'One thing we know about anxiety and depression is that they correlate significantly with people's sense of control or lack of control over their own lives. People who believe that they are in charge of their own fate are less likely to become anxious or depressed than are those who believe that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control. -- #Shift Toward Extrinsic Goals, away from Intrinsic Goals: Twenge's own theory is that the generational increases in anxiety and depression are related to a shift from "intrinsic" to "extrinsic" goals. Intrinsic goals are those that have to do with one's own development as a person – such as becoming competent in endeavors of one's choosing and developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Extrinsic goals, on the other hand, are those that have to do with material rewards and other people's judgments. They include goals of high income, status, and good looks. Twenge cites evidence that young people today are, on average, more oriented toward extrinsic goals and less oriented toward intrinsic goals than they were in the past. For example, a poll conducted annually of college freshmen shows that most students today list "being well off financially" as more important to them than "developing a meaningful philosophy of life," while the reverse was true in the 1960s and '70s. The shift toward extrinsic goals could well be related causally to the shift toward an External locus of control. We have much less personal control over achievement of extrinsic goals than intrinsic goals. I can, through personal effort, quite definitely improve my competence, but that doesn't guarantee that I'll get rich. I can, through spiritual practices or philosophical delving, find my own sense of meaning in life, but that doesn't guarantee that people will find me more attractive or lavish praise on me. To the extent that my emotional sense of satisfaction comes from progress toward intrinsic goals I can control my emotional wellbeing. To the extent that my satisfaction comes from others' judgments and rewards, I have much less control over my emotional state. -- My hypothesis is that the generational increases in Externality, extrinsic goals, anxiety, and depression are all caused largely by the decline, over that same period, in opportunities for free play and the increased time and weight given to schooling. By depriving children of opportunities to play on their own, away from direct adult supervision and control, we are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives. We may think we are protecting them, but in fact we are diminishing their joy, diminishing their sense of self-control, preventing them from discovering and exploring the endeavors they would most love, and increasing the chance that they will suffer from anxiety, depression, and various other mental disorders.'

'As long as kids grow up in a literate society, surrounded by people who read, they will learn to read. They may ask some questions along the way and get a few pointers from others who already know how to read, but they will take the initiative in all of this and orchestrate the entire process themselves. This is individualized learning, but it does not require brain imaging or cognitive scientists, and it requires little effort on the part of anyone other than the child who is learning. Each child knows exactly what his or her own learning style is, knows exactly what he or she is ready for, and will learn to read in his or her own unique way, at his or her unique schedule. -- The message repeated most often in these stories of learning to read is that, because the children were not forced or coaxed into reading against their wills, they have positive attitudes about reading and about learning in general. This is perhaps most clearly stated by Jenny, who wrote, regarding her daughter (now 15) who didn't read well until age 11: "One of the best things that came out of allowing her to read at her own pace and on her own initiative was that she owned the experience, and through owning that experience she came to realize that if she could do that, she could learn anything. We have never pressured her to learn anything at all, ever, and because of that, her ability to learn has remained intact. She is bright and inquisitive and interested in the world around her." #Children learn to read when reading becomes, to them, a means to some valued end or ends. There's an old joke, which I recall first hearing several decades ago, about a child who reached age 5 without ever speaking a word. Then one day, at lunch, he said, "This soup is cold." His mom, practically falling over, said, "My son, you can talk! Why haven't you ever said anything before?" "Well," said the boy, "up until now the soup has always been warm."' -- Needs must

'We adults flatter ourselves when we think that we are the best models, guides, and teachers for children. Children are much more interested in other children than in us. Children are especially interested in, and ready to learn from, those others who are a little older than themselves, a little farther along in their development, but not too far along. Children are drawn to older children, and older children are drawn to adolescents. Adulthood is too far off to be of much concern. That is why age-mixing is crucial to children's self-education. #Younger children want to do what older children do: Children on the verge of being able to play strategy games, or read, or perform new operations on the computer, or engage in more advanced athletic activities, become motivated to do so by observing those activities in older children and adolescents. In our study of how and why children learn to read at the school, some told us that they wanted to read because they were envious of the older kids who were reading and talking about what they had read. As one student put it, "I wanted the same magic they had; I wanted to join that club." Younger children don't just blindly mimic older ones. Rather, they watch, think about what they see, and incorporate what they learn into their own behavior in ways that make sense to them. Because of this, even the mistakes and unhealthy behaviors of older children can provide positive lessons for younger ones. Young children talk endlessly about what they like and don't like about the activities of the older ones around them. Negative models can be as helpful as positive ones. -- #Older children are excellent helpers and advisors of younger children, partly because they do not help or advise too much: Children often prefer to ask an older child rather than an adult for help or advice, even when an adult is available whom they could easily ask. I suspect there are many reasons for this, but one of the main reasons, I think, has to do with control. Children seeking help or advice do not want to give up their own control of the situation. They don't want any more help than what they ask for, and they want to decide themselves whether or not to accept what is offered. So, here is a valuable lesson that we adults can learn from children about helping and advising children: Don't give more help, or more advice, than is asked for! Come to think of it, the same lesson applies to helping and advising adults. -- #Older children expand their own understanding through explanations to younger children: Everyone who has ever been a teacher knows that we learn more when we teach than when we are taught. The requirement to put ideas into words that others can understand, and the need to think through objections that others might make, leads us to think deeply about what we thought we knew. Often this leads us to a better understanding than we had before. In an age-mixed environment, children, not just adults, can learn through teaching. -- #Older children develop compassion and nurturing skills through helping younger ones: Even more valuable than the cognitive gains derived from interacting with younger children are the moral gains. To develop effectively as responsible, ethical beings, children need to have the experience of caring for others, not just the experience of being cared for by others. -- Sudbury Valley has about 200 students, who range in age from 4 on through high-school age (age 18 or so). It seems to work great for everyone in that age range, and I think such a broad mix is valuable for everyone. The 18-year-olds are sometimes almost like uncles or aunts to some of the 4-year-olds. They are, I think, learning to be parents. In our culture we provide very little opportunity for people to learn how to be parents, until they actually are.'

'#Age-mixed play is less competitive, more creative, and more conducive to practicing new skills than is same-age play. Age-mixed play is, in short, more playful than is same-age play. When children who are all nearly the same age play a game, competitiveness can interfere with playfulness. This is especially true in our current culture, which puts so much emphasis on winning and on all sorts of comparisons aimed at determining who is better, an emphasis fostered by our competitive, graded school system. In contrast, when children who differ widely in age play a game together, the focus shifts from that of beating the other to that of having fun. There is no pride to be gained by the older, larger, more skilled child in beating the much younger one, and the younger one has no expectation of beating the older one. So, they play the game more joyfully, in a more relaxed manner, modifying the rules in ways to make it both fun and challenging for all involved. A playful mood facilitates creativity, experimentation, and the learning of new skills, while a serious mood tends to inhibit these and leads a person to fall back on skills that have already been well learned... "I'm 23 years old and I've played a lot of soccer. It would be pretty silly for me to try to be better than the three 8-year-olds who crowd around my feet every time I try to kick the ball. I think that the 8-year-olds are too busy running after kids who are three feet taller than they are to worry about being the best 8-year-old. In this game, as in real life, the only standard that matters is one you set for yourself. One of the profound truths you learn is that we are all so different from each other that peer pressure and comparisons of worth are meaningless. If you're 11 years old and you are only allowed to play with other 11-year-olds, it's very hard to glimpse this profound truth, which unlocks the meaning of excellence."'

'When given a choice, children spend considerable time interacting with others who are older or younger than themselves. Sudbury Valley has, at any given time, approximately 170 to 200 students, who range in age from 4 to 18 years old and sometimes older. Students can move freely at all times throughout the school buildings and campus, and they can interact with whomever they please. The school is large enough that students could, if they chose, interact just with others who are within a year or two of themselves in age. But they don't do that. In our quantitative study we found that more than 50% of students' social interactions at the school were with other students who were more than two years older or younger than themselves, and 25% of their interactions were with other students who were more than 4 years older or younger than themselves. Age mixing was especially frequent during play. Active play of all sorts was more likely to be age mixed than was conversation that did not involve play. Age mixing allows younger children to engage in, and learn from, activities that they could not do alone or only with age-mates. -- Here's an example of intellectual play in the zone of proximal development. In several instances we observed 7- or 8-year-olds playing complicated card games in groups with older children and teenagers. By themselves, 7- and 8-year-olds would not be able to play such games. They would not be able to keep their attention focused long enough, or keep track of the rules, or even hold their cards straight enough to keep others from seeing them. They could play the games with older children because the older ones kept them on track, reminded them when necessary of what they had to do, and sometimes gave them strategy hints: "Pay attention." "Try to remember which cards were played." "Think before you lay down a card, so you don't put down something another player can take." Attention, memory, and forethought are the elements of what we commonly call intelligence. In the process of playing cards, which they were only doing to have fun, the older children were incidentally helping the younger ones to develop their intelligence. -- When you are little and just with kids your own age, the range of possible activities is restricted by the knowledge and abilities of those in your age group; but in collaboration with older kids there is almost no limit to what you might do!'

'#Free age mixing: An enormous amount of learning occurs in interactions with others. When we segregate children by age, in schools, we deprive them of the opportunity to interact with those others from whom they have the most to learn. In hunter-gatherer tribes, and at Sudbury Valley, children and adolescents regularly, on their own initiative, play and explore in widely age-mixed groups. In age-mixed groups, younger children acquire skills, information, ideas, and inspiration from older ones. In such groups, younger children can do things that would be too dangerous, or too complicated, for them to do alone or just with others their own age. Older children also benefit from age-mixed interactions. They learn how to be leaders and nurturers. They develop a sense of responsibility for others. They also consolidate and extend their own knowledge through explaining things to younger children. #Access to knowledgeable and caring adults: In hunter-gatherer bands, the adult world is not segregated from the children's world. Children see what adults do and incorporate that into their play. They also hear the adults' stories, discussions, and debates, and they learn from what they hear. When they need adult help, or have questions that cannot be answered by other children, they can go to any of the adults in the band. -- At Sudbury Valley, too, adults and children mingle freely (there are 10 full-time staff members and roughly 200 students, between the ages of 4 and 19). They know all of the students over the entire span of time that they are students at the school (unlike teachers in a conventional school who know each set of kids for just one year) and take pride in watching them develop. Since the staff members must be re-elected each year by vote of all of the students in the school, they are necessarily people who like kids and are liked by kids.'

'The Sudbury Valley model of education is not a variation of standard education. It is not a progressive version of traditional schooling. It is not a Montessori school or a Dewey school or a Piagetian constructivist school. It is something entirely different. To understand the school one has to begin with a completely different mindset from that which dominates current educational thinking. One has to begin with the thought: Adults do not control children's education; children educate themselves. -- The school does not interfere with students' activities. Students are free, all day, every day, to do what they wish at the school, as long as they don't violate any of the school's rules. The rules, all made by the School Meeting, have to do with protecting the school and protecting students' opportunities to pursue their own interests unhindered by others. -- The most important resource at the school, for most students, is other students, who among them manifest an enormous range of interests and abilities. Because of the free age mixing at the school, students are exposed regularly to the activities and ideas of others who are older and younger than themselves. Age-mixed play offers younger children continuous opportunities to learn from older ones. For example, many students at the school have learned to read as a side effect of playing games that involve written words (including computer games) with students who already know how to read. They learn to read without even being aware that they are doing so. Much of the students' exploration at the school, especially that of the adolescents, takes place through conversations. Students talk about everything imaginable, with each other and with staff members, and through such talk they are exposed to a huge range of ideas and arguments. Because nobody is an official authority, everything that is said and heard in conversation is understood as something to think about, not as dogma to memorize or feed back on a test. Conversation, unlike memorizing material for a test, stimulates the intellect. The great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued, long ago, that conversation is the foundation for higher thought; and my observations of students at Sudbury Valley convince me that he was right. Thought is internalized conversation; external conversation, with other people, gets it started.'

'Next time you are in viewing range of a child under the age of about five years old, sit back and watch for awhile. Try to imagine what is going on in the child's mind each moment in his or her interactions with the world. If you allow yourself that luxury, you are in for a treat. The experience might lead you to think about education in a whole new light – a light that shines from within the child rather than on the child. -- #Language Education: Infants and young children continuously educate themselves about language. Early in infancy they begin babbling language-like sounds, practicing the motor acts of articulation. With time they restrict their babbling more and more to the sounds of the specific language that they hear around them. By a few months of age they can be observed to pay close attention to the speech of others and to engage in activities that seem to be designed to help them figure out what others are saying. For example, they regularly follow the eyes of older children or adults, to see what the others are looking at, which helps them guess what they are talking about. With this strategy, a toddler in the garden who hears someone say, "What a pretty chrysanthemum," has a good chance of identifying what object is being referred to. Between the ages of two and 17, young people learn an average of about 60,000 words (Bloom, 2001, Behavior & Brain Sciences, 24, 1095-1103); that works out to nearly one new word for every hour that they are awake.'

'#Pretend and sociodramatic play: We are the imaginative animal, able to think of things that are not immediately present, and so we have fantasy play, or pretend play, which builds our capacity for imagination. In this type of play children establish certain propositions about the nature of their pretend world and then play out those propositions logically. In doing so they are exercising the same capacities that allow us, as adults, to think about things that are not immediately present, which is what we all do when we plan for the future and what scientists do when they develop theories to explain or predict events in the real world. We are an intensely social species, requiring cooperation with others in order to survive, and so we have many forms of social play, which teach us to cooperate and to restrain our impulses in ways that make us socially acceptable. Children in sociodramatic play are also practicing the art of negotiation. As they decide who will play what roles, who will get to use which props, and just what scenes they will enact and how, the players must all come to agreement. Indeed, a basic rule of all social play is that everyone must agree. Anyone left unhappy by a decision will quit, and if everyone quits there will be no game. Since the motive to play is strong, the motive to keep the other players happy is strong. That is true of all social play, but it is especially apparent in the negotiations that are observed in sociodramatic play. Keeping our companions happy, so they stay with us and continue to support us through life, is surely one of the most valuable of human survival skills, and children continuously practice that skill in social play.'

'From an evolutionary perspective, the main purpose of play is education. Play is nature's way of ensuring that young mammals will practice the skills they need for survival. You can predict what a young mammal will play at by knowing what it must learn. Young carnivores, such as lions and tigers, play at stalking, chasing, and pouncing. Young zebras and other animals that are preyed on by lions and such play at running, dodging, and escaping. Young monkeys play endlessly at chasing one another and swinging from trees. Young humans – who have far more to learn than do the young of any other species – play in far more ways than do the young of any other species. We come into the world as little scientists, pre-programmed to try to understand everything around us. Nobody has to tell us to explore and learn about our environment; we do it naturally, all our lives, in increasingly sophisticated ways, unless someone turns it into work by trying to make us do it. -- #Rough and tumble play #Language play #Exploratory play #Constructive play #Pretend and sociodramatic play #Games with explicit rules -- When children are free to play, have sufficient time to play, and have playmates of a range of ages with whom to play, they play in all of these ways. In doing so, they learn all of the basic skills that are required of human beings everywhere--physical skills, linguistic skills, intellectual skills, social skills, self-control, and law-abiding skills. We cannot teach any of these skills to children. All we can do is provide the conditions in which they can teach themselves, using the joyful, playful means designed by evolution. Our job is to make sure that children have lots of time and and opportunity to play. They'll take care of the rest.'

'Infants of just 14 months already have a nonsense-detector that alerts them to unreliable people, from whom they'll no longer bother taking lessons. "Infants seem to perceive reliable adults as capable of rational action, whose novel, unfamiliar behaviour is worth imitating," the researchers said. "In contrast, the same behaviour performed by a previously unreliable adult is interpreted as irrational or inefficient, thus not worthy of imitating." The new finding adds to a growing body of research showing children's selectivity in who they choose to learn from. For example, children prefer to learn from adults as opposed to their peers, and they prefer to learn from people they are familiar with and who appear more certain, confident and knowledgeable. "These results add to a growing body of literature that suggests that infants are adept at generalising their knowledge about the reliability of other people across varying contexts," the researchers said.'

'The root of statism is our view of children.' -- "Parents have no clue why they're telling their children to do stuff – it's just cultural photocopying over and over – and children get that very quickly. And children are hurt by that. Children are very hurt by their parents being revealed as not only false gods but very often as devils claiming to be good. The merciless light of the curious and optimistic child – the skeptical but not nihilistic child – that irradiates most adult souls. That combination of curiosity and optimism, questioning rationality – and trust... [parents] feel that children are aggressing against them... And so they have to convince the child that questions are evil... and fundamentally, it's because the child can see the truth that the parents don't want them to see. ...all of the parent's hypocrisies and falsehoods become clear and parents can't handle that and so they project all of their falsehoods and manipulation and corruption onto the child..."

'The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; enjoys the mere accumulation of things. The Pert age, which follows this, is characterized by contradicting, liking to "catch people out" (especially one's elders)... The Poetic age is popularly known as the "difficult" age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness; a reaching out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others. Now it seems to me that the layout of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular appropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-Parrot, Dialectic to the Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic age.'

'Children who are given love, respect, understanding, kindness, and warmth will naturally develop different characteristics from those who experience neglect, contempt, violence or abuse, and never have anyone they can turn to for kindness and affection. Such absence of trust and love is a common denominator in the formative years of all the dictators I have studied. The result is that these children will tend to glorify the violence inflicted upon them and later to take advantage of every possible opportunity to exercise such violence... Children learn by imitation. Their bodies do not learn what we try to instill in them by words but what they have experienced physically. Battered, injured children will learn to batter and injure others; sheltered, respected children will learn to respect and protect those weaker than themselves. Children have nothing else to go on but their own experiences. Evil exists. But it is not something that some people are born with.'

'Yeah, it might not actually be the fault of the kids...' -- How many fingers, Winston?

“You don’t need to bully children into believing things that are true; you only need to bully children into believing things that are false.”

'Adults may trigger each other’s original traumas, but they don’t cause them. The real, indeed the only source of our deep suffering is always the same—our family of origin, and for one simple reason: it’s only as children that we’re vulnerable to being so deeply hurt by how we’re loved. The absence of love, even acts of thoughtlessness can tortures us as children. If it’s bad enough, we don’t even develop emotionally and intellectually. Severe neglect can turn a brilliant child into a grossly underachieving dunce that thinks of herself as a worm. Who’s done the brainwashing? Curiously it’s we, the children, who have done most of it. Children are the very best of unconditional lovers. They have no other choice; their parents are it. Whatever’s missing in a child’s life, they will provide for everyone, if necessary by sacrificing part of themselves—almost always the part of them that, independently of their parents might see a truth that could hurt everyone by finding fault in them.'

'Can you be vaguely dissatisfied, unfulfilled and possibly even resentful of your marriage, yet fake it enough that your spouse thinks you love them more than anything? So why do you think you can fool your 8 year old? Because he's 8? He smells it on you, it reeks, like sepsis. And like all infections, it will spread to him eventually. -- I have a surprising piece of advice for parents, which I hope will be taken in the spirit it is offered: your kid doesn't want to be around you that much. No one does. This isn't because you're a bad person but because you're an ordinary person. You are not such a unique, creative, intelligent or even interesting person that the kid benefits from constant exposure to you. When you have something to offer, maximize and concentrate that time, and then get the hell out of the way.'

Gisted -- Parents have a very ambivalent relationship towards capitalists. To assuage parents' guilt about using the TV as a free babysitter, capitalists put anti-capitalist messages in kids cartoons to provide parents the excuse that by letting their children watch TV programming, they are in fact educating them about the 'selfishness' of capitalism. But when parents tell their children that self-interest is bad and that you shouldn't do things for your pleasure but rather you should do things for the pleasure of others – that's a really terrifying idea for children – it totally screws up their sense of security. A child is left with a very basic question: if self-interest is bad, why did my parents have me? Because to take pleasure in my existence would be selfish, right? But if selfishness is bad, then my parents must really not want not me. -- If you genuinely take joy in your children then your children are secure in their value to you—there's nothing 'selfless' about this at all.

'Anthony West contended that if you read Nineteen Eighty-four closely, you would see — must see — that "the whole pattern of society [in the novel] shapes up along the lines of fear laid down in 'Such, Such Were the Joys' until the final point of the dread summons to the headmaster's study, for the inevitable beating. In '1984,' the study becomes Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, and the torturers correspond closely to the schoolmasters." In effect, West argued, "what [George Orwell] did in '1984' was to send everybody in England to an enormous [St. Cyprian's] to be as miserable as he had been." The totalitarian essence of the St. Cyprian's experience — the experience of being dominated, bullied, spied on; the experience of being made to suffer pain and to look foolish by more powerful others against whom one had no defense — this could be visited upon a child at almost any sort of school one could imagine. It is, then, the compulsory school experience we have to examine...'

Socialism. The denial of all evidence-based thinking. The denial of scientific method applied generally and to relationships. The denial of ethics. The denial that one day you'll discover that your 'friend' is no longer suitable and that you need to move on to find new friends and rely on your self-esteem to test your own hypothesis as to what makes a good friend and what does not. But no, instead, this: 'For many child-rearing experts [government-funded?], the ideal situation might well be that of Matthew and Margaret Guest, 12-year-old twins in suburban Atlanta, who almost always socialize in a pack. “I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,” said Jay Jacobs, [friendship coach]. “If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child’s ability to explore other options in the world.”' -- No, it gives them the very *reason*, the rationale, the self-directed responsibility to explore other options on *their* terms. Leave them kids alone!

Gisted -- Young children have no power, but as they start to get into their teens, things change. As the teenager's independence and power grows they begin to suspect the worst. As a young child they had asked themselves the question: are my parent's exercising power over me because of their morality or is it just because they like to exercise power over me? And young children mostly go along with the idea that their parents and teachers are exercising power over them for their own good. But in the teenage years, as their parents continue their petty attempts to exercise power of them they realise that it has nothing to do with virtue or about what's good for them because their parents don't know them, they never had any curiosity about them. They begin to understand that the only reason their actions were controlled was to appease the vanity and sadism of their parents. At this point it almost becomes a point of pride for the teenager to make a show of their resistance.

Gisted -- You have to be curious about your children. You can't get mad at your children for not trusting you. Children are for the most part a product of their environment and the primary ingredient in that environment is you as a parent. Children almost never know why they do what they do. To be curious about why teenagers are doing what they're doing is a great challenge and an even greater challenge has there been no curiosity about them hitherto. -- We live in a world where lies are the foundation of moral hypocrisy and where moral hypocrisy rules the world. This is not an easy world to grow up in. You can't overestimate the amount of rhetorical guns that are pointed at children wherein if they don't conform they face a life of social ostracism and economic problems. Even if you can accept the fact that the world is crazy, your children still have to grow up in that world and you'll probably have to tell them a lot more about corruption than you'd ever want to.

Gisted -- Leftists won't talk about the true nature of power disparity in society which is first of all parenting, second teaching, third universities, and way down the list after the government agencies, the taxation, the military, the police, and all of the vast apparatus of State power, is the "evil" capitalist who survives only by the grace of people's voluntary interactions and so has no 'power' and can't fight back—which is precisely why cowardly leftists like to pick on them. -- But the power disparity that exists within the classroom where you can't argue, can't question, and where you absolutely can't think for yourself... By the time the child hits puberty the true self is so buried under accumulated years of neglect, indifference, humiliation, punishment, scorn, and boredom, that the personality is left completely undeveloped and all you have in its place is this vain, useless, petty false self that has been grown like an evil weed in an untended garden.

Gisted -- "It's essential to understand that all politics arises from a disparity of power: the State has the police, the guns, the military, the courts and the prison system – and we don't. You can't understand politics without understanding the family which is the most extreme form of power disparity that exists in the world. Most people's perceptions of the State arise directly from their own perceptions of their parents or their authority figures. -- We are not going to successfully spread the ideal of freedom to "the wider sphere until we learn deeply about our own histories and can face the problem of violence without prejudice, without excuses, without irrational aggression, without the constant confusion that comes from covering up early crimes IN OUR OWN HISTORIES. IN OUR OWN HISTORIES! YOU CAN'T FIGHT THE STATE UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR OWN FAMILY. You can't fight against the corruption in others unless you have fully examined the corruption in yourself."

Gisted -- All "these morally insipid and pathetic justifications with these ridiculously complicated, convoluted, and self-contradictory principles; this is where it comes from: the imaginary rules we create to justify parental abuse. This is why people think this way; this is why they create entirely separate rules for the State; this is why they can't apply any kind of moral absolutes to people in power—because they can't do it to their parents! Because their parents have abused the argument from morality and used the ultimate club of moral absolutism to beat their children physically, or verbally, or psychologically into mute, broken submission. This is why nobody can apply any moral reasoning to the State. It has nothing to do with the State. The State just cashes in on the brutality of parenting. -- This is the cost we pay for failing to deal with our pasts: a cycle of continual slavery, of continual surrender to ever increasing, ever aggressive, expanding power."

Gisted -- The 'Terrible Twos' is when the child first starts to say "No!" to authority. The child has a large number of resentments built up since birth, so when they feel direct attempts to control them, they resist mightily. The important thing to remember about young children is that they come into this world fully ready to be entirely rational and don't know about the 'adult' irrational prejudices like sexism, religion, and nationalism. So "initially we simply obey our parents because they are powerful, but we do have a strong sense of, and need for, reciprocity. We know that if a rule is put in place by our parents that they themselves don't follow, then something is very wrong." Almost without thinking we begin the process of "transposing these hypocritical bullyings" into some kind of 'consistent' moral law because the alternative is to "face the realization that we're ruled by petty, vindictive sadists – and that's not only terrifying but also humiliating."

Gisted -- People think they're a bad parent if they can't stop their baby from crying. The baby is constantly looking to model the behaviour of the parent in order to learn how to manage its own emotions. So if the parent gets stressed about the crying it only makes the baby even more 'upset' as it responds with further stress. Ignoring a baby stunts the development of empathy. If a parent had/has learned to process their own negative emotions then they would respond with neither stress nor contempt for the negative feelings of others. -- Children don't experience much reciprocity. You want to mirror and interact directly with the child one-on-one to build empathy by doing what they do so that they learn 'what I can do to others they can do to me'. Parents are seldom curious about their child's feelings, particularly negative ones. First offering your own response then asking how the child feels helps them to process and share their feelings rather than dismissing and repressing them.

Gisted -- Politics is just an extension of the family. Once we've understood the affect parenting had on our own political beliefs, then we can start to have a real empathy with and sympathy for the affect parenting had on the beliefs of others. -- One of the reasons why people resist the idea of freedom and morality is because they harbor within themselves a terrible guilt about how they've handled their own children as well as a rage for how they were handled as children. "Negative feelings don't go away until you deal with them; they're like repetitive dreams." It's difficult to get into this with parents because they can't easily see the crime when they're complicit with that crime. -- The State likes two types of parents/children: #1. Those who propose State authority to 'solve' every problem because they can't manage their own negative feelings about any problem. #2. Those who don't/can't care about any problem but will blindly follow every order given to 'solve' it.

'Dr Hibbing feels it may help explain why it is so hard to change someone's mind in a political debate. Different people, he said, started from a different psychological point. "You have people who are experiencing the world, who are experiencing threat, differently. "It's just that we have these very different physiological orientations. We're not sure where they came from, they may be genetic, they may be something from ***childhood***; we do know, though, that they run deep because it's a reflex, it's not something you can change tomorrow, the depth of that may be something of an asset in figuring out why people are so stubborn in their political beliefs."'

'Children are being given rewards to promote Fanta, Nintendo and other products to their Facebook friends in a controversial form of stealth marketing. In some cases children as young as seven have been offered the chance to become “mini-marketeers” to plug brands by casually dropping them into postings and conversations on social networking sites. They can earn the equivalent of £25 a week for their online banter — sometimes promoting things that they may not even like. The marketing agencies advise their young recruits to target different sets of online friends with different brands and coach them to sound “natural and unrehearsed”.' They should prepare their product pitch by “thinking deeply about how you would describe it to your best friend ... Write down the key points in your own words and make sure it doesn’t sound too rehearsed. Be natural; be you”.' -- via @MaxKeiser

'It is my strong belief, based on considerable experience with children, that we are born strong, secure, confident and empathetic. It takes a fierce effort to destroy the natural strength of children. [P]arents teach their children [...] nonsense. -- The moment you lie to someone, you become both their slave and their master. You are their slave, because you are terrified of being discovered—and you are their master, because you must control their perceptions. You must destroy their curiosity. You must respond to any approach to your falsehoods with irritation, condemnation and withdrawal. The energizing question ‘why’ becomes your implacable enemy. You must undermine their capacity to reason, to think for themselves. You must overcomplicate the world. And most of all—most of all—you must become the sworn enemy of all principles, even the most innocuous. The only ‘rules’ you can allow are base commandments, such as ‘respect your elders’, ‘love your country’ and so on.'

'There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to socialise children by scaring them. The aim of such socialisation-through-fear is twofold: firstly, to get children to conform to the scaremongers’ values; secondly, to use children to influence, or at least to contain, their parents’ behaviour. The Big Brothers of the 1940s saw children as tools of moral blackmail and social control. Today, in the twenty-first century, scaremongers see children in much the same way, exploiting their natural concern with the wonders of life to promote a message of shrill climate alarmism. In a world where moral education seems to be exhausted, where teachers are reluctant to judge or to explain the difference between right and wrong, environmentalism has become one of the few values that educators feel comfortable with. The growing significance of environmental issues in the school curriculum is directly proportionate to society’s broader moral illiteracy and loss of purpose.' -- I'm snitching on you

'"The most disturbing facet of this ubiquitous childhood disorder is an utter lack of empathy," Mateo said. "These people—if you can even call them that—deliberately violate every social norm without ever pausing to consider how their selfish behavior might affect others. It's as if they have no concept of anyone but themselves." "The depths of depravity that these tiny psychopaths are capable of reaching are really quite chilling," Mateo added. Mateo added that even when subjects were directly confronted with the consequences of their inexplicable behavior, they had little or no capacity for expressing guilt, other than insincere utterances of "sorry" that were usually coerced.'

'Without all of those complex adult filters, kids are a conduit to something we don’t normally allow in the adult world: pure desire. There are none of the shoulds and should nots, no rationalizations and thoughts of what is proper or responsible. That kid is still inside everyone. So the dead-simple lesson is this: Every sale starts with pure desire. Customers either “want that” or they don’t. The rest is just mental gymnastics to justify that core emotion. Know what your customer really wants.'

'Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered. Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids. -- Competing data-mining companies such as J.D. Power Web Intelligence, a unit of quality ratings firm J.D. Power and Associates, also trolls the Internet for consumer chats. But Vice President Chase Parker said the company does not read any data that's password-protected, such as the instant message sessions that EchoMetrix collects for advertisers.'

'Every year, in the first week of August, Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, and Japan Rail East hold a promotional event called the "Pokemon Stamp Rally". This has been going on for maybe ten years. The nature and scope of this promotional event is mind-blowing. And if we've consumed the right amount of Brain Lube, the things it implies are even more amazing and depressing.' -- Got to catch them all. Pokemon! -- A brief history of kleptomania (in video games): What stingy consumers started doing was buying games, clearing them, and then selling them back to used shops as soon as they could. So what game developers started doing was #1. Making games needlessly difficult #2. Padding games with artificial barriers such as level-grinding, side quests, etc. It's no tinfoil-hat theory that many of the conventions of the Japanese RPG were born out of publisher mandates such as "keep people from selling the game back in the first two weeks".'

'Early childhood development researchers have discovered that a simple, five-minute self-regulation game not only can predict end-of-year achievement in math, literacy and vocabulary, but also was associated with the equivalent of several months of additional learning in kindergarten. Their self-regulation, or ability to control behavior, was measured with the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task, a structured observation requiring children to perform the opposite of a response to four different oral commands. For example, children were instructed to touch their toes if told to touch their head, and vice versa.'

'"Britney just seems a little bit old-fashioned is all," mother Heather Patterson said. "We want our little girl to have all the advantages a name like Miley, or maybe Hannah, would give her." In addition to the name change, the Pattersons announced Monday that they were expecting their first son in July, tentatively named Twitter Efron Jonas.'

"I imagine a lot of grown ups will want this, too."

'In recent years, there's been a dramatic increase in the number of children being diagnosed with serious psychiatric disorders and prescribed medications that are just beginning to be tested in children. The drugs can cause serious side effects, and virtually nothing is known about their long-term impact. "It's really to some extent an experiment, trying medications in these children of this age," child psychiatrist Dr. Patrick Bacon tells FRONTLINE. "It's a gamble. And I tell parents there's no way to know what's going to work."' -- Pushermen.

'Power-Hog is a power consumption metering piggy bank designed to sensitize kids to energy cost associated with running electronics devices. Plug the tail into the outlet and the device into the snout; feed a coin to meter 30 minutes of use.'

'"Think of a princess, a beautiful princess locked up in a tower. Think about how she must feel, yearning to escape. Now, imagine you are reading a book about that princess, engrossed in what is to become of her. You feel for her, you care about her, you want her to escape. Yes?" she asks. Ah, yes, I suppose so, I nod, wondering where we are going. "You see," she says flashing her trademark, wide-mouthed smile. "Don't tell me youngsters playing a computer game in which the princess is locked in the tower give a stuff if she gets out or not. They don't. They don't because those sort of computer games aren't about empathising with or understanding her plight. She is just there as a goal. The game is all about getting her out of the tower because that means they win. Game over. It's all so meaningless. In the truest sense of the word," she says shaking her head in exasperation. "It… means… nothing," she says slowly, drumming her red fingernails on her desk to emphasise each word.' -- True

"The (mostly) young people engaging in these sciencelike conversations are precisely the same ones who are, more and more, tuning out of science in the classroom. Steinkuehler thinks videogames are the way to reverse this sorry trend. She argues that schools ought to be embracing games as places to show kids the value of scientific scrutiny -- the way it helps us make sense of the world. Science isn't about facts. It's about the quest for facts -- the scientific method, the process by which we hash through confusing thickets of ignorance. It's dynamic, argumentative, collaborative, competitive, filled with flashes of crazy excitement and hours of drudgework, and driven by ego: Our desire to be the one who figures it out, at least for now. It's dramatic and nutty and fun. And it's pretty much how kids already approach the games they love."

'In Wannado Ciy no one is unemployed. The choice of profession is free and the middle class is intact. Outsourcing doesn’t exist. Wannado City presents itself as a city without any ideology. As in real America, different ethnic groups mix in the workplace. ‘In Kids We Trust’ is the motto in the courtroom. Children’s heads, not presidents, adorn the bank notes. Only the American flag next to the judge, as well as a picture of George W Bush in the courtroom testify to everyday life. Officially the children are here for fun – child labour is frowned upon. “We call it real play, not working,” says the press spokesperson.' -- Work = Shopping = Citizenship. Grim.

'Children talk about an “animal kind of alive” and a “Furby kind of alive.” Will they also talk about a “people kind of love” and a “computer kind of love”? The new objects ... play ... on what they evoke in us: when we are asked to care for an object, when this cared-for object thrives and offers us its attention and concern, we experience it as intelligent, but more important, we feel a connection to it. The old AI debates were about the technical abilities of machines. The new ones will be about the emotional vulnerabilities of people.'

"... children play with these objects, they are made to feel as though computers are something that might love them, that they might love, that they need to nurture, that might nurture them. How are we going to feel when our computers are relating to us at that level? Do we want that? How is that going to change our views of ourselves and of our relationship with the world around us? That's what interests me now."

'For these children, in this context, aliveness seems to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. "If you put in a robot instead of the live turtle, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?" I ask. Not really, say several of the children. Data on "aliveness" can be shared on a "need to know" basis, for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things? When do we need to know if something is alive?'

'Facing media-fuelled consumer-driven ridicule by their kids, many parents can't face their responsibilities... The universe conjured up [by kids marketing] is one of "kids rule", in which children are "empowered into an adult-free space".'

Deborah Wilson, Teacher: "We've got a culture of pessimism, and a lot of the problems today are because a lot of parents are like overgrown children. What I'm teaching is what the wise man of the community might be doing."

"... another intriguing and valuable point data shows that many Mothers (64%) visit Stardoll without their child... Seemingly they enjoy dressing up their avatars (paperdolls) as much their children do."

"Some youngsters are spending hours at night on e-mail with their friends. One fad is "the 30 minute rule," in which a child who doesn't respond to e-mail within half an hour gets targeted and picked on by other schoolmates." -- Twitter.

'"It's like a Pixar movie," says Justin Cook, lead designer of Trouble in Paradise. "I love some of those movies more than my kids do, but we'll all sit and watch them. There should be more games that do that."'

"... the kids decided I should have a Webkinz, so I could come over to visit their homes." -- Read that again.

"Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken... four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment.. they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing."

"Children develop their observation skills by doing many types of activities [including the] use of the five senses, kinetic movement, spatial refinement, small and large motor skill coordination, and concrete knowledge that leads to later abstraction."

"They feel that TV shows are better written and more interesting. For roughly $40US, they got something like 25 episodes... My son read four 600 page Harry Potter books on our two week trip..." -- Again: They're hungry. Beware of their appetite.

Love how she says, "we blowed it up together". We! Gotta love kids and their porous sense of self.

“Kids don’t want to do anything without being watched”.

"Every time they connect the Tag to the computer, a record of the child’s activities will be uploaded to that profile, giving parents a detailed look at what the child read, learned and struggled with."

"Perhaps it’s a lesson for all of us: educate, give kids things to talk about and help them better themselves… nice."

"I've been to a lot of conference sessions talking about how to make games better than they are ... I just can't shake the feeling that all us game developers would learn these lessons better if we just sat down and played like a 3-year-old for a while."

Must see Anti-smoking ads.

'Jane Healy said computer games fuelled the development of basic "flight or fight" instincts rather than considered reasoning... parents would be wise to keep children away from computer games until at least 7 to allow their brains to develop normally.'

"Concentrate designs and manufactures products for schools. We create and develop innovative products to help children concentrate at school by identifying the reasons that they might be distracted, uncomfortable or unable to focus." (Dragon's Den!)

'Whyville's makers announced that "Edu-tisement effectively offers sponsors the opportunity to advertise products to users, but infuses the experience with a meaningful and fun educational component."'

"... to blast ads at kids whose parents are already paying for Webkinz access comes off like a crass cash-grab... A more reasonable approach to advertising via Webkinz would be to offer a discounted or free service in exchange for client-side ads."

"new N-Gage is also seeing Nokia dip its toes in the water of virtual worlds, with news of a game called Creebies. A Bluetooth multiplayer mode will let people’s Creebi pets ‘play’ together by transferring them between handsets..."

Kids Virtual World stats, US Jan 2007 -- July 2007

"... when virtual worlds behaviors go mainstream and spill over to other demographic audiences. My sixty-something-year-old mother already uses Webkinz to connect a few nights each week with her eight-year-old neice and six-year-old nephew in Virginia."

'Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn. -- “My favorite thing from Brainology is the neurons part where when u [sic] learn something there are connections and they keep growing. I always picture them when I’m in school.”' -- Praise them for effort.

"it's very clear that people who don't play online games don't understand that reading, interacting with others, and coming up with original ideas is often what they're all about. In part that's why they're so addictive."

"Moshi Monsters love words and communicate with their monster owners regularly via speech bubbles, to encourage reading. For instance, their monster might be feeling 'jubilant' one day, but 'melancholy' the next." -- Love that!

"Even more engaging than the cute graphics and animations and much fun than decorating my room, is the daily one minute dose of quick-fire puzzles. These are great, and appeal to me in the same way that Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training does."

"Some projects will utilise the popularity of social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace, while others will use purpose-built web services and online games." Delivering audiences to advertisers, huh? Leave them kids alone! (Only joking. Inevitable.)

"Lord Puttnam fear[s] that all children will learn from these virtual spaces is that they are first and foremost consumers." Hypocritical %*@$! Go sell some ads!

'"There's no 'free chat' - children can only communicate with each other by using drop-down lists of pre-approved phrases." -- [Subscriptions:] "If there's enough educational value and enough entertainment, the parents will be happy to do that."

'Geezers need excitement. If their lives don't provide it they stay inside violent. Common sense. It's simple common sense.' [Twatface, The Streets, said that!]

"I would be much less concerned about things like online predators or violence, then I would be about the conflation between consumption and citizenship. Because our kids are being taught that to be a good citizen you got to buy the right stuff"

On Webkinz: "not only sharpened her daughter's computer skills, but it also has helped to instill responsibility for something — in a virtual sense — that was living."