Saturday, July 10, 2010

“Kidulthood”

Do you tell your children what to do, or, is it the other way around?  I know at my house, I laid down the rules, which is not to mean that I would not consider my children’s thoughts regarding rules, as they were growing up, but if their thoughts were off base, they were told so directly.  There was no namby pambying in the Venlet household.

Oh that this were so out in the world of politics, but alas it is not, as this story plainly points out.

Consider Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where a classful of determined seven-year-olds started a campaign, which 19 months later convinced state legislators to ban the sale of novelty lighters. The kids, of course, are proud of themselves, and the politicos are behaving as though it’s reasonable and even admirable for middle-aged lawmakers to seek counsel from people who still worry about the monsters under their bed.

It all started when a woman took her three-year-old to a dollar store, and the toddler picked up a novelty lighter shaped like a lion. Her mom apparently bought the lighter, since it later became the mascot of the second-graders’ campaign to ban it.

Children definitely shouldn’t play with lighters; if your kid wants a plastic lion, don’t give her one that makes fire. But the New Jersey law doesn’t simply ban the sale of novelty lighters to children, or mandate stores display them on high shelves out of a toddler’s reach; the lighters are banned for everybody in the state, on the premise: “If kids can’t handle this, adults can’t have it either.”

Kids should not be telling adults what to do, and adults who allow children to dictate ridiculous ideas into legislation are worse than infantile.

From a Jennifer Abel story in the Guardian titled Welcome to kidulthood, linked via her website Ravings of a Feral Genius.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/10 at 08:53 AM
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