It's really dehumanizing to take a very large group of people and basically say they are incapable of decent thought like you and need to be controlled.
[edit: added the word "reliably"]
There has been myriad research detailing the adverse effects of children (aka developing humans) viewing violence, sex, drugs, etc. I think four year-olds safely qualify as developing. If stuff like this isn't alarming enough, consider a more extreme example like the two year old in Indonesia who smokes a couple packs of cigarettes per day http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/indonesia.smokin... . You're hurting these kids' chances (of living a healthy life/of relating to their peers/of being successful/ etc)
For those hounding me for citations, here's something I quickly rustled up:
From an economist: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22743802/Learning-Violence-Young
From a social psychologist: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2038214/Video-Game-Violence
From a the Institution of Youth Development in Washington DC: http://www.scribd.com/doc/33292276/Violence
As to the studies, I've read some such studies and deemed them invalid or unscientific. Can you cite one that you would stand behind as rigorous and accurate?
[Edit: Can you site ONE study that you will STAND BEHIND? One you've read in full. Not three studies you just googled. I can google studies too...]
Yes, there are questions about whether playing "Mature"-themed games actually causes problems for teenagers.
Yes, there is an effort, probably ill-conceived, to restrict access to "Mature"-themed games for teenagers.
We are not talking about teenagers; we're talking about a 4 year old.
One simple axis of argument to observe here is the Harvard (Kutner & Olson) vs. Iowa (Anderson) debate; Kutner's book points out that much of the psych research is methodologically flawed. But both Kutner and Anderson agree that exposure to very violent games is associated with increased aggression. Kutner just doesn't want to see all games demonized for all pre-adult age groups.
One thing "associated with" does NOT mean is "caused by". It's consistent with, say, people first becoming aggressive and then taking up violent games afterwards. And it's consistent with taking their violent games away from them making them more, not less, aggressive.
Anyway, just because two people from a debate agree doesn't make something true. And just because psychological studies are flawed for irrelevant reasons doesn't mean they aren't also flawed for relevant reasons. Feel free to cite a study you'd like to stand behind...
I've cited researchers (both with litanies of studies) downthread.
Which cleverly dodges the question at hand. Cartoon violence and/or sex: harmful to kids or not?
The big problem with most of the psych studies indicating "harm," for some definition of harm, is in the controls. Typically they'll sit some kids down in front of an Xbox for a measured period of time, and monitor them for signs of aggression and aberrations in empathy. The control group consists of another group of kids sitting in the next room playing with crossword puzzles.
The control groups in these studies should consist of kids running around outdoors playing Cowboys and Indians, but that never, ever seems to occur to the psych majors. It's almost as if they initiated their studies to demonstrate a preordained conclusion, or something.
That's what psych studies do - they establish correlations. People are not crash-test dummies that can be produced identically in quantities and experimented on. Different people respond to experiences differently, but that doesn't mean you can't say that those experiences are generally harmful or generally beneficial.
Nobody claims that psychology has the predictive power of physics, but that doesn't mean it has nothing useful to say.
And that's why they are useless. Because correlation isn't causation. Or in other words, because "aggressiveness is correlated to GTA" is fully compatible with GTA reducing aggressiveness. Whenever correlation studies try to give conclusions, they are reliably compatible with the opposite of their conclusions, so they are just nonsense...
Naturally the rest of society wants us to be docile, but it is not necessarily what is good for you. Also, the people with the guns usually win and set down the law. "We can talk about everything" is a lie.
I also still remember being a kid, which gives me a somewhat biased opinion, I guess.
My own non-scientific guess would be that peer pressure is more important. Personally I was never much into watching gruesome movies, for example, but for a while it seemed to be a test of courage among other kids my age. So essentially kids might have been watching more gruesome stuff than they really liked because of peer pressure. Or they really liked that stuff - then I wonder why?
Also as kids we loved Wild West stories, would dress up as Cowboys and Native Americans and shoot around with toy guns. The totem pole and the associated torturing were a particular favorite. We never mistook play for reality, though (no real torturing).
Let me disclaim right here that the kind of bad parenting on display in this article is of approximately the same valence as the bad parenting I inflict on my kids on a weekly basis. I'm just saying it made me queasy is all. The kid, who is clearly awesome, is going to be fine.
My family had a similar approach and I turned out ok :)
There are similar developmental challenges faced by the human brain over it's lifetime. It never stops changing. At some point, we draw a line and say that it is grown up, but it's a blurry line.
There is nothing de-humanizing about taking a group of people (based on age) and saying they are incapable of certain types of thought. Adding the word "decent" as you did would be adding subjectivity and moral judgement, however the parent post didn't say that.
You might not remember it, but you also struggled with certain concepts: object permanence, abstract thinking, reasoning. Assuming a child is the same thing mentally as an adult is a huge mistake. We may grant them the same basic human rights, but they are absolutely not capable of the same level of thought. That's why we have a different word for them: children.
At the age of 3 or 4 children are just starting to understand the concept of "same" and "different".
Here's some information about childhood milestones:
http://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/toddler/P...
There are just so many learned realities that we as adults assume but which kids have no idea about, to the extent that we have no freaking clue about how they see the world.
Sometimes I think about what the difference between an 18 year old and a 24 year old's brain is. Or, perhaps the difference between a 30 year old and a 50 year old person.
I think we have an intuitive understanding of it and it shows up in a lot of public policy debate. People talk about ageism and old people "not getting it" and older folks have a similar "kids these days" feeling. I wonder what part of that is simply due to differing world views caused by differing brain capabilities. Nobody seems to talk about that when we debate these things. I'm sure its being studied.
I for one think we must control babies. The risk that they might rise up and overthrow us is just too great to ignore. :P
Most of the time a parent and his child agree about who should control something. The parent pays for the baby's food and the baby doesn't object. This is not "control" in the relevant sense because the baby prefers it be this way. And other times the baby decides on the location of his rattle. He exercises some control over his life and his parent is fine with that.
The interesting case -- and the one where the notion of an adult controlling a child is most relevant and meaningful -- is when there is a disagreement. Then if the adult, say, unplugs the TV to prevent the child playing GTA, against the child's will, he is taking control of the situation and exercising control over the child's life.
A wide variety of excuses are given for adults controlling children as a react to disagreements. One particularly generic and offensive one is "kids don't think so good". This sometimes takes more specific forms, e.g. "kids don't think so good on the specific issue of differentiating between virtual reality and reality" (btw, ironically, most adults are extremely bad at that same issue in some different forms, e.g. they don't really understand that when they "see" a chair the visual image is a VR rendering inside their head).
Anyway, here is a fact that, ahem, adults often mess up and which many young children intuitively seem to grasp: if we accept that the ratio of stuff adults are right about to stuff children are right about is 1000:1, it does not follow that in a disagreement the adult is right (or probably right). This is because disagreements do not happen in a random sample of cases. Disagreements only happen when both parties judge that they have relevant information that the other hasn't properly taken into account.
In disagreements, it's nothing but sheer unadulterated arrogance (and irrationality) to assume one is right. And to attribute this assumption to demographic characteristics of the other person is dehumanizing.
But again we're talking about a 4 year old. It just shouldn't be controversial (or, worse, acrimonious) to suggest that the rules are different for preschoolers.
But I don't see anything about being younger than that which changes what constitutes a rational way to approach a disagreement.
Therefore, when your 4 year old eats your 5 year old's cookie, it isn't productive to demand that the 4 year be held to account for "how it would make YOU feel if HE ate YOUR cookie". It's confusing and irrelevant to the child.
Since parents for most of the last century have used exactly those words on little kids, I have illustrated a disagreement between me and a hypothetical parent, and resolved it with a very, very basic finding of developmental psychology.
That disagreement is not very relevant to whatever it is our disagreement is, but it does illustrate that the logic you're deploying isn't... um... controlling? here.
Incidentally, isn't it a little bit weird that I'm taking this side of a discussion against the author of the "Don't Fight" iPhone application? =)
I don't know if you've read through my app, but I think you will find it's consistent with my views in general, and thoroughly fails to advocate empathy.
I would be more inclined to point out that if there is a disagreement about a cookie, it is in everyone's interests to use a truth seeking process to find out the right thing to do. Then everyone can win. With fighting, someone loses, and it will sometimes be you, and even if you win the other guy uses his creativity against you instead of cooperatively.
Like the Golden Rule, for example. Do I like being slapped? If no, don't slap. Do I like to be stolen from? If no, don't steal from others. And so on. Empathy towards others goes a long way towards being moral -- even if one has to "fake" it at times.
by your standards, if i like being slapped is it moral for me to slap others?
Most skills do take a long time to master.
And I like truth.
Feel free not to read my stuff though, shrug.
Philosophy also suffers from some crippling flaws that Wittgenstein pointed out.
epistemology is a very important and useful field. at least i think so, feel free to post or cite a criticism. i'll accept that most of the rest of philosophy is a bad signal to noise ratio.
Avoid exposing preschoolers to violent media and video games. It's correlated with increased aggression and poorer judgement. It's also --- and here I'll have a harder time citing sources --- cruel. I felt bad for the little boy when he felt bad about "running someone over". There was no reason to expose him to this kind of emotional confusion.
It is not "dehumanizing" to suggest that a 4 year old doesn't have the same cognitive function as a 14 year old.
And for the love of Dr. Spock, don't let them play Cops and Robbers, either!
Just having been a child at one time, and now an adult, and seen and interacted with children, should give plenty of experiential evidence consistent with my original comment's claim. This is really not rocket science or esoteric: it's actually pretty much part of everyday common sense for a lot of adults, especially for anybody that is a parent or who has taken care of children professionally. No academic paper citing is needed.
EDIT: after this post you edited yours to add "reliably". Good, that loosens it up and you may no longer be in logical error.
but seriously, my original comment contained my point, and was in English. I'm now done with this thread. :)