I often wonder whether this has a lot to do with how we treat our kids. I often catch myself acting uninterested in my daughter's interests (she's two and often wants to show me things for the 50th time that were pretty boring in the first place.) She doesn't have any attention or behavioral issues in general, but I was amazed when a friend of mine came to visit who is an early music educator. They didn't do anything music related, but watching her interact with my daughter was eye-opening. She was very present and respectful with regards to my daughter's interests and what my daughter wanted to do. I guess more or less she treated my daughter more or less like an adult. Thinking about it, it's so easy to be flippant or dismissive about what our kids are doing or are interested in without even noticing.
I was really amazed to see how much my daughter reciprocated the attention and my friend was able to get her to pay attention to this or that or be much more engaged than I usually can.
This is obviously a very small sample, but it really made me think about the ways that we don't treat our children like adults (and how maybe they act like children because we treat them that way.)
An indirect way of encouraging this is including kids in what you are doing, as opposed to engineering activities for them.
A lot of kids' world these days is an artificial reality, made for them. School, soccer, art class, play dates. The reason the activity exists is to give kids an experience. We're not interested in it, because it's kid stuff.
When I was a kid, some of the most formative activities were fishing, sheep farming & vegetables gardening (grandparents on a farm), home repair jobs like painting or brickwork.
When I was very small (2-4), if my parents were painting a room, I was also in old clothes with a paintbrush "helping". Same with spring cleaning or whatnot. I had a little hammer I could bang, to help my dad assemble IKEA furniture.
You don't have to conciously "engage" in their stuff, just let them engage in your stuff.
> I often catch myself acting uninterested in my daughter's interests
I read a book that talk about how to improve on this [0], when ever my 5yo daughter shows me some of her drawings I try to take notice of some detail and comment on it, not just say 'that's nice dear'. She draws masses and masses of pictures of stick girls in dresses, but I always try to find some detail that she's done different.
We often draw or paint together, maybe once or twice a week. The last time we did it, I painted a picture of a boat on the sea, she painted a space portal that takes you to another world.
Well, it sounds like in the Mayan village, a kid would have the opportunity to run off and interact with someone else, or do something else, a lot more easily than in an American suburb or city. I don't think we can conclude from the NPR article that the Mayan mothers actually have to put up with looking at the same thing 50 times. It sounds like Mayan children have a lot more physical space to explore, and a lot more other children nearby.
My perspective shifted over time as I watched children become teens, then adults, and marvelling at how I thought of them changed.
It sounds lame, but I came to think of kids a people too vs just children. As in they are adults whose brains haven't finished wiring themselves and they deserve not just to be treated with respect, but also to be thought of respectfully. It's obvious to me now, I mean I can remember how some adults treated me all the way back to 3 yrs old or so. I'm that kid, just older.
Treating your child with adult-like respect is one of the principles of RIE parenting. Worth reading more about, if you want to learn more about different parenting styles.
> She was very present and respectful with regards to my daughter's interests and what my daughter wanted to do.
I am sure if she came over to your place for 50+ times she would also act different than the first time. I think It’s ok to be bored with a 2 year old request to show the same book or the same picture over and over and over again.
If she goes on and on about the same thing, to me that seems like she wants your approval. Give it but also try to gently direct her to do something different?
Reciprocity of being interested, by example, FTW. Makes sense to model and ensource behavior
If I get amped up, I become a firehose of consciousness tangents ADD-I but it's usually better to chill, listen and only say what's most important than no-filter crunk-tired.
This is pretty much how I was raised in a small midwestern farming community. I was in charge of the laundry by the time I was 6, and the lawn when I was 8 or 9, and summers were pretty much filled with activities that my friends and I could organize.
Moving to the burbs where play was organized sports and kids had everything done for them was a really big shock.
It was hard to believe how inept at life most of my peers were when I went off to University. They only things they knew were what was on tv or from school.
What's really interesting to me is this same thing can be applied to adults too.
The article writes:
> For starters, he says, ask your kid this question: 'What would you do if you didn't have to do anything else?'
I often wonder what civilization would be like if adults asked the same question to themselves and then lead a life where they focused on that instead of being pressured into "making a living".
It's very hard to compare a hunter gatherer / traditional village society to the modern urban & educated society and have meaningful takeaways.
The crux of the matter is the requirement for responsibility. Rather than have this goofy teenagehood that runs from 13-25, forcing the matter of responsibility at an earlier age and accepting the failures is a critical difference.
Protecting children and ensuring they are not morally damaged runs exactly counter this reality. There's a good deal of cognitive dissonance and parental self-delusion going on here as well.
I have generally grown to have a dislike of child labor laws that prohibit or limit working after 14. It's doing a great disservice to the young adults who could be doing something constructive in character.
Same goes for chores: children should be doing a full set of chores in household rota as soon as they are physically able. Vacuuming, dishes, pet litter, etc.
> Same goes for chores: children should be doing a full set of chores in household rota as soon as they are physically able. Vacuuming, dishes, pet litter, etc.
It is insane that some parents I know would like to reply to this part of your answer like this: "Kids should be kids you shouldn't force them to be adults too soon or you might steal their childhood". I've literally heard that.
I have 6 kids, and I've found it's pretty simple to get kids to pay attention (or anything else). Be consistent, and willing to discipline if necessary. Here's the order I follow:
1. Polite request
2. Polite command
3. Stern command
4. Warning
5. Push-ups
6. Spanking
They know I love them and because of that love obedience is required. Situations rarely escalate past step 2, and step 6 is memorable.
ETA: for anything past the polite stages, I try to always follow-up with gentle counseling after they've had a couple minutes to think about it. "Do you know why you got into trouble? How could you have handled the situation better?". Complete amnesty is the rule during counseling, i.e., no matter what they confess, they will NOT receive punishment. I want them to learn by reflection.
I've never been past step 3 with my kids. A stern request will often invoke tears, but is usually effective. If not, I'll modify the environment, either by removing the thing that's the focus of the problem or by removing the child to another location. When my oldest was very young she used to unfurl the toilet paper in all the bathrooms, so we kept it on a shelf she couldn't reach. When she started potty training we put it back and the unfurling started happening again. Someone would always stop her pretty quickly, but it was frustrating having to be constantly vigilant. I understand how satisfying it must be to watch the paper fly off the roll at speed and pile up on the floor and after all, you only live once, so one day I made a deal with her: I'd let her unfurl an entire brand new roll all the way down to the cardboard and then we'd never do it again. After that the rolls lived happily ever after on their dispensers.
I'm also hyper conscious about the media they consume. The girl began consistently saying please and thank you after watching The Busy World of Richard Scarry and we never prompted her or even explicitly taught her those words.
Ok, but in the Mayan method, the kids figure out for themselves what needs to be done, so you rarely have to do even step 1. The fact that you don't seem to have gotten that makes me think you didn't actually read the article.
My father was short tempered, very loud, and an unusually large man in stature and presence. Additionally he worked nights, got a couple hours of sleep, and then woke up and took care of my brother and I for breakfast / school before sleeping more. He was not someone to mess with in general, let alone at 630am on a Tuesday.
I think the threat of being screamed at and intimidated made my brother and I two of the most well behaved kids I knew. I would see my friends going bananas and think, “are you guys out of your minds?”
I’m not advocating this style of parenting, and I won’t replicate it, but I can’t deny that the old school mechanism of raising kids was basically “sit down, shut up, or else!” and it made kids much more likely to listen. And the view of children as mini adults who could be useful, if properly trained, has been the default parenting style for thousands of years.
> And the view of children as mini adults who could be useful, if properly trained, has been the default parenting style for thousands of years.
I remember reading a theory, long ago, that the absence of this is the entire source of teenage rebellion. Like the children from Guatemala in this article, it also said that this phenomenon pretty much only exists in "westernized" countries.
Basically, the theory is that puberty is when our bodies start telling us we're adults and need to take more responsibility/control, but society doesn't let us. So to find ways to take control, teenagers start doing things they're typically not allowed to do.
I'm in your camp: I never really understood why others did what they did, but fitting the theory, my parents did steadily treat my and my brothers more like adults as we grew up, instead of like kids most of the time.
One suggestion from their parenting style, that's apparently rare based on what my friends said:
Never give your kids an allowance. Once we were old enough, they started paying us for more chores/responsibilities; I got $5 for vacuuming the house once a week, my brothers each got $5 for mowing the lawn (usually split between inside and outside the backyard). Additional $1 for loading/unloading the dishwasher. Stuff like that. It doubled as giving us an inherent understanding of money long before we needed to work, rather than just giving us more responsibilities as suggested in the article.
Another anecdote people might not like: Sunday school was an amazing form of early-childhood education for me. Some of my first experiences with music, art, and reading were in Sunday school. It taught me to love drawing and singing which I still like to this day. We were taught to obey our parents or go to Hell, to pay attention or go to Hell, to share and be kind and to empathize... or go to Hell... Which everyone of course realizes the implications of, even at very young ages.
I once had a very interesting conversation with a high school teacher of mine who taught very high-level math. Speaking only of his students who were in honors courses, he said that there was a clear divide between students from religious homes and students from secular ones. The religious ones were much more diligent and willing to learn. The non-religious ones may have been smart but were sometimes unmotivated or couldn't handle the rigorous pace of work. The religion itself didn't matter - we had Hindu, Christian, and Jewish kids in the class, maybe one Muslim but I don't remember. He himself was a Christian so maybe he was biased, but I believe it.
There's a lot of range of behavior when it comes to strict parents, but just for the sake of tossing out my own anecdote the friends I had growing up with what I thought were ultra strict parents, all ended up acting out in later years. These were smart, disciplined kids that I grew up with, but when finally out from under their parents things changed as they went through university and eventually early life away from their parents.
To me it seemed they were just kept in a bottle for years and then other development started as soon as it could away from mom and dad.
Granted, what you and I think of as strict parenting could be very different things, and a few had a sibling who actually stuck with a very straight and narrow path through life.
Yes, kids and young adults now commit less violent crime and less likely go into bloody fights. I mean, for all the "kids behaved better for thousands years", I actually went out of way to check how people in the past acted and it was not so rosy.
On average, the kids raised like this tend to do what autority tell them when autority is present. It is different when autority is not present and they are in presence of weaker kids.
> the threat of being screamed at and intimidated made my brother and I two of the most well behaved kids I knew
I can't speak about your experiences, of course. In general, my understanding from experts is that being yelled at trains children to simply avoid being yelled at; they don't learn good behavior.
> And the view of children as mini adults who could be useful, if properly trained, has been the default parenting style for thousands of years.
I don't see that as a positive. The world was a horrible place for thousands of years; it was only in the last century that we started figuring things out, got children out of coal mines, learned germ theory, democracy and human rights became the norm, etc. etc. I like our modern ideas much better.
It's amazing how so many in our society wonder why kids naturally don't want to be forced to sit down, shut up, and passively consume arbitrary, impractical, and obsolete information. Our teaching and testing methods are stuck in the 19th century. Children who don't fit the mold of a cog in the industrial machine are drugged into submission.
>We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
As someone who has spent a bit of time traveling in the Mayan parts of Guatemala and Mexico, it seems difficult to me to compare parenting styles without also considering the fact that quite a few of the Maya in general are living in abject poverty with very little social mobility and with often 3+ generations of family living in close proximity, and I suspect as their financial situation improves and they have better access to distractions like tv or internet, the differences will fade away. I’d be very surprised if it even survived one generation of living in Guatemala City, let alone after moving to the US.
It’s one thing to let your kids free roam in a village that has a single dirt road going through it and almost everyone around you is a cousin or has known your family for generations. It’s quite another in the suburbs where you have only had a 5 minute chat with one neighbor in 3 months.
I’m also sort of skeptical of applying a value judgement to one or the other — I’m not sure that it would be beneficial to raise your kids that way in the developed world, although it sounds nice in the abstract.
I have so many problems with these kind of articles / studies. For starters, does any of this matter? There seems to be a moral assumption that more motivated kids are somehow better.
I also dislike the ‘more autonomy’ argument - somewhere in the article it says something like ‘ we can’t give kids that much autonomy because it would be dangerous’. So it’s setting up a morally superior scenario and parenting approach and then discounting it as inapplicable in the modern context. What does that tell you about kids? Nothing. But it tells you a lot about society’s priorities.
I’ve got a counter conclusion; the American kids have seen the toys before and they’re just not that interesting. The Mayan kids have fewer toys so are interested in playing with them.
I'm disappointed to see this article trot out the "unsafe" trope, especially after, earlier in the article, citing the Maya mother stating her child knows how to avoid traffic.
> Now, many parents in the U.S. can't go full-on Maya to motivate kids. It's often not practical — or safe — to give kids that much autonomy in many places, for instance.
I'm not asserting that traffic is the only US safety concern (or that it's even comparable for that example), but I would have hoped the authors would at least put in a link to an article regarding safety concerns or the controversy, without implicitly taking sides.
For what it's worth, what the Maya families are doing is a version of the central principle of Montessori early education (and what my company is trying to scale). That is, build a capacity for deep concentration in early childhood using (1) high autonomy pedagogical practices and (2) an environment with a structure that makes it possible for children to contribute to practical life.
Text version for EU users https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=621752789 , since declining tracking does not redirect to the correct article. It should work well with your browser's reading mode.
"The parents intentionally give their children this autonomy and freedom because they believe it's the best way to motivate kids." This is basically the philosophy behind self-directed learning: unschooling as well as learning communities like Sudbury schools, liberated learners centers, and agile learning centers.
I work at one of these schools, and our kids are really good at paying attention. ADD is a real thing and still affects some of them, but we also have a lot of kids who were diagnosed with ADD and it turns out when they are interested in what they're doing, their attention span is completely normal.
So it comes down to the choice of the kids. Apparently, making an origami jumping mouse is interesting for mayan kids, but not for american ones. The article doesn't even try to convince me that autonomy is the critical factor.
When a professor starts a sentence with "It may be the case that" it is clearly just personal opinion and not published scientific fact. The professor intentionally makes the disclaimer that she has no proof for the hypothesis.
I guess my follow up is: which is better? Is it better not to pay attention to tasks and imagine other stuff or is it better to focus on the task no matter how trivial?
In other words, should the Maya kids be learning from the Americans?
The way my step sons live strikes me as having much less autonomy than I had at their age. I’m still boggles that young kids aren’t allowed to walk to school by themselves.
Most of the time, I tend to think as long as good basic care is taken of kids, they can work out all sorts of weird child rearing environments just fine.
Something that has given me pause though is the astonishing addictive power of the various “screen” which occupy so much attention. Unibiquitous telecommunication is something new in human history, and it really grabs hold of people, the young as much as anyone. My concern is that our highly tuned psycho-physiology has not evolved to handle the type of activity, and it’s distorting our consciousnesses, and ability to pay attention, in ways that are unhealthy.
(Similarly to how humans have a hard time with too much access to processed food with high calorie amounts.)
[+] [-] jinfiesto|7 years ago|reply
I was really amazed to see how much my daughter reciprocated the attention and my friend was able to get her to pay attention to this or that or be much more engaged than I usually can.
This is obviously a very small sample, but it really made me think about the ways that we don't treat our children like adults (and how maybe they act like children because we treat them that way.)
[+] [-] dalbasal|7 years ago|reply
A lot of kids' world these days is an artificial reality, made for them. School, soccer, art class, play dates. The reason the activity exists is to give kids an experience. We're not interested in it, because it's kid stuff.
When I was a kid, some of the most formative activities were fishing, sheep farming & vegetables gardening (grandparents on a farm), home repair jobs like painting or brickwork.
When I was very small (2-4), if my parents were painting a room, I was also in old clothes with a paintbrush "helping". Same with spring cleaning or whatnot. I had a little hammer I could bang, to help my dad assemble IKEA furniture.
You don't have to conciously "engage" in their stuff, just let them engage in your stuff.
[+] [-] icc97|7 years ago|reply
I read a book that talk about how to improve on this [0], when ever my 5yo daughter shows me some of her drawings I try to take notice of some detail and comment on it, not just say 'that's nice dear'. She draws masses and masses of pictures of stick girls in dresses, but I always try to find some detail that she's done different.
We often draw or paint together, maybe once or twice a week. The last time we did it, I painted a picture of a boat on the sea, she painted a space portal that takes you to another world.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/769016.How_to_Talk_So_Ki...
[+] [-] zasz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samplesizeme|7 years ago|reply
It sounds lame, but I came to think of kids a people too vs just children. As in they are adults whose brains haven't finished wiring themselves and they deserve not just to be treated with respect, but also to be thought of respectfully. It's obvious to me now, I mean I can remember how some adults treated me all the way back to 3 yrs old or so. I'm that kid, just older.
[+] [-] dreadpirateryan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usaphp|7 years ago|reply
I am sure if she came over to your place for 50+ times she would also act different than the first time. I think It’s ok to be bored with a 2 year old request to show the same book or the same picture over and over and over again.
[+] [-] 2muchcoffeeman|7 years ago|reply
I remember being a kid and how people would be disinterested in you beyond anything superficial.
I often wonder how much of this effected my later behaviour.
[+] [-] melbourne_mat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ycombinete|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burntrelish1273|7 years ago|reply
If I get amped up, I become a firehose of consciousness tangents ADD-I but it's usually better to chill, listen and only say what's most important than no-filter crunk-tired.
[+] [-] tomohawk|7 years ago|reply
Moving to the burbs where play was organized sports and kids had everything done for them was a really big shock.
It was hard to believe how inept at life most of my peers were when I went off to University. They only things they knew were what was on tv or from school.
[+] [-] nickjj|7 years ago|reply
The article writes:
> For starters, he says, ask your kid this question: 'What would you do if you didn't have to do anything else?'
I often wonder what civilization would be like if adults asked the same question to themselves and then lead a life where they focused on that instead of being pressured into "making a living".
[+] [-] pnathan|7 years ago|reply
The crux of the matter is the requirement for responsibility. Rather than have this goofy teenagehood that runs from 13-25, forcing the matter of responsibility at an earlier age and accepting the failures is a critical difference.
Protecting children and ensuring they are not morally damaged runs exactly counter this reality. There's a good deal of cognitive dissonance and parental self-delusion going on here as well.
I have generally grown to have a dislike of child labor laws that prohibit or limit working after 14. It's doing a great disservice to the young adults who could be doing something constructive in character.
Same goes for chores: children should be doing a full set of chores in household rota as soon as they are physically able. Vacuuming, dishes, pet litter, etc.
[+] [-] fb03|7 years ago|reply
It is insane that some parents I know would like to reply to this part of your answer like this: "Kids should be kids you shouldn't force them to be adults too soon or you might steal their childhood". I've literally heard that.
[+] [-] naveen99|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unit91|7 years ago|reply
1. Polite request
2. Polite command
3. Stern command
4. Warning
5. Push-ups
6. Spanking
They know I love them and because of that love obedience is required. Situations rarely escalate past step 2, and step 6 is memorable.
ETA: for anything past the polite stages, I try to always follow-up with gentle counseling after they've had a couple minutes to think about it. "Do you know why you got into trouble? How could you have handled the situation better?". Complete amnesty is the rule during counseling, i.e., no matter what they confess, they will NOT receive punishment. I want them to learn by reflection.
[+] [-] marmaduke|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c22|7 years ago|reply
I'm also hyper conscious about the media they consume. The girl began consistently saying please and thank you after watching The Busy World of Richard Scarry and we never prompted her or even explicitly taught her those words.
[+] [-] gtm1260|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodandsteel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheerioty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s4vi0r|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rejschaap|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryan-allen|7 years ago|reply
this is interesting, i will try this.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maltalex|7 years ago|reply
In the western world the answer to that question is often some addictive activity such as playing video games, or watching videos on youtube.
[+] [-] seibelj|7 years ago|reply
I think the threat of being screamed at and intimidated made my brother and I two of the most well behaved kids I knew. I would see my friends going bananas and think, “are you guys out of your minds?”
I’m not advocating this style of parenting, and I won’t replicate it, but I can’t deny that the old school mechanism of raising kids was basically “sit down, shut up, or else!” and it made kids much more likely to listen. And the view of children as mini adults who could be useful, if properly trained, has been the default parenting style for thousands of years.
[+] [-] Izkata|7 years ago|reply
I remember reading a theory, long ago, that the absence of this is the entire source of teenage rebellion. Like the children from Guatemala in this article, it also said that this phenomenon pretty much only exists in "westernized" countries.
Basically, the theory is that puberty is when our bodies start telling us we're adults and need to take more responsibility/control, but society doesn't let us. So to find ways to take control, teenagers start doing things they're typically not allowed to do.
I'm in your camp: I never really understood why others did what they did, but fitting the theory, my parents did steadily treat my and my brothers more like adults as we grew up, instead of like kids most of the time.
One suggestion from their parenting style, that's apparently rare based on what my friends said:
Never give your kids an allowance. Once we were old enough, they started paying us for more chores/responsibilities; I got $5 for vacuuming the house once a week, my brothers each got $5 for mowing the lawn (usually split between inside and outside the backyard). Additional $1 for loading/unloading the dishwasher. Stuff like that. It doubled as giving us an inherent understanding of money long before we needed to work, rather than just giving us more responsibilities as suggested in the article.
[+] [-] subjectsigma|7 years ago|reply
I once had a very interesting conversation with a high school teacher of mine who taught very high-level math. Speaking only of his students who were in honors courses, he said that there was a clear divide between students from religious homes and students from secular ones. The religious ones were much more diligent and willing to learn. The non-religious ones may have been smart but were sometimes unmotivated or couldn't handle the rigorous pace of work. The religion itself didn't matter - we had Hindu, Christian, and Jewish kids in the class, maybe one Muslim but I don't remember. He himself was a Christian so maybe he was biased, but I believe it.
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
To me it seemed they were just kept in a bottle for years and then other development started as soon as it could away from mom and dad.
Granted, what you and I think of as strict parenting could be very different things, and a few had a sibling who actually stuck with a very straight and narrow path through life.
[+] [-] watwut|7 years ago|reply
On average, the kids raised like this tend to do what autority tell them when autority is present. It is different when autority is not present and they are in presence of weaker kids.
[+] [-] colecut|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forapurpose|7 years ago|reply
I can't speak about your experiences, of course. In general, my understanding from experts is that being yelled at trains children to simply avoid being yelled at; they don't learn good behavior.
> And the view of children as mini adults who could be useful, if properly trained, has been the default parenting style for thousands of years.
I don't see that as a positive. The world was a horrible place for thousands of years; it was only in the last century that we started figuring things out, got children out of coal mines, learned germ theory, democracy and human rights became the norm, etc. etc. I like our modern ideas much better.
[+] [-] eguanlao|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jeroenhd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnytran|7 years ago|reply
I would love the text-only site... if it worked.
[+] [-] wu-ikkyu|7 years ago|reply
>We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
-Buckminster Fuller
[+] [-] empath75|7 years ago|reply
It’s one thing to let your kids free roam in a village that has a single dirt road going through it and almost everyone around you is a cousin or has known your family for generations. It’s quite another in the suburbs where you have only had a 5 minute chat with one neighbor in 3 months.
I’m also sort of skeptical of applying a value judgement to one or the other — I’m not sure that it would be beneficial to raise your kids that way in the developed world, although it sounds nice in the abstract.
[+] [-] sjclemmy|7 years ago|reply
I also dislike the ‘more autonomy’ argument - somewhere in the article it says something like ‘ we can’t give kids that much autonomy because it would be dangerous’. So it’s setting up a morally superior scenario and parenting approach and then discounting it as inapplicable in the modern context. What does that tell you about kids? Nothing. But it tells you a lot about society’s priorities.
I’ve got a counter conclusion; the American kids have seen the toys before and they’re just not that interesting. The Mayan kids have fewer toys so are interested in playing with them.
[+] [-] Forge36|7 years ago|reply
I'm curious if their measurement of paying attention to an unrelated task performed by someone else is a measurement of attention or curiosity.
[+] [-] mmt|7 years ago|reply
> Now, many parents in the U.S. can't go full-on Maya to motivate kids. It's often not practical — or safe — to give kids that much autonomy in many places, for instance.
I'm not asserting that traffic is the only US safety concern (or that it's even comparable for that example), but I would have hoped the authors would at least put in a link to an article regarding safety concerns or the controversy, without implicitly taking sides.
[+] [-] mbateman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aissen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] i_love_jc|7 years ago|reply
I work at one of these schools, and our kids are really good at paying attention. ADD is a real thing and still affects some of them, but we also have a lot of kids who were diagnosed with ADD and it turns out when they are interested in what they're doing, their attention span is completely normal.
[+] [-] qznc|7 years ago|reply
When a professor starts a sentence with "It may be the case that" it is clearly just personal opinion and not published scientific fact. The professor intentionally makes the disclaimer that she has no proof for the hypothesis.
[+] [-] projectramo|7 years ago|reply
In other words, should the Maya kids be learning from the Americans?
[+] [-] icc97|7 years ago|reply
I wonder how much this has to do with the value of child life.
What are the statistics of Mayan children being run over / kidnapped?
I can't imagine it's somehow safer in Mexico, just somehow parents are more willing / less informed to take this risk.
[+] [-] b1daly|7 years ago|reply
Most of the time, I tend to think as long as good basic care is taken of kids, they can work out all sorts of weird child rearing environments just fine.
Something that has given me pause though is the astonishing addictive power of the various “screen” which occupy so much attention. Unibiquitous telecommunication is something new in human history, and it really grabs hold of people, the young as much as anyone. My concern is that our highly tuned psycho-physiology has not evolved to handle the type of activity, and it’s distorting our consciousnesses, and ability to pay attention, in ways that are unhealthy.
(Similarly to how humans have a hard time with too much access to processed food with high calorie amounts.)