I also don’t have kids, and don’t have particularly strong opinions on how other people choose to parent their kids. I do think that we as a society have collectively raised the bar of what counts as a good parent far higher than it ever was before, and it seems incredibly unlikely a priori that all those recent changes are helpful, let alone helpful enough to be worth the demands they put on parents. But I can say that by the time I was 3 and in pre-school, we weren’t getting intervention from adults every 5 minutes. And by kindergarten at 5 it was much less often still. Groups of us would go whole hours or days without anyone hitting anyone else. I think the only time I got hit by anyone from age 4 on was one time in 6th grade? First, because yes, if you did, you got punished enough to not want it to happen again. And second, because you learned that if the adults didn’t punish you for whatever reason, the other kids would. Maybe that’s part of what’s been lost? The willingness to have a society of kids that internally regulates by dealing with its own problems, even if it does so in ways the adults may not prefer? Letting kids take on more of certain kinds of risk as the price of autonomy, and deal with the consequences of when it goes poorly?
I think that hugely depends on temperemant of the child. I was constantly getting into fights til labout the age of 11. Not in a bad way, they were mostly good fun, but yeah lots of fighting.
Interesting. All of my friends at that age were too nerdy to want to do that kind of fighting. I did martial arts, but that’s a controlled setting, and also made it very obvious why real fighting is undesirable.
I’m genuinely curious, then: If in your case you said this was in good fun, do you think it would have been an improvement had adults constantly intervened to prevent those fights? Where do you, personally, draw a distinction between unacceptable fighting and acceptable roughhousing? Do you consider it plausible that kids are fighting in part because they’ve never really had the opportunity to learn through direct experience that actual fighting is bad, and also to learn how to tamp it down to play-fighting that all involved parties enjoy? What alternatives to actual fighting are available to kids today that achieve the kinds of social and physical goals/roles that good-natured fighting served in your own childhood?
I also don’t have kids, and don’t have particularly strong opinions on how other people choose to parent their kids. I do think that we as a society have collectively raised the bar of what counts as a good parent far higher than it ever was before, and it seems incredibly unlikely a priori that all those recent changes are helpful, let alone helpful enough to be worth the demands they put on parents. But I can say that by the time I was 3 and in pre-school, we weren’t getting intervention from adults every 5 minutes. And by kindergarten at 5 it was much less often still. Groups of us would go whole hours or days without anyone hitting anyone else. I think the only time I got hit by anyone from age 4 on was one time in 6th grade? First, because yes, if you did, you got punished enough to not want it to happen again. And second, because you learned that if the adults didn’t punish you for whatever reason, the other kids would. Maybe that’s part of what’s been lost? The willingness to have a society of kids that internally regulates by dealing with its own problems, even if it does so in ways the adults may not prefer? Letting kids take on more of certain kinds of risk as the price of autonomy, and deal with the consequences of when it goes poorly?
I think that hugely depends on temperemant of the child. I was constantly getting into fights til labout the age of 11. Not in a bad way, they were mostly good fun, but yeah lots of fighting.
Interesting. All of my friends at that age were too nerdy to want to do that kind of fighting. I did martial arts, but that’s a controlled setting, and also made it very obvious why real fighting is undesirable.
I’m genuinely curious, then: If in your case you said this was in good fun, do you think it would have been an improvement had adults constantly intervened to prevent those fights? Where do you, personally, draw a distinction between unacceptable fighting and acceptable roughhousing? Do you consider it plausible that kids are fighting in part because they’ve never really had the opportunity to learn through direct experience that actual fighting is bad, and also to learn how to tamp it down to play-fighting that all involved parties enjoy? What alternatives to actual fighting are available to kids today that achieve the kinds of social and physical goals/roles that good-natured fighting served in your own childhood?