Wow. I didn't realize that the chat room was where all the discussion was going on about my firearm question. I'm not a big gun person, but I have gone to the gun range with friends several times and always see children there. It is not much of a big deal to have a gun in your house in the US, and I didn't really think the question would be this controversial.
@JavidJamae It shouldn't be controversial -- whether it is part of other people's cultures or not, it's part of ours, here. Unfortunately, like the two twits who respond to every bedtime question about how anyone not co-sleeping is a selfish, lazy, neglectful parent, some people just don't have the maturity to ignore what they don't like. Instead, they try to push their cultural values on everyone.
@JavidJamae Like I said in meta, I believe that teaching Christianity to children is harmful, but I'm not trying to get every positive mention of it banned just because it's in opposition to my culture. I've even upvoted a couple of things written from an overtly Christian perspective, because they seem to be very good advice for those people to whom they apply.
I may be one of the co-sleeping twits you're referring to. :-) But I didn't mean for it to come across that way. I don't think my answer itself had a negative tone, but my comments were probably what got you.
I just voted to delete my co-sleeping response actually. After reading it again, I think you're right, it wasn't really helpful.
And... two of the three people I tried to introduce to the site left without even registering over the co-sleeping fanaticism.
(And one of them is an attachment parenting afficionado)
That's why I'm worried about it. I could care less if people are in favor of co-sleeping or not. I just want a site where everyone is free to get information on parenting, and no one is chased off by soapboxing.
Ya, unfortunately, I think that because people take parenting philosophies so personally, its going to be hard to get to the point where objective answers are predominant.
@Shog9 It did, but it reached equilibrium. There's still some stupid, but there's enough non-stupid to smack it down pretty hard (and enough consensus on what is non-stupid).
@Shog9 Agreed... I also think that Programmers benefited from the fact that it serves a community primarily already familiar with Stack before they came. Writers and Parenting don't have that.
I wish @torbengb would show back up, I'd like to discuss his "do weapons belong here?" meta-post with him, without doing it all on meta... I don't think he realizes the road he's trying to take us down.
I like to keep an open mind, and I admit that it's a wise parent who asks, how can I protect my child against the weapons I keep at home because that's relevant to some professions.
But some questions go more in the downright scary direction of What is a good starter firearm for children?
I fin...
HedgeMage - I don't quite understand why you think shopping questions are bad if they're related to teaching your child something.
I agree that asking for a specific brand or product is too specific, but asking what type of something works best for a certain age range seems like a solid question to me.
@JavidJamae Because the information they generate becomes out of date quickly. Stack sites aren't just about the questioner right now, they are about creating an enduring reference.
@JavidJamae It was unclear whether you were asking about the type, or specific recommendations. I didn't even grok that you might have meant type until @Shog9 and I talked about it.
Perhaps I should have been more clear, but the question reads: "Is it best to start with pellet, airsoft, or bebe guns, or go straight to a real firearm? Should you start with rifles or handguns?"
Ya, the first sentence says: "What is a good firearm to start children ages 6-12 on for target practice and gun-safety education?"
Perhaps it should have read: "What is a good TYPE of firearm..."
I think it was "What is a good starter firearm...?" as the title. If It had said "what should I look for when choosing a good first firearm for instructing a child?" or "what is a good TYPE..." I'd have felt differently.
I know, though, that I'm not the only one who was confused, because I flagged several answers that were specific items.
@Jacob Otherwise we'll be banning everything on education, sex education, anything even tengentially religious or non-religious, anything related to health care or safety... dang, that's pretty much all the questions.
@Jacob I think we all agree that it should have been worded better :)
I do feel a little bad that I didn't edit instead of voting to close.
It's close to being a good question.
Which brings me full circle to the issue I had with @torbengb's meta post...
@Shog9sorry for wandering on a tangent before telling you what I was thinking.
@Jacob - I created a separate question about safety. This question was an educational question regarding how I would teach a child to shoot guns (specifically for competitive sport shooting, but I didn't list that out to keep it general).
The meta post argues that all non-safety gun questions should be disallowed for two reasons:
1) Gun ownership is controversial, and he feels like allowing questions about it on the site implies that everyone on the site endorses teaching young people to use firearms.
2) Firearms-related questions are, in his opinion, too localize because as @hawbsl said it only applies "in the United States and in a few war torn countries"
@Jacob Then people with other interests should get off their rears (or on them, rather) and submit questions!
1) If we can't talk about guns because @torbengb doesn't want to be seen as endorsing their use for children, then we'd better not ever mention Christianity, because I have serious problems with teaching children about it, and so on -- everyone has issues with something
2) By that argument, we also can't talk about CAS, Autism, SID, or any other special need because it effects a small proportion of children worldwide.
@Shog9 Kind of?
I don't think that @torbengb was thinking about these things when he posted to meta, which is why I hope I can catch him in chat to talk about it.
I get that he's anti-gun, but everyone is anti-something, and I'll bail on the site before I endorse any move toward this kind of censorship (on any topic)
@Shog9 The problem is, our nascent community so far seems to think anything is flame-worthy. I agree that avoiding flamewars is important, I just feel that the correct way to do it is to be adult about it. We can ignore tags we aren't interested in -- and this is why.
this answer worries me a bit though. "A large part of parenting is knowing how to teach your children. A large part of knowing how to teach your children is knowing what tools to use" - that's true enough, but... If you stretch that to allow questions on anything you might happen to purchase for your kid, then it's effectively limitless.
but its not a stretch when its a real problem that someone is facing, or something that they want to know the answer to.
The point is, if I want to know what type of baseball bat to start my kid on, or what things to look for when buying an electronics kit, nobody would vote to close it.
If the problem is about parenting, and not just... Something they happen to be doing with their kids. I mean, "How can my son beat Level 13 in Angry Birds?"
@Jacob - but then should you take sleep questions to a sleep forum, breast-feeding questions to a breast-feeding forum, and health questions to a health forum?
@JavidJamae I think to a degree, the people who don't have exposure to our culture see the "gun thing" as a hobby for rednecks. They do not grok that it is part of an overarching lifestyle/parenting-style choice that is pretty intrinsic to how we raise our children.
@JavidJamae But take an example where there is an exchange site... What guitar should my child start on? would that be more suitable for the guitars exchange site?
So, is our metric "is this a question related to parenting that can't better be answered on another SE site?"
I guess it comes down to what we want Parenting.SE to be...
Personally, if it's a grey area, I'd rather err on the side of inclusion, then tag very carefully so people who are annoyed by a particular type of question can effortlessly avoid it.
For example, an "activities" tag that handles everything related to teaching/engaging in specific activities with your child, but not solely about parenting.
@JavidJamae So we can have controversies over whether things are controversial or not?
@JavidJamae So for the meta posts we'll need a "recursion" tag, right?
The thing with going to specific sites is that sometimes a parent answer might be better than an expert answer. The expert site may not have the practical parent perspective your looking for, but rather an esoteric technical perspective..
@HedgeMage Hello! I'm not avoiding you :-) just caught up in the daily life. I'm not pleased with all the bad vibes this generated, and I'd like to help steer things back to a better situation. I guess it's unfortunate that such a controversial topic cropped up so early; I sincerely believe it would have mattered much less if it had come later.
@JavidJamae RE: the tag that is now proposed as "activities": Why not call it "controversial"?
Obviously one could argue that any parenting matter is subjective and therefore controversial, but still... some topics are (or should be) known to be controversial, and we've already had two different such topics (weapons training, and co-sleeping) where people plainly disagree.
@torbengb I think we've already seen that a number of people on this site tend to have knee-jerk, emotional reactions rather than rational ones. If we could trust them to generally behave as adults, we could tag things as "controversial" instead of trying to segment topic areas (activities, firearms, sleeping habits) where people are likely to go off the deep end.... however, how much are they going to flame in conversations on what is/isn't controversial?
One of the fundamental premises behind the SE platform is simply this: Ask a question, get an expert answer. Questions that cannot be answered are off-topic and not allowed. This can include questions as inane as "which is the best color?" or "Is C++ a better programming language than VB?"
Th...
here's something I'd like some thoughts on, if you guys have any:
It's easy to observe that over-emotional, knee-jerk reactions are a problem, but I was thinking (as I ate enough delicious fresh strawberries to probably be very ill later) about WHY people have those reactions, and if it's possible to not just short-circuit the irrational speech, but the reaction itself...
So, something I've noticed is that those of us who are able to contribute constructively, even on subjects not in line with our own parenting philosophies, seem to have something in common:
as to your observation, I think you're in the right area. the problem is the over-emotional response, and given the topic at hand, I don't think there's any way to avoid that... people get emotional when it comes to their kids.
I think that's going to be the #1 most difficult thing for this proposal to get over.
We tend to look at things more like a cultural anthropologist (think Daniel Jackson on Stargate, not Dr. Brennen on Bones)... how does this particular behavior or strategy fit into the culture the child is raised in? Is it adaptive or maladaptive? Why?
This outlook gives us a couple of things:
1) It does not preclude there being different "right" answers for families with different cultural values.
2) It encourages a logical, rational (albeit still subjective) of the "rightness" of a particular answer, because rather than "good" and "bad" we have to think about things in concrete terms: adaptive/maladaptive, conformist/nonconformist, etc.
What I want to know is there any way to teach that mindset in a kind of implicit way (i.e. without subjecting them to a semester of study before letting people in) on the site?
Will there be a test in this? I should take notes, and google maladaptive :)
I think that since there is likely to be a steady stream of new (and international) users, the best way to handle the new controversies that are bound to happen is to lead by example;
perhaps downvote and certainly comment on non-constructive answers; edit new questions so that they are phrased the least confrontational;
and make a reference topic on meta (because it would be too big for the FAQ) about the pitfalls of a subjective SE like this one, and about best practise of conduct.
The answer depends a lot on the culture the children are raised in. For example, when working with children raised in a culture where strict gender roles are the norm, and boys and girls aren't normally allowed to socialize with one another, I found that children performed considerably better wh...
Basically, the point here was that having gender stereotypes reinforced through same-sex schooling is adaptive in societies where the stereotype is the only permitted behavior, but maladaptive in societies where the student will grow up to have to cope with myriad kinds of behavior from both sexes.
So, you can't say that it's good or bad in any objective sense -- because the effects of learning that are relative to the society in which one lives.
Ah yes. What may be missing in the question's title is, what does the asker want to achieve? In the frame of your reply, that could be best learning, or best social skills later on.
@ESR, @torbengb, @cabbey, and I were discussing whether there were a way to implicitly teach a cultural anthropology mindset to parenting.SE contributors to try to combat the knee-jerk emotional reactions so many questions receive.
I'll pass on your compliments in the admin chat :)
The two worst offenders were the firearms discussion and a couple of people who went off on every bedtime question about how everyone who doesn't co-sleep is a horrible neglectful parent.
The though you want to convey to people who join here is, I think, a lot like the rule in programming that you want to separate mechanism from policy. Mechanism is what enables you to do thing; policy is your choices about what you do with the mechanism.
So I suggest as a first step inventing some kind of tagline you can repeat at people. "Mecanism, not policy" may be too dry and techie; I don't know, not familiar with the demographics here.
So, if someone posts asking "what's a good starter type of firearm for a child?" and someone else starts in on "it's a bad idea to tech kids about firearms", you can say "mechanism, not policy".
The question is about mehanism, and appropriate. The response argus policy and is not.
(BTW, the correct answer is "A .22-caliber target pistol similar to a Colt Woodsman.)
(had to be away for a while, and now it's nearing bedtime. Sorry - I had wanted to participate more today. I'll work on that meta topic and post back.)
A quick skim of the committer profiles show that about 50% of committers were also active (1k+ rep in aggregate) across one or more tech-oriented stack sites, however it seems than more non-techs followed through on the commitment than techies.
is tempted to write a script that uses the stack API to assess "techie-ness" of the audiences for non-technical stack sites
Sorry, I have "ooh, shiny!" syndrome tonight
@ESR I think you are on to something here.
@ESR though I'm not sure that we can get that across to an audience that hasn't mastered the level of specificity that folks like those present in this chat
So I'd say start by having a FAQ entry explaining what "mechanism, not policy" means. You have a high enough percentage of techies that you can usefully point back to the programming usage, and that may even lend it some authority.
@HedgeMage Do you know the programming usage? Well enough to explain it?
that just might work -- especially if it's successful in encouraging the rational/techie contingent to be more active now that they have a vehicle by which to tame some of the nonsense.
Yes, I expect to. But I think that now that we've narrowed down what we want to encourage, and how to get it across, the site has a much better chance at productivity than it did two hours ago :)
And thanks for your input -- your talent for simplifying things is something I have got to pick up one of these days :D
@ESR By the way, Tim Post would like me to pass on best wishes for the health of your cat. :)
I think if we put together the community wiki post @torbengb suggested, including both a short primer on concrete terms used in this context ("adaptive" vs "maladaptive" for example) and an explanation of mechanism vs. policy, we will be on the road to a more constructive parenting.SE
Can you change the display title of the forum? Because another way to reinforce the message would be to have it read not "Parenting" but "Tools for Parenting".
Been using it for half an hour and I still like this webchat interface better than any I've ever seen. Someone did an unobtrusively superb job of design here. I'd rather like to know who.
How do you teach kids to defend themselves, without becoming bullies? I'm talking about younger kids (1.5 to 3yo) who are not mature enough (or old enough) to take self-defense classes.
My son is two and a half, and he's a bit on the small side; he has a lot of older cousins (and younger cousins...
I'm actually facing that one now. My daughter has only one ear .. and that's starting to become a problem for her.
On the one hand, violence is bad.. on the other, sometimes you need to defend yourself against bullies .. while showing some degree of compassion. It took 20 years for me to learn how to do that. She's five.
@TimPost Here are some things that have worked with my son (now 8) from about that time:
1) Martial arts training. If you know what you are doing, you can make better decisions. "Is it worth knocking this guy down" vs "is it work killing this guy" instead of "is it worth doing something that will have totally unknown results?"
Also, a good martial arts program also teaches a reasonable philosophy on the use of force, and instills confidence and other traits that help one be less of an attractive target.
Well, I'm glad I could help out. I was actually doubtful I'd have anything useful to say, but (as is often the case) my unconscious mind was doing a better job of working the problem than my conscious was.
2) Teach her to be effect-focused, i.e. "what will happen if this bully keeps doing X?" If X is shouting insults, the effect is nothing, if X is hitting her, the effect could be serious. After some practice with it my son (at 4 and mostly non-verbal) grokked it.
@TimPost That's unfortunate. I'm lucky in that the dojo we found here is really great. Sensei has a child my son's age, and he's really a natural at working with kids in general.
3) Make sure she has a good peer group outside of school. For my son, his class last year was a hellish mix of bullies and kids who kind of acted out randomly. The friends he made at the dojo made all of that more bearable for him, and gave him a solid frame of reference for how his peers should act.
@TimPost My son and I study karate together and it is really amazing... apart from the obvious benefit of knowing exactly what one another will do in a dangerous situation, it's a great bonding experience, a chance for him to see that sometimes mom struggles with new things, too (plus how I handle it when I'm having a hard time with something), and generally a ton of fun.
@TimPost Hmm... have you considered looking for panantukan or pananjakman (sp?) or one of the other Philippino weaponless styles? Perhaps they would be more common in your area.
We've jumped styles a couple of times because IME the right teacher is way more important than what type of martial art is taught, at least when it comes to little kids.
@TimPost I've found that examples really do help. At our dojo, part of the training is practicing different scenarios for use of force. We role play, and decide whether to walk away or use words or use karate (and if we use karate, what specifically do we do and to what end?)
Meh, it's not exactly health food, but it's better than, for example, the overprocessed pre-prepared gunk I see so many people eating here in the states.
I like to keep an open mind, and I admit that it's a wise parent who asks, how can I protect my child against the weapons I keep at home because that's relevant to some professions.
But some questions go more in the downright scary direction of What is a good starter firearm for children?
I fin...
One of the fundamental premises behind the SE platform is simply this: Ask a question, get an expert answer. Questions that cannot be answered are off-topic and not allowed. This can include questions as inane as "which is the best color?" or "Is C++ a better programming language than VB?"
Th...
This page:
http://www.nullege.com/codes/search/urllib2.Request.add_header/all
appears to be indirect evidence of an RFC 3229 implementation.
