aging / acting like an adult: the gravest offense in 21st-century American culture

lol TV news is garbage why would I let my child watch that

now that she can read a whole new range of info is available to her, which I am excited to share

well in my day we had Cronkite

apparently kid asked what happened to Martin Luther King not long ago

mom: "a man shot him"

child stares

(i'm sure that's the digest version)

oh look: http://www.sfgate.com/local/article/2-dead-several-injured-in-school-shooting-in-5845525.php

xp TV news was brilliant in the '70s.

My sister was an eighties kid and by that time the talks on Vietnam or genocide had been replaced with cable television cartoons. Sis turned out okay, but she is less aggressive and competitive than her older sibs.

Everybody dyes their hair? How is that a problem?

Seriously cannot fathom parents who put news blinders on their kids

I do this; what's so unfathomable about it? As far as I know, my 9-year-old doesn't know about school shootings. We talk about things that I don't think will feel personal to him; like, he knows Russia is invading Ukraine. I don't think he knows that ISIS beheads people, or what rape is, or the details of what happened in the Holocaust, and I'm OK with that for now. I don't think it'll make it impossible for him to be an adult.

Obviously I don't think this is what everyone should do with their kids, but it's what I do.

Yeah you gotta draw lines about what will traumatize them vs. what they are capable of treating as an abstraction

like yeah my daughter knows who Hitler was and that he hated Jews (thanks art history books about Marc Chagall lol) but she doesn't know people were shoved into ovens

I think she's a little young to grasp that there was a whole culture of people who happily mass murdered people like her

and if you said people were shoved into ovens it would just sound like a fairy tale

One thing about getting older (I am not yet 30 btw) is beginning to see things detach themselves from the age brackets I think they should be in, floating off, and reattaching to points in people's lives where I wouldn't expect them. Clothes, ways of talking, music, have been doing this weird dance for the last five years now.

Maybe that's always been going on, or has it sped up recently?

I used to be freaked out by adults with braces but i guess invisalign fixed that?

Parents I encounter today are downright paranoid about exposing children to anything "negative".

fuckin kids today -- when i was their age we went to bed each night in fear of soviet first strikes amirite

actually i do remember taking comfort from the fact that where i lived was probably within vaporizing range of a likely target and thus no 'on the beach' bullshit

I guess it depends on how much violence your child will be directly exposed to - something tells me that people who live near gang shootings can't exactly shield their children.

There are gang shootings in my neighborhood. My children are not aware of them because of when/where they tend to take place (v late at night, close to major thoroughfares like Mission St) also there are no gang members in our family.

there was a hs student killed by another student recently but that is p rare. She heard about it because the victim had recently graduated her school and had siblings still going there. So there were assemblies/discussions about it w the student body.

I know one kid whose mom literally never tells her "no". Like, the mom has expressed this to me as one of her principles of parenting. (I have watched as kid has grown into a whiney slack-jawed weirdo fwiw)

http://static.tvgcdn.net/MediaBin/Galleries/Shows/G_L/Lit_Lp/Louie/season3/louie-30.jpg

Sorry if I seemed judgmental - I'm not. I think most of my peers raise their children that way. It's just so different from my own childhood. My Dad worked in Gary, Indiana and we often had to drive through there so we had to have frequent talks about why there is inequality, why so many black people were poor. It was important to my parents that we didn't get bad ideas from the media. Something I'd like the next generation to learn. I think my parents were exemplary people but I don't expect everyone to be that way.

we had to have frequent talks about why there is inequality

I have those talks with my kids too! But I want it coming from me, not through a story in the paper or god help me TV news that he comes across without me.

In other words, "news blinders" doesn't mean "raising kids to think nothing is bad in the world," but it does mean "kids don't have to know details about beheadings and rape." I did go into a lot of detail about Curt Schilling's mouth cancer the other night, though, because I really do kind of want him to be scared of tobacco.

By the age of 8, I had enough historical perspective to understand exactly what it meant when one of my classmates called me a nigger, so it kind of baffles me to see that others in my putative peer group aren't making sure their kids understand at a young age how America is and how they can make it a better place.

i have nothing to do with anything & have no children but, yeah: i think blackout is a weird angle on this, given that kids won't be blissfully ignorant or sensitively primed of what's what but exposed to the crazy creative writing interpretation & storytelling of other kids, non-stop, w/o factchecks. i am e-mailing everybody's kids my own personal wikipedia playlist of the worst ten things that happened in the twenty first century, if you want to opt out hit me up at my inactive ilx webmail address asap

Well, in my case, the eight-year-old who had to look up 'rape' in the dictionary because of the news became the 12-year-old who, when told about a possible local prowler/rapist, suggested that maybe the answer to that was not 'women and girls, stay inside' but 'if a man is this possible local prowler, why not tell all the men to stay indoors instead?'

Granted, the news ran under some kind of fairness doctrine at the time...

Well, I just got back from dinner with my brother & his two kids, where we wandered into exactly this discussion. Kids are seven and four and a half. Of course our adult convo turned to the news, and we were talking about a woman I knew who got shot, then I apologized because kids were present. Smart eight year old goes, "I heard that! Strangers are bad people!" Then his mom told me 7 year old insists on watching the news, he esp follows the Malaysia flight story. Of course his mom is a flight attendant & they fly all of the time so they have to think about aircraft disasters.

I asked his parents if they let him watch news and they said he insists, but they're indulgent sort - again, afraid their kids will be the goody two shoes at school. Being Italian that's kind of a no no. Kid is so well-versed in the headlines I can understand why some parents would be alarmed. Have to admit, I laughed my ass of at how street smart and sassy he is.

it kind of baffles me to see that others in my putative peer group aren't making sure their kids understand at a young age how America is and how they can make it a better place.

dunno how personally I should take this but a) 6 and 8 are v different ages and b) racial epithets and their relationship to mass murder are things that are framed by a historical perspective that is a bit different from "random people may murder you at school for no reason at all", which is what I specifically took issue w re: tailhook and talking about it w my daughter.

I've definitely been thinking for a long time about having my kids learn less/later about the holocaust than I did. I think it's perfectly understandable why a generation that was closer to it felt it so important to emphasize so much, but the effect is an outsized sense of insecurity in the world that probably doesn't match up with what it's like to be Jewish in 2014 in America.

We've covered slavery, racism, ww2, the palestinian/israeli conflict, egypt, benghazi, russia invading the ukraine, FDR/the great depression, mlk/malcolm x/civil rights movement, gandhi, police brutality.. I am ok w leaving some of the grislier details of hiroshima, the holocaust, lynchings, etc for a later date

how does one explain benghazi to a little kid

It was on NPR all the time for awhile so we looked up where it was on a map, I explained what an embassy was and how diff't groups were fighting to be in charge of the country etc.

did you teach the controversy

Kids are so smart, we forget what a seven or eight year old is capable of! Vietnam and kids is such a unique subject, it was a national trauma in a way today's wars aren't - for whatever reason. It was discussed in the churches!

weren't they sending kids not that much older off to vietnam to fight?

wonder when original topic will resurface

have you noticed a change of subject?

yeah im not that far gone

Thought this might be the appropriate thread but not sure
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/william-shakespeare-culture-war-highbrow-lowbrow-94733/

bummed that this thread wasn't bumped because the Star Wars thread has almost 1000 new answers

pointing out that shakespeare has for hundreds of years been an essential part of mass/pop/whatever culture in the english speaking world to make a something something something point about sneering intellectuals is on some _trenchant social commentary_ shit

life is too short to read the stuff that noah berlatsky writes