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Writer's Block: Old enough!?!
May. 9th, 2010 04:38 pm[Error: unknown template qotd]
I don't believe in age limits. I believe in parental responsibility.
I've known some extremely mature, well-read, free-thinking 13-year olds, and some immature 50-year old assholes. Even though I don't like kids myself, I think a lot of problems in today's society are because people have been trying so hard to shelter their kids from 'the real world', where adults communicate and socialization takes place.
I didn't have siblings my own age, and very few friends my own age when I was a kid. I also didn't have the internet - the real world was my internet. My parents had adult friends, and with my dad being a trucker, my parents took me on the road a lot. I was not allowed to act up - I was expected to speak only when spoken to, and sat around absorbing much of the conversation that went on around me. Because I behaved and was unobtrusive, people didn't feel it necessary to dumb down the conversation to include me, but they did tend to ask me questions and involve me in some discussions. I heard about the Vietnam war from people who were there, I heard about politics from people who voted, I heard about crime, race riots, the recession, the environment, social standards (aging hippies vs conservatives, mostly) and how they were changing once again, I learned about different people from different places, I learned a lot about the business of long-haul trucking and how trade impacted that industry. I also got to hear stories - ghost stories, funny anecdotes, friendly warnings about bad neighborhoods and unsafe roads, I got to hear about first-hand encounters with cads and heroes... and I got to see firsthand the untold beauty of my own country - things like waking up in the fog in the middle of Iowa and being surrounded by a herd of deer grazing around my dad's truck, or seeing pronghorn off in the distance while crossing the Texas panhandle, coyotes in New Mexico, a traditional dance in front of someone's house while driving through an Apache reservation, men working on high-rise construction, the women who did their best to make the truckers feel at home in the truck stops - mainly by baking the best pies & brewing the best coffee.
All of these experiences were put into a proper context for me by my parents. My parents were not the best people on the planet, and they had issues, and I had bruises... but if one of their friends or 'company' brought something up that they considered inappropriate, my parents didn't hush the speaker - they told me to go elsewhere for awhile. That's really how any kid should be raised - with parental supervision. Any parent who just leaves their kid unattended in front of any media source, be it television, radio, books, the internet or other people, is not doing their job. There are things that are not 'age-appropriate', but the parent should be the filter for that material. The solution is not to expect the media source to self-censor or exhaustively monitor the age of people who uses their site.
I don't believe in age limits. I believe in parental responsibility.
I've known some extremely mature, well-read, free-thinking 13-year olds, and some immature 50-year old assholes. Even though I don't like kids myself, I think a lot of problems in today's society are because people have been trying so hard to shelter their kids from 'the real world', where adults communicate and socialization takes place.
I didn't have siblings my own age, and very few friends my own age when I was a kid. I also didn't have the internet - the real world was my internet. My parents had adult friends, and with my dad being a trucker, my parents took me on the road a lot. I was not allowed to act up - I was expected to speak only when spoken to, and sat around absorbing much of the conversation that went on around me. Because I behaved and was unobtrusive, people didn't feel it necessary to dumb down the conversation to include me, but they did tend to ask me questions and involve me in some discussions. I heard about the Vietnam war from people who were there, I heard about politics from people who voted, I heard about crime, race riots, the recession, the environment, social standards (aging hippies vs conservatives, mostly) and how they were changing once again, I learned about different people from different places, I learned a lot about the business of long-haul trucking and how trade impacted that industry. I also got to hear stories - ghost stories, funny anecdotes, friendly warnings about bad neighborhoods and unsafe roads, I got to hear about first-hand encounters with cads and heroes... and I got to see firsthand the untold beauty of my own country - things like waking up in the fog in the middle of Iowa and being surrounded by a herd of deer grazing around my dad's truck, or seeing pronghorn off in the distance while crossing the Texas panhandle, coyotes in New Mexico, a traditional dance in front of someone's house while driving through an Apache reservation, men working on high-rise construction, the women who did their best to make the truckers feel at home in the truck stops - mainly by baking the best pies & brewing the best coffee.
All of these experiences were put into a proper context for me by my parents. My parents were not the best people on the planet, and they had issues, and I had bruises... but if one of their friends or 'company' brought something up that they considered inappropriate, my parents didn't hush the speaker - they told me to go elsewhere for awhile. That's really how any kid should be raised - with parental supervision. Any parent who just leaves their kid unattended in front of any media source, be it television, radio, books, the internet or other people, is not doing their job. There are things that are not 'age-appropriate', but the parent should be the filter for that material. The solution is not to expect the media source to self-censor or exhaustively monitor the age of people who uses their site.
