A Lesson From New Guinea: Your Kid Is Going to Be Fine

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/a-lesson-from-new-guinea-your-kid-is-going-to-be-fine/266666/



My nine-year-old has been begging me for a while to let him walk alone to his friend's house, half a block and two not-very-busy-street-crossings away. I finally let him do it, inspired in part by an anecdote from Jared Diamond's latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?. Diamond is talking about his work among the traditional (or as he sometimes calls them, "small-scale&quot societies of New Guinea.

When I arrived at one particular village, most of the porters from the previous village who had brought me there left, and I sought help from people of any age capable of carrying a pack and wanting to earn money. The youngest person who volunteered was a boy about 10 years old, named Yuro. He joined me expecting to be away from his village for a couple of days. But...Yuro remained with me for a month...It was evidently considered normal that a 10-year-old boy would decide by himself to go away for an indeterminate length of time.

If a New Guinean kid could go wandering away from home for weeks at a time, I figured my son could probably go up the block.

Diamond's goal in The World Until Yesterday is (as his book's subtitle suggests) to compare modern and traditional societies and think about what the latter may have to teach the former. One of the main areas in which people in modern societies can learn from traditional societies, Diamond argues, is in the realm of childcare.

[leveymg]

1. American society, in particular, infantilizes adults so they remain frightened, dependent and docile

In addition to child-rearing practices, there are factors such as specialization in the professions and overclassification of government information that lend to the attitude held by many people that they are operating "in the dark", helpless and incapable of understanding their world, which is presumed to be hostile, without the guidance and protection of institutional authority figures and "experts".

Of course, there is also a politics of infantilization, and we see it here in blind faith in the leadership principle and assertions that some leaders are playing "8-Dimension chess" and, therefore, should not be criticized or questioned.

in·fan·til·ize (nfn-tl-z, n-fn-)
tr.v. in·fan·til·ized, in·fan·til·iz·ing, in·fan·til·iz·es
1. To reduce to an infantile state or condition: "It creates a crisis that infantilizes them, causes grown men to squabble like kids about trivial things" (New Yorker).
2. To treat or condescend to as if still a young child: "The Victorian physician infantilized his patient" (Judith Moore).

[valerief]

5. Bingo! Organized religion, political leaders, and the media have infantalized U.S. adults

so much we're now Embryoids.

[leveymg]

7. Must be why the Right is so obsessed with giving Embryoids, like cos., full legal status as people

Their only protection is to be part of a larger machine. While that's essentially a paranoid schizophrenic vision, the essence of fascism (and all authoritarian political thought, e.g. Hobbes "The Leviathan"), or plain Science Fiction, there is some metaphorical truth in these unhealthy, deeply disturbing images of how American society operates. Ergo, The Matrix "Hive Mind":





Machines that control and harvest thoughts (drawing by paranoid schizophrenic):

[surrealAmerican]

2. As a parent, you need to always remember ...

... that you're raising them to be responsible adults. They won't learn responsibility for themselves without the freedom to practice it.

[XemaSab]

3. New Guinea is a seriously dangerous place

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1757.html

Port Moresby is right in there with Mogadishu and Port au Prince as one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

A friend of a friend was gang-raped there.

[marmar]

4. k/r

[FirstLight]

6. Interesting

I can totally see this in my own life. I recall growing up in Oakland , while we weren't in the really exclusive area of Piedmont, it was still the 'hills' and there was a distinct line through most of the city that I didn't cross. When my mom would have to go to a certain store that was on the other side of town, i was instructed to lock my door, etc...

In my early teens, as my range of experiences expanded, i recall a specific example like the one above. My best friend's mom had an office on MarArthur Blvd. near 35th Ave. We were working for her mom one saturday for mall money, and she gave my friend $20 and told us to walk to the Church's Chicken to get dinner for us all. I was horrified! We were going to WALK? ALONE? ...2 white girls under 15?

My friend was totally fine, though. She had done little jaunts to the corner store etc. for her mom for years, and had no qualms about the 'area' or the people in it. She taught me a valuable lesson about walking down the street and not being afraid ("If you walk like you know where you are going, nobody will mess with you.&quot . My mom didn't realize the disservice she did to me by being so fearful. ...and to this day, my bestie and I still recall that afternoon and chuckle at my reaction to the simple request of walking to the corner on an errand...