging and a changing body and I suddenly getting interested in a particular gender - I have no context for the first part and the last part is not a change but something that was true for my entire conscious life (though the importance may have changed). Instead understand that a teen has spent their life as a child and has only been asked to be a child. Trying to be an adult is something totally new. The risk of failure (loss of status among peers, loss of respect of superiors, loss of closer companionship) is high, the experience to help decide what to do is minimal, even the experience of seeing others face these challenges and NOT suffer is minimal to non-existent. Every adult that forgets their personal experiences when they were a teen and gives the above speech is just proving, not disproving, the common accusation that parents "just don't understand".
Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter (in the sense of capability to learn) than most of us. Blaming them for their lack of experience is not our best move. Telling them they'll "understand when (they're) older" is moronic if we don't give support to our claim. (NB: Concepts like the "it gets better" movement to encourage teens with non-traditional sexuality seem dramatically better at trying to do the right thing to me, though any teens involved might correct me - I'm cis-straight male, never heard such attempts when I was a kid, and haven't been a teen for decades)
Nothing will make the teenage years without drama for most people, but actually trying to relate, offering support that doesn't rely on having experiences they don't have, and dropping our own "I know everything" attitudes can do a lot.
(/me steps off soapbox)
Supposedly, childhood was invented quite recently in our evolutionary history by our culture: http://a.co/34eSXPC I have read that children were once treated more like little adults who didn't know anything.
Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter (in the sense of capability to learn) than most of us. Blaming them for their lack of experience is not our best move.
Kids aren't dumb, they're actually smarter? I would agree. This is why kids should use their superior brain plasticity to get their heads around the implications of their lack of experience, and try to benefit from indirect experience and the store of human knowledge. Some kids are smart enough to do this. Some kids instead convince themselves of a narrative of superiority, as if they're the first truly "real" humans on the planet.
It's precisely because kids are so smart and imbued with so much potential, that I have to call them out. With great power, comes great responsibility.
If you're providing them with the tools to learn from, I'm all for it. When I'm learning something, I want to be told when I mess up, but the best advice also comes with an explanation, or at least counter evidence to examine. Just saying "WRONG!" and "You think you know this? Bah, you're an idiot" all the time makes me less likely to learn from you specifically AND less likely to learn in general.
There's nothing wrong and a lot right with giving these people with little experience the benefit of your own, to preventing them from making mistakes. We just need to make sure that's what we're doing. While the teen years will (literally) naturally involve a lot of questioning authority and testing boundaries and establishing a pecking order, I think we've magnified this by blaming the teenager rather than their lack of experience, by blaming their attitude while ignoring our own. Every "why do I have to..." and "Can't we just..." and "this isn't FAIR!" is an opportunity to engage them. Every "because I said so" and "you don't know what you're talking about" that involves no other data is teaching them there's no point in consulting us.
Put another way - I don't think most teens think they know everything. They just know little else, and too often we're telling them that they think they know everything, while not showing that they don't.
Right. That's such a bad teaching strategy, it's more like a technique for fighting education.
Every "why do I have to..." and "Can't we just..." and "this isn't FAIR!" is an opportunity to engage them.
That is profound, actually. I may indeed use those as teaching moments. If my teen-aged kids can convincingly argue the other side, I might just raise their score a point, credit their account, then give them a chance to think out how they can make at least a part of their goal happen after all.
Every "because I said so"
Adults need to remember that "because I said so" only flies with little kids. (And even then not necessarily.) It certainly doesn't fly with adults, and teens are kids becoming adults.
But all that said, when someone brings up an idea with merit containing a potentially mental-model revising observation, there are two kinds of people in the world: People who consider the idea sincerely, and people who refuse to do so. In that case, be the smart one!
Instead she finished with "...committing any crime you can't retire on". It was a game-changer for me. This advice...had context. It wasn't a absolute "no", nor did it rely solely on experiences I didn't have. It extended on experiences I _did_ have into a broader area.
Throughout most of my teenage years I avoided all the worst situations that peer pressure was steering me towards, not because I suddenly properly calculated the risks - I could no more visualize the impact on my life that any kind of conviction would have than I could before - but because I was better weighing the _gains_. Instead of "doing this will prevent me from losing ranking in my social hierarchy" it was "doing this will not gain me material improvement". Instead of "if I fail I will get in trouble" it was "I will be disappointing because I tried, regardless of success".
Eventually, of course, I built my own ethics structure about why crime/rudeness/unnecessary risk-taking were undesirable, but this one statement gave me time to do so that I might not have had.
I highly recommend it to all parents.
This is pretty interesting "advice", but curious how on that would have impacted my younger self
Becoming a CEO and indulging in embezzlement on the other hand...
As an adult I realize that she'd not have been happy in either case. (I think. Probably.) But it was exactly that shift of thinking from "should I do this" (prone to peer pressure) to "is the payoff worth the risk" (which leads to "what is the risk?") that kept me from doing anything particularly stupid and why I brought the story up in relation to the article.
As adults we normally relate "should I do this" to "what is the payoff" and "what is the risk". As a preteen/teen the life experiences to encourage those connections aren't there, so the decisions will be different from the average adults'. This crazy advice (my mother doesn't remember making it, so it was probably an off-the-cuff attempt at humor that altered my life) created a temporary bridge between those concepts until I had the experiences to build my own bridges.
In retrospect it's actually similar to how certain religious doctrines provide reasons for moral decisions when you wouldn't necessarily have those morals on your own. mindblown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5J5swxSLnE
Of course, it is questionable what is worse for a parent: learning their got caught committing a crime, or learning their child committed a crime. Its basically akin to defeatist attitude, or perfectionism (which is defeatist).
It also helps against self-incrimination (or well, incrimination by the parents). The idea is that if you cannot even tell your parents about it, you must keep it secret.
Of course the easier one is "I never want you to commit any crime" but once you go down the route you told there's evidence the child is already down that dark path, or might get influenced to walk it.
Instead, I'd rather give my child the required confidence that they have self respect, and that I am a listening ear when they need me.
Being in the hunting party for your tribe and being the one to go in close with a spear to make the killing thrust on a large animal. A bit closer to today: a poor young man with no prospects goes off on a two-three year whaling voyage. If he makes it back he would have enough experience to sign up from another two-three year voyage and get a decent share. If he returned from that one he would have enough capital to set himself up with a home and family.
These days taking risk in the physical realm is highly discouraged and there is almost no highly rewarding outcomes for taking physical risk in wealthier countries. A crew hand on a crabbing boat can make good money, with low skills for high risk, but that is so strange we televise them on TV for entertainment. And even that type of work is going away as people decided it is too high risk and introduce individual fishing quotas instead of short open fishing seasons. Many more people do high risk activities unrelated to any productive endeavor (mountaineering, BASE jumping, wingsuit flying, etc). Maybe human space travel with open up high risk/high reward opportunities for people again.
I am wondering if we are indeed some kind of optimization algorithm ran for somebody else to validate some model they need in their "real" universe.
Currently the two options we are contemplating between is staying in a large major urban city (population ~10M) or moving to Bariloche, Patagonia (population ~150k)
I only have my own childhood experiences to work from growing up in NYC..and remembering vividly how I yearned to always play in nature. Going to summer camp was my only joy to escape the intensities of the city.
I noticed how pre-teens and teens are here in the big cities, and the kinds of activities they do ( which are quite varied naturally ) vs the kinds that Bariloche will have to offer.
On one side the kids from big cities never get bored.. but seem to always grow up very fast..and get into all sorts of night-life very early on.
On the other side, if you are teen bored in a small town then getting into trouble there with less stuff around that will kill you is very appealing to a parent.
What are your stories??
I don't know what small towns you've been around, but at least where I grew up those things were:
A: Drinking and driving B: Heroin/Meth
My friends from the countryside generally got into waayyy riskier stuff than the city kids, and it often seemed to be boredom / hopelessness related.
So.
C: Get pregnant.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@-41.1389439,-71.3092729,3a,75y,2...
I'd say the kids are bored.
My oldest has had sleep issues from birth and was a boatload of trouble in the form of curiosity killed the cat and you can't tell me no. He's a handful.
From age 2, he was taught to keep himself entertained and out if trouble so I could sleep a little while he was up nights. He was taught to tell me when he spilled stuff in the middle of the night so I could clean it up. He did not get in trouble. He only got asked what he spilled so I could clean it up properly.
I gave my kids a lot of latitude and worked with them to make sure their needs were adequately met. I did a whole lot of dealing with the woman in the mirror and trying to not hang my crap on them. I facilitated their interests and made sure they were reasonably safe.
I did things like rent Jurassic Park and watched it first, then watched it with them so I could pause it and warn them about icky surprise scenes. They very much wanted to see it they weren't that old. I made it as comfortable and not traumatic as I could and let them have their way.
I started with laying that foundation from birth. By the time they were teens, we had a good relationship. They never went through rebel teen crap. They didn't need to. There was nothing to rebel against.
ASD kids are picky. Try to keep foods on hand that are healthy and that the kid likes. Let them eat what they want from what is on hand.
Hey them a good multivitamin. Disney Princess Gummy vitamins worked well for my kids.
Make sure they get outside every single day for some physical activity. You may have to work at making sure this happens at the right time of day as well.
Kids need to be both physically tired and mentally tired to sleep. ASD kids have trouble getting the mental stimulation they need. Video tapes and video games sometimes serve them well.
Don't substitute physical exhaustion alone for physical tiredness plus mental tiredness. This can cause night terrors, where they wake up screaming after an hour.
Be accommodating of their weird preferences as much as possible. My oldest slept all kinds of weird places when he was little.
I have had a parenting blog in the past. I have fantasies I will eventually get back to that.
Best.
In my opinion determining factors were that my parents were very lax so I could do as I pleased, that I was a single child and had to entertain myself a lot (I don't know if it has much to do with personality, but I think having no siblings to distract me from observing surroundings helped), paid for riding lessons which turned out to be my huge passion and which was social enough to bring and keep me outside much of my adolescence. A lot of friends were in scouting groups and that probably helps too.
As for my opinion on having children up in a big vs small city, I think it's too bad to pass up on all the opportunities you can have in a big urban area for a slim and uncertain gain as you have no guarantee your child will enjoy nature on his own and not prefer being on the internet. The cultural offer, education quality, elitist programs are in cities, also the friends he might have will be much more interesting (and their parents too), the network you can have from childhood friendships is unbelievable when you grew up in the right environment, and I can say without a doubt that had I not been in a special school, in the middle of kids smarter than me, with similar to better sociocultural backgrounds, I would not have pushed myself that hard.
Maybe have some shades of grey in there?
I live in the suburbs of Washington DC and yesterday I took the Metro in to go to a busy crowded Happy Hour with a bunch of dressed up, "important" people. It was fun.
If it wasn't raining today, I'd have plans to go on a beautiful nature hike on rugged terrain called the Billy Goat Trail. I regularly see deer in my back yard.
For my personal situation, I wish I lived closer in and plan to move this year. However I'll still be an hour drive max to somewhere that the air is fresh and scenery beautiful and calm.