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Comment by sdh | Hacker News Reader

"I'd like to make a thoughtful comment, but I'm struggling to get past the phrase 'age-appropriate'. As someone who has never been 'appropriate' to their chronological age in any respect, it always comes across as reductive, patronising and ultimately dehumanising. It seems to me to be the product of a worldview which sees children not as distinctive individuals with unique preferences and aptitudes, but as mere larvae passing through 'developmental stages'. I consider it an affront to the dignity of all children and my teeth are set on edge every time I hear it."

Do you have kids? Do you think a 4-year-old has "unique preferences" or feels de-humanized because he isn't given "ice cream" as a choice for dinner?

While your comment might be true of an adolescent, it is not true of all children as a category. There are very real and beneficial reasons for age-appropriate learning and guidance.

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At two I was a committed vegetarian, at four a committed socialist, at six a committed atheist. I could calculate the kinetic energy of a bicycle in motion before I could ride one. At four years old, I most certainly did feel de-humanised when refused a vegetarian meal or spitefully tricked into eating meat. I'm obviously a distant outlier, but the standard deviation is much greater than most people imagine. At the other end of the distribution, here in Britain a tenth of all 16 year olds can't understand a bus timetable, fill in a job application, read the instructions on a frozen meal or make change from a ten pound note. I believe matters are significantly worse in the US. Those people have all been dismally failed by a society and a schools system that assumes that children develop at the same pace. Given that in my country half of all prisoners are functionally illiterate, I believe we have paid a very dear price for that attitude.

Age-appropriate is one size fits all; It works fine for average people but fails catastrophically for anyone at the edge of the bell curve. If you think there is such a thing as "age appropriate learning and guidance", spend a day in an elementary classroom and see for yourself just how different a group of young children can be in terms of mental and emotional development. I'll wager that you'll be astonished at just how great the range is.

You seem to be taking a very blunt position in the nature vs. nurture debate, which I find a little unsettling.

That said, I don't think the problem with common education today is that it's one of an one-size-fits-all orientation, I think it's rather that the culture at large doesn't value education and reasoning as much as it should. Kids today are so distracted with gadgets these days that it's very hard for them to truly try and develop their intuition with things like mechanical objects (my niece likes to stare at the coffeemaker, and see how it stops, when it stops, etc. It's absolutely fascinating to see her figure it out).

I must admit that, like sdh, I am very curious as to whether you have your own kids.

Perhaps I'm misreading you, but this comes across to me like "if you don't have kids yourself you could not possibly understand". That is, I believe, a thoroughly wrong position to take about most anything in life.

Exposure to phenomena like "kids" is rather abundant in most societies. For parents as well as non-parents. Observation and analysis about how those phenomena processes seem to be behave can even sometimes be made more accurate by those not emotionally bound up in the here and now.

I believe there is no argumentative authority arising from the fact that one is or is not a parent.

To settle what might be an authority issue for you: I don't know about jdietrich, but I have kids and I mostly agree with him.

The interpretation I took was "If you have kids there are things you cannot avoid experiencing, and thus knowing first hand. These things are not obvious to someone without kids and are hard to explain to such a person."

No - my question was simply whether he has kids or not. He has every right to his own opinions (which I don't particularly disagree with) - I was simply interested to see if he is a parent or not.

I am not jdietrich, but I have a 3-going-on-4-year-old child, and she is certainly a "distinctive individual with unique preferences and aptitudes".

On the other hand, she is certainly different from (say) what she's likely to be in 15 years' time, in ways that are clearly related to her age. There are things I wouldn't say or do with her because they aren't "age-appropriate", though I wouldn't use that particular term. If someone who didn't know my daughter tried to tell me that I couldn't do this, that, or the other because it wasn't "age-appropriate" then I might react in roughly the way jdietrich did; but if my wife did, then I hope I'd give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she meant "appropriate for who and what she currently is". (Though I might have trouble giving her the benefit of the doubt in a situation like the one in the original article...)

As for the original situation, I don't think there's any point trying to pass judgement on what they said to each other in those first few minutes. No one is at their best in that kind of situation. On the face of it, at least, what they ended up doing seems to have worked out well enough for them, but of course it's quite possible that we're hearing a distorted version of the story.

Though I disagree with jdietrich's analysis of the rest of the article, I agree with the thing about age-appropriateness. I also think he showed pretty clearly that he remembers his own childhood, and uses that to validate his feelings about "age-appropriateness", rather than parenthood.

I am not a parent, and I had a good enough childhood (though I think I could have been given better schooling), but I have a four year old niece and she definitely is a person with her own worldview and her own feelings. I can have a conversation with her as I can with somebody else, regardless of age.

If you take people seriously, no matter what they look like, I promise you that you will have a richer life.

So, do you have kids?

If not, it doesn't invalidate your observations, but it definitely puts you at a disadvantage. You just have no idea what you don't know until you spend 24/7 raising a child.

I have two kids. They both learn differently and at different rates. As a result, we teach them differently. However, we are still teaching them what is appropriate to their specific stage of development (I call that age appropriate, but you may not).

So, I totally agree that learning should be unique to the individual, but I also think there are very real and distinct stages of growth that each individual goes through and for learning to be most effective it needs to take that into account.

I have kids; they have friends; all are intelligent, responsible youngsters. I live in the American midwest, in Iowa in fact. These kids do chores, cook dinner, read more than one language, do calculus. Maybe we just do things different in Iowa. But its easy to moan about the next generation, harder to do something about it. Consider joining a Scout Troop, the Music Auxiliary, the Debate team. Don't have those things in your area? There's your trouble right there.

I think many children are far more capable than most people think.

As to preferences, I had a fairly long hart to hart with my mother over the God question when I was 3. At 2 I decided I don't like fresh tomato's and at 29 I have yet to change my stance.

PS: A friend of mine found out that it was easier to get his children to fall asleep when lowed music was playing than in a reasonably quiet room. If your open to the possibility you can find all sorts of interesting things about your children even at fairly young ages.

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