27 years ago I accidentally ran the hardest, strangest Easter egg hunt
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I took our six year-old to an indoor climbing venue last year. She'd never done any kind of climbing before (although always seemed to be "climbing on" anything/everything at playgrounds and in kindergarten, particularly things that aren't really designed to be climbed. Had had a few interactions with gravity, including landing on her face at a playground, one of the reasons that prompted me to check out options for some proper climbing instruction for kids)
We pitched up, she met the trainer, she's the youngest in the group and also the last experienced, they get kitted out and head out to warm up then start climbing, I did what any HN parent does: fired up my laptop to catch up with work and stopped paying attention...
About 15 mins later another parent came over to me and asked "is that your daughter right at the top?" (about 16 meters/50 feet up, at the top of the wall)
Me: "err ... yeah"
I’m amazed as an adult that that thing was allowed but it was pretty fun at the time and I’d guess not actually that dangerous.
I was curious and looked it up. In Germany climbing structures may have a "fall height" of up to 3 meters. They can be much higher, though, since the fall height is only counted to the next rope layer. Basically, the ropes will slow down your fall is safe enough.
Later on that day, a girl from their family was climbing on a low branch (maybe 2m off the ground), fell, and seriously messed up her ankle or knee. She was on crutches for a while.
The boys and I must’ve been somewhere between 8 and 12 meters off the ground. In retrospect it’s one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done multi-pitch trad climbing.
In terms of what the minimum and maximum baselines would be discipline-wise.
Actually, the problem is the opposite. Their muscles get too strong too quickly and then they blow a pulley because their tendons aren't strong enough for the forces that their muscles are easily capable of producing. This happens in adults too, but AFAICT it's more common in kids and adolescents (but perhaps that's because most adults who get into the sport later don't ever climb as hard). Growth plate injuries are less common but devastating.
Avoiding these sorts of injuries is probably the biggest reason why training or a team is worth the $.
Let kids discover their limits instead of purposefully (or accidentally) imposing your own.
I wrote it for a few reasons. One, to be funny… clearly the commenter was not thinking about something like driving when they made the comment, so I thought it was kinda funny to shift the perspective to think about something where it is clearly a bad idea to just let a kid try something they think they can do.
Secondly, it was a bit from exasperation from comments I see about the ‘right’ ways to raise kids without thinking about/understanding the limitations that actual parents are under when trying to raise kids. I have two young kids (6 and 3), and in my experience, parenting is so much more about circumstances than parenting advice ever seems to acknowledge.
For example, let’s take this advice. Whether I can just let my kids try something that I think they aren’t yet capable of doing is entirely dependent on the circumstances. Is it safe to let them try? Can I afford to spend the money it takes to let them try the thing? Do I have the time to clean up the mess that will happen if they fail? Is it legal to let them try? Will it prevent them from being able to do another thing that I think they are more likely to be able to do?
Basically, my response to advice like this is usually an exasperated, “yeah, no shit I’d love to do that if I can, but so many things stop me from always doing it.” Maybe that is harsh, but it is the gut reaction to this sort of advice as a parent of young children.
And I know I was guilty of this before I had kids. I had so many ideas about how I would raise my kids and do all of these things, but I learned quickly that you don’t have as much control as you would like to imagine as a parent. Before you have kids, you imagine you drive their growth like you drive a sports car, with precision and the ability to choose the exact path you take. In reality, it is more like sailing a giant sailboat in a storm, doing your best to keep the ship pointed in the generally correct direction without taking on too much water.
I also totally get where you’re coming from. There are so many people who have great ideas on how to tell you what to do and no willingness to discuss how it works in practice. That said, we are the ones who have to reach inside ourselves and instead of responding with something that wins you more internet points, it can be more beneficial instead to attempt being fair, insightful, and kind. That can be itself a simple benefit to reality.
And then maybe one day we won’t have advice given without context or insult with the same.
Be well.
I am not sure why you think the comment was so antagonistic towards the person I responded to; it was a light hearted joke pointing out a flaw in their suggestion, it wasn’t a personal attack or anything.
On the other hand, it did seem to oversimplify and intentionally misinterpret the comment for the purpose of a shallow gag or unimportant edge case.
It would be great if HN was a place for deeper commentary. There are other places on the Internet for the caliber of commentary that fits in the duration of a session of potty training. It would probably be better if we worked to maintain some of what made HN different: substantial comments based around ideas without sarcasm or insults.
Just one poster’s opinion…
I don't think what my comment was saying was about an edge case. Many things kids want to do before they are ready are dangerous
Regardless, it’s incorrect logic to point out that there are other oversimplified posts in the thread and justification. Just because someone did something bad, doesn’t invite us to do more of the same.
Maybe edge cause is the wrong word. It’s plainly obvious. No one read the OP and thought: I wonder about 3 year olds driving cars!
Of course, safety and exploration exist along a continuum. It’s good to let kids learn. It’s good to protect kids. So far, the thread has shed no light on the nuance. One poster has expressed an unjustified preference for kids learning their own limits and another has added the pointless rejoinder — “not 3 year olds in cars!”
> it did seem to oversimplify and intentionally misinterpret the comment for the purpose of a shallow gag or unimportant edge case
I'm surprised that bringing up an "edge case" against an over-generalized statement is considered "intentionally misinterpreting" the original comment.
I think charitable reading of comments goes both ways - if we are supposed to read "Let kids discover their limits instead of purposefully (or accidentally) imposing your own." in a charitable manner, why should we assume that a short comment that brings up an edge case is (only) intended as a sarcastic dig at the original comment? It definitely forces the reader to think of beyond the "ideal" case, going into the realm of practicality. It is short, admittedly sarcastic (probably bad, but you complained about more than sarcasm), but I think it gets the main point across.
Alternatively, if we're not feeling charitable, I think it can be fair to say that the original comment paints a way too simplistic over-generalization of the difficult decisions in parenting, maybe even trivializing the hardships of parenting and blaming parents for not being more encouraging to their kids despite the parents having tried their best to manage practical difficulties -- in which case the reply still makes sense.
BTH I just think you (and others) were simply biased towards "positive" comments that you agree to. The long exposition by cortesoft was nice, but unnecessary once the edge case was brought up (I for one, understood what he/she meant). Do we really want to impose a minimum limit on post length just to make people feel less offended?
What evidence supports this claim?
I don't think the advice is to truly let kids do whatever they want with no input. It's to seriously entertain it when a child wants to try something new, even if your first instinct is to think they are too young. You can still say no, but it should be for the reasons you followed up with, not because "they're not ready".
I doubt many parents are just stopping their kids from trying things simply because they don't think they will succeed... it is always because non succeeding would have some negative consequence that is not worth the risk (e.g. the kid could get badly hurt, create a huge mess, destroy valuable property, etc).
I think you're engaging in black and white thinking by saying things are either dangerous or not. There's an in between.
Equally your comment seems like a tear down attempt.
If you want to teach a kid to drive a car you should probably stick to video games or low-speed go karts though.
There were prizes if you found a certain number of eggs and 3 special metallic eggs worth bigger prizes like stuffed animals or one of those giant net stockings full of toys.
In the end she found two eggs.
But I remember some full grown dude bro waving a plastic bag and bragging how he'd scored like 30+ eggs. And I didn't see any family with him.
It's really only higher commitment graded climbs (multi-day) and alpine that remain the realm of climbing where age 25+ are often better than age 15-25, and then more because the primary challenges are skill (dialed-in rope systems and logistics) and danger (judgement, reading terrain, route finding) rather than any particular piece of actual climbing.
The speed record world seems something similar -- younger climbers are much stronger and much more brash; it's mostly much more experience with systems, logistics, and terrain that keeps older folks in the game. (This might also be why speed roped solo climbing remains a young person's game -- the systems are still in a period of innovation so there's less of an incumbent advantage. Or maybe older folks are just not interesting in playing.)
In many ways, it's very similar to programming. I couldn't do the sort of epic hacking or programming comps I did as a kid (but of course old me is a much better person if what you want is a system you can trust or a system that solves a truly hard problem).
> I did what any HN parent does: fired up my laptop to catch up with work and stopped paying attention...
Responsive to another comment to the effect of "let the kids get scraped knees":
Respectfully, as someone who has guided youth climbing trips, this is not an appropriate philosophy when introducing a child to rock climbing (indoors or outdoors). Climbing -- especially indoor climbing -- can fee lsafe but has unintuitive and EXTREME bifurcation points in its risk profile. Situations can change from extremely safe to almost certain death, and in many cases even most adults won't be able to perceive the difference.
"let an uneducated kid climb a choss pile" can become something close to negligent homicide in the not unlikely event that they rip off a death block and kill a party below them.
"Let a unsupervised kid climb 50 feet" is not dissimilar, because in case of a fall they are the death block for anyone walking below.
Gravity is not something one can effectively learn about via gradient descent on the side a cliff.
Also money
Once you move outside, that's when you start to spend thousands of dollars on cams, quick draws, etc.
FWIW though, the local gym here is $70/mo and a day pass isn't cheap either. I'd love to join, but that's just too much for me.
no one suggested this happened except you though. It's clear the kid was supervised by the climbing instructor. Clearly top-roping with either auto- or human belay because that's the only kind of situation where you'd have a kid on a 50-foot wall. Kid could get injured sure, but it would be a tooth getting knocked out by slamming into the wall from a bad belay catch, not falling 50 feet to the ground.
One year we used camo eggs - and all three of our kids have red-green color issues. They found very few.
Just a month ago my wife found one in a decorative pot on top of a cabinet - where it'd been for 20 years. Each time we have one of these epic finds, we share it with a family text.
Or install the Nitter Redirect addon! I forgot I recently did that, and was pleasantly surprised someone had the good taste of pasting the nitter one directly :D
This was unexpectedly terrific.
Anyway, I’m glad I finally found the term for these sentences. Many thanks.
some sentences only work like that when written (like the german example) and others only when spoken.
being non-native speakers has the interesting advantage that often we don't know the default interpretation of a word, because we don't always know which meaning of a word is more common.
on the other hand we'll miss some because we are not even aware of the second meaning of some words.
I also like to post this video different places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aERpL5IqqTo
"Don't have time to sit and read a novel during your busy schedule? Subscribe to receive carefully-curated and abridged novels via SMS. We will space out the texts during your busy day so you have the time slowly digest and experience the same novels your friends are talking about at the coffee shop, but on your own schedule."