How would you suggest that Mamas go about discouraging sons from doing such things? This is a genuine question.
By encouraging them to feel empathy for things that are smaller than they are.
How would you suggest that Mamas go about discouraging sons from doing such things? This is a genuine question.
It's a good question. My sense is that as a kid, I had a pretty good idea about right and wrong, but was not very skilled at applying that knowledge to a particular situation. So I think fairly specific advice works best. When kids I know are around sixteen, I always tell them, "you're going to drink, you're going to do stupid things, but no matter how much fun it seems at the time, or even if your friends think it'll be fine, never ever drive drunk or get in the car with a driver who's drunk." Taking the same approach, I think I'd say something like "There will be times when it will be a lot of fun to pick on someone or do something to someone that makes them seem silly. But whenever you're about to do something to someone else, ask yourself first whether it's a nice thing to do to them, and don't be scared to refuse to do it." I think it's always good to acknowledge the impulse, give the potential future perp a sense that he's not bad just for having the impulse, and give him guidelines for dealing with it.
I think it's always good to acknowledge the impulse, give the potential future perp a sense that he's not bad just for having the impulse, and give him guidelines for dealing with it.
Pussy.
Oh man, I've totally done this. But we didn't have a girl, and a few times we sprayed hookers.
I also feel a bit guilty, and I also can't help laughing.
How often are you in a position to dispense such advice to 16-year-olds?
I once taught a summer course that combined athletes and affirmative action admits in a "gearing up for college" thing. The athletes sprayed one of the a-a girls in the hall with a fire extinguisher.
It really was not funny at all.
How often are you in a position to dispense such advice to 16-year-olds?
Extended family, kids I've babysat, etc.
Now, kids, listen to what your "cool" "uncle" Ogged has to say about the dangers of the sexual relations and the alcoholic beverages...
I'm picturing you as the Coz, in case you couldn't tell. Man, you should get some new sweaters.
I must at least have more credibility than some random high-school teacher.
3 is pretty good.
See, if I ever have kids, I'm going to have to start all over in some really important ways: we were all girls in my family, and we were all raised Mormon. Other people's teenaged traumas were, basically, "other" when not sinful. Um, so, I'll have a lot to figure out before my hypothetical kids grow up, I guess.
I think it's always good to acknowledge the impulse, give the potential future perp a sense that he's not bad just for having the impulse, and give him guidelines for dealing with it.
Acknowledge the impule is good. I think too often parents want to assume "my kid would never do that." Oh yes he fucking will.
As far as I can tell I was a very easy kid to raise. Basically there was no time at which I wasn't concerned that if I did something wrong my parents would be disappointed. I even refused pot at parties where everyone was smoking pot (two parties, that is), in a wealthy neighborhood, with no chance that we were making loud noises that would annoy the neighbors...because...you know, maybe a cop could be...you know, driving by, and knock on the door to ask for directions or something. Or maybe one of my friends was an informant.
So basically I was constantly concerned that if I did something that was out of character, my parents would find out. And the thing is, they weren't even disciplinarians. I think the only time they reacted with shock and anger at something I did was
A) when I called a fellow U-12 soccer player "Mr. Pituitary Problem"
B) when I broke a window with one of my shoes
C) when I broke my grandparents' screen door with a soccer ball
- and even then, there wasn't any actual punishment, just a few minutes of yelling about how they were disappointed and didn't expect me to be careless or whatever.
I guess that around the age of 10 I developed the extreme risk-averseness, backed up by a desire to avoid humiliation, that has been remarked upon by people IRL. Probably I would have rebelled if my parents insisted on illogical things, but that never happened.
As such, despite being closer memory-wise to my childhood experience than most people here, I have nothing to add to this conversation. Forget whatever it is I just said.
Wait a minute, that comment did contain a useful idea, viz. "Don't insist on illogical things". That's obvious to all of us here, though.
Pretty much. I loosened up in college though.
That "Mr. Pituitary Problem" sounds funny though.
But the point is, if your kid is a huge pussy, there may be little need to steer him away from the temptation to do pointless and destructive things. This can save you a lot of time and worry.
So what you're saying, Ned, is that guilt-tripping is just as effective and probably easier than that "encouraging empathy" crap.
I wonder how much that can be instilled though. Some of us probably wired to be a bit more destructive.
If guilt doesn't work, there's always fear. Random and arbitrary beatings should do the trick.
21: Unless the guilt tripping creates a resentful young man, in which case all bets are off.
It wasn't even intentional guilt-tripping. I just wanted to avoid all risk of awkward situations, some of which would involve guilt.
But yes, guilt-tripping would probably produce a similarly docile response. Followed with a total descent into hedonism and resentment as soon as the kid goes away on his own, though.
(In case anyone's wondering, none of this is in earnest.)
Are we not Christians?* Shouldn't someone be saying that the problem is not a caterpillar here or a fire extinguisher there, but pretty much Ogged's whole life and everything he's ever done?
*Except for Lobofilho and his ilk. You know, the Judeo-Christians we hear so much about.
I think Ned's on to something. I was an exceedingly well-behaved kid (read "pussy"), and I also seem to recall the worst possible consequence of bad behavior being embarrassment. I still cringe physically when I remember embarrassing things that happened 5, 10, 15, 25 years ago.
So, parents, make your kids neurotic humiliaphobes, and they'll turn out all right.
Earnestly, I also like Ogged's 3, which basically boils down to: instill empathy. Which apparently B said in 2. So... I'm done.
I still cringe physically when I remember embarrassing things that happened 5, 10, 15, 25 years ago.
Ditto. I'm not sure exactly where I fall on the spectrum under discussion; I consider myself to have been a pussy as an adolescent, and yet I was poorly behaved -- mostly in self-destructive and passive-aggressive ways. But I totally hold a grudge against myself for my transgressions.
This didn't beat putting glue on a caterpillar?
I think the acknowledgement that even decent kids are likely to want to do things they really shouldn't is a useful one -- I know the worst things I've ever done I did while talking myself into thinking that it wasn't the sort of thing I'd be likely to do at all.
One of the SO's cousins went to jail for a few years because he helped hide a dead body. One of his college roommates killed a guy, and asked him to help out afterwards. Her cousin hadn't had anything to do with the killing, but he couldn't say no to a friend--you understand. He's a nice guy, moves pianos for a living now. He just made a bad decision. Anyway, time to go start Christmas shopping.
Random and arbitrary beatings should do the trick.
Teo's right. As a child, I didn't respond well to random beatings until my parents achieved the optimal ratio of random to arbitrary.
This makes me think of Jean Kerr, explaining the situation behind her classic Please Don't Eat the Daisies:
My real problem with children is that I haven't any imagination. I'm always warning them against the common-place defections while they are planning the bizarre and unusual. Christopher gets up ahead of the rest of us on Sunday mornings and he has long since been given a list of clear directives: 'Don't wake the baby,' 'Don't go outside in your pajamas,' 'Don't eat cookies before breakfast.' But I never told him, 'Don't make flour paste and glue together all the pages of the magazine section of the Sunday Times.' Now I tell him, of course.
And then last week I had a dinner party and told the twins and Christopher not to go in the living room, not to use the guest towels in the bathroom, and not to leave the bicycles on the front step. However, I neglected to tell them not to eat the daisies on the dining-room table. This was a serious omission, as I discovered when I came upon my centerpiece--a charming three-point arrangement of green stems.
But seriously: I like 3. Another thing parents can do is to hold up alternatives that the peer group is not the sole unit of measurement in the world. It's easier to do the thing that you already know is right when you can remember that what's cool among your three 15-year-old-friends may be hurtful among others.
hold up alternatives that s/b
hold up alternatives showing that the peer group....
Totally bogus psychological speculation: the specific warnings in 3 are useful because they trigger a moment of reflection at just the right moment. "Hey, wait, I was *warned* about this..." More general advice might not prompt the insight that, wow, the general adage applies in this particular situation. And once you stop to reassess, it's easier to change course.
40: Yeah. Because that's such an important part of development -- learning how and when to extrapolate a general rule from a specific incident, recognize that a particular situation falls under a general-rule category, etc.
Childhood is full of times when you go too far in one direction or the other, which at least gives your parents some funny stories. Adolescence is partly about figuring out which general rules you really do have to follow. And then -- at least for me -- adulthood is about trying to surround yourself with people who have a mutually understandable worldview.
The caterpillar died (a slow gruesome death), LB, you speciesist.
36: This would be such a non-fun conversation to have at the beginning of every potential relationship.
"So, I don't want to freak you out or anything, but I should probably tell you that I did a little time in prison a few years ago."
"Really? What for?"
"Helping my roommate hide a corpse."
"So in case this relationship goes bad, you should remember that he still owes me one."
A friend will help you move, but a true friend will help you move bodies. Or so they say.
OT: I just wrote a greasemonkey script (firefox extension, more or less) that linkifies references to comment numbers in a thread so you can quickly jump back to that comment. It sort of breaks when there are links that have numbers in the URL, though. Anyone interested?
OK, here's the script. I bet that it breaks the preceeding link for me.
Changing some lines in the 24–29 range helps:
m = contents.match(/([0-9]+):(?![\<\"0-9])/);
if (m) {
if (commentIDs[m[1]]) {
haveHits = true;
contents = contents.replace(new RegExp(m[1]), "<a href=\"#" + commentIDs[m[1]] + "\">" + m[1] + "</a>");
It now only picks up colon-postpended comment number references, which are a fairly large majority. It would be simple enough to add commas, too.
colon-postpended
What about colon-upended? IYKWIM, AITYD.
m = contents.match(/ ?([0-9]+)[ :,](?![\<\"0-9])/);
This'll pick up a lot of false positives, though. Doesn't break URLs anyway.
Yeah, I tried the "look for colons" thing too, but I discovered that, at least in this thread and the gender thread, that those references were actually in the minority. Not useful enough for me.
My first thought about that, ML, is that it sounds like you're talking about prolapsed cola, in which case, no thanks.
Ah, but looking for spaces as well is good. But some URLs have commas, too. I think the way to fix it is to search for the start of A tags and skip them.
PK dislikes his music teacher b/c she thinks it's funny to have the farmer's wife throw the blind mice's tails out the window after she cuts them off. PK says it would be much better to have the mice beat her up. I agree.
Now: am I scarring him for life, or preventing him from growing up to kill caterpillars? Make up your minds, people.
Yeah. Plus the above would actually catch URLs ending in spaces.
There doesn't seem to be a way to say "match at the beginning of the string or after a space". I thought [ ^] might work, but no dice.
NEW PLAN
m = contents.match(/(^([0-9]+)[ :,](?![\<\"0-9]))|( ([0-9]+)[ :,](?![\<\"0-9]))/);
if (m) {
var match = m[2] ? m[2] : m[4];
59 -- "ben w-lfs-n" s/b "Nirvana"
56: The latter, one would hope. That is a nasty, sadistic song, isn't it? Perhaps it needs re-writing. It might be fun to create a crisis in the music department by protesting the lyrics. After all, if children can be expelled for bringing a plastic knife in a lunch box...
I just want to know, ye who squirted fire extinguishers at random people, whether you understand that the canister = penis, foam = semen. If you're going to jerk off out the window of a car full of people, at least have the decency to offer your victims a lemon-scented paper handkerchief. Were you raised by Republicans???
I just want to know, ye who squirted fire extinguishers at random people, whether you understand that the canister = penis, foam = semen.
Um, no.
We stole a few of those old school silver ones that use water. They hold a lot of water, shoot it really far, and they're re-usable. The pressure nozzle is the same configuration as the intake on a car tire. It was convenient to be able to pull into a gas station and re-fill it.
63: So you peed on people. A pissing contest is a pissing contest...
canister = penis, foam = semen
All day I am going to have in mind the image of Viridiana attempting to milk her uncle's cow.
Could one of you guys tell me how to install the script in 61 into my browser?