Xander
Lex Parsimoniae
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2007
- Messages
- 4,463
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 9w8
I was reading through "And Another Thing" by Jeremy Clarkson and he expressed that in his opinion kids shouldn't go round climbing everest or have every toy ever known not because it can turn a child in to a demonstrative nightmare who screams when you refuse to buy them a new Alienware PC each time an upgrade comes out but more because by the age of about twelve they've little left to do with their lives except work and wait till their dead. This kind of makes sense to me and I can see how it could cause the general nose dive in children's attitudes and aspirations.
I noted that the successful people of my kind of age are all heavily into computers or some emerging market. These were not heavy consumers they were innovators more obsessed with fiddling with old components than laying their hands on the latest and greatest pieces of preformed fully functioning all singing all dancing tech.
It seems as though attention levels have gone down with fewer kids developing a taste for the slower interests and more and more going for the quick fix. Even in the realms of role playing games you can see this trend. Games Workshop is consistently dumbing down it's rules and making everything faster so a game only lasts the same amount of time as a DVD. Instead of the RPG shops stocking the various different genres of roleplay they now seem swamped with a dozen dozen different trade-able card games which take about thirty minutes to play.
As a person who likes involved experiences with nuances to master and not just a fiddly control and the computer ramping up it's silicone reflexes to virtually clock speeds I find it increasingly difficult to find anything suited to me and yet if I had ADHD it seems that I would be well catered for!
Basically with children I see one strain of thinking reign supreme "I want my kids to have everything that I wanted when I was young". Now this is a fine and noble goal in concept but I think that it's being employed with naivety which I would find difficult to match in almost every other field of thinking. Sure if you can give your child everything they ever wanted and still produce a child who would give it all up for a good enough reason then yes you've mastered it but what about if you don't manage that fine pinnacle of achievement? If your child is given everything then where is the sense of value? If they have seen the view from the top of the Eiffel tower by the age of six then at seven that is something not unusual. Why, unless the experience was profound, would they bother again with the idea of "let's go up there the view will be amazing"?
So are the kids of today having their futures dampened by the parents heading off at the pass all those things which should be built up to?
I noted that the successful people of my kind of age are all heavily into computers or some emerging market. These were not heavy consumers they were innovators more obsessed with fiddling with old components than laying their hands on the latest and greatest pieces of preformed fully functioning all singing all dancing tech.
It seems as though attention levels have gone down with fewer kids developing a taste for the slower interests and more and more going for the quick fix. Even in the realms of role playing games you can see this trend. Games Workshop is consistently dumbing down it's rules and making everything faster so a game only lasts the same amount of time as a DVD. Instead of the RPG shops stocking the various different genres of roleplay they now seem swamped with a dozen dozen different trade-able card games which take about thirty minutes to play.
As a person who likes involved experiences with nuances to master and not just a fiddly control and the computer ramping up it's silicone reflexes to virtually clock speeds I find it increasingly difficult to find anything suited to me and yet if I had ADHD it seems that I would be well catered for!
Basically with children I see one strain of thinking reign supreme "I want my kids to have everything that I wanted when I was young". Now this is a fine and noble goal in concept but I think that it's being employed with naivety which I would find difficult to match in almost every other field of thinking. Sure if you can give your child everything they ever wanted and still produce a child who would give it all up for a good enough reason then yes you've mastered it but what about if you don't manage that fine pinnacle of achievement? If your child is given everything then where is the sense of value? If they have seen the view from the top of the Eiffel tower by the age of six then at seven that is something not unusual. Why, unless the experience was profound, would they bother again with the idea of "let's go up there the view will be amazing"?
So are the kids of today having their futures dampened by the parents heading off at the pass all those things which should be built up to?