Adolescents’ rich and nuanced relationship with risky behaviour
nature.com
nature.com
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.