Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Disgusting den of creepitude
Posts: 9694

As a relativly new pa (9 mo. daughter) does anyone feel kids are way smarter than they're given credit for? Of course she goes for the things she's not suposed to (remote for TV, cat box, daddy's beer), but she pays attention to where I hide them, then promptly goes to liberate the taboo items. I'm truely boggled. These children are quite smart and I think she gets a kick outta seeing me jump. Who said kids don't have a sense of humor...

She's getting smarter by the day, and I'm begining to revaluate my actions. These wee ones pick up quick. I've been to jail more times than I can count on one hand, but untill I had to raise a child, I've never felt the urge to change myself for the better.

Damned kids anyway. I'm not ranting, just pointing out the obvious. Gotta go, she's after the cat box again.........

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location: The Bottom of the Toyem Pole
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No offense by leaded brethren, but I think it says a lot that you don't try to hide things out of sight.

But yeah, kids are smart. I'm not joking when I say they are smarter than adults. Adults know more stuff, but kids are smarter when it comes to figuring things out and learning about the world.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Sedona, Arizona
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I had a racoon that could do that.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: my mother's bloody womb
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no offense to you, or any other new parents, but i think most people are amazed that kids can do anything because kids aren't expected to do anything anymore. it isn't that far back in our evolutionary chain that children as young as 9 months to a year were expected to be much more independent than they are now. i'm sure oxsan can regale you with all sorts of tales of children left alone in the back yard at that age while mom cooked dinner, and children as young as 3 or 4 going to the local park by themselves if they didn't have to cross any streets on the way.

of course these days everything is super regulated, inspected, declared hazardous and whatnot, so parents are paranoid to put the kids on the floor for more than five minutes at a time. and with pedo's and other various predators out there, it's not safe to let a 12 year old walk to the park alone, let alone a child.

but what do we expect in a world where even the grown ups are held hostage to useless legislature and beaurocracy? every day we're told about more food we shouldn't eat, more drugs we shouldn't take, and how we should live our lives. it's no wonder that parents are shocked that their kids can actually apply knowledge to almost any situation, given the fact that we are not allowed to once we grow up.

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Registered: Jul 2000
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and on another note, there is a running theory that children born in the past 10 years or so are genetically smarter than their forebears. how this is scientifically possible is another question. but they call the theory "indigo children", and there are books on the subject that i haven't read.

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Registered: Sep 2000
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A lot of Indigo children stuff is new age hogwash (a close friend is really into it, and she's a newage kooky as could be, but in a comfortingly intelligent way). My theory is that Indigos are more the product of a new wave of parenting whereby the child's innate potential (nothing new and all children have it) is nurtured and nourished rather than squashed or squandered. One big change seems to be if you relate to the child as a consicous intelligent entity or as a mindless shitbox.

My sister is 20 years younger than me, 12 years younger than my other sister. She was born into a family that had pretty much moved out of childhood and was into young adulthood/ adolescence, and we treated her the same. Her development was remarkable (she's considered an Indigo by those in the know).

I don't buy into the explanations that new agers try to provide, but I do believe firmly that the world we live in is one that we make, so if you want to believe in magic, you'll live in a magical world. Of the children I know that are young, those who's parents treat them respectfully and as equals (not in every sense, but in an emotional-intellectual sense) are incredibly bright kids, whereas the kids who's parents treat them like life-like playthings don't have quite the same development (even though they exhibited stunning intelligence, it just doesn't get cultivated).

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Beatrice, Nebraska
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I'm amazed that children can do things because they are dumb.

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Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:

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Originally posted by Nutrimentia
No offense by leaded brethren, but I think it says a lot that you don't try to hide things out of sight.

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Disgusting den of creepitude
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Two (2) Dickel pernts. For accusing me of being too inept to hide shit. All I can say is I've got 8 months on ya in the daddy biz. You'll see..... Testing you is the first thing babes do.

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Registered: Jan 2002
Location: UK
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I fear any future children of mine finding my pot and thinking it is a stock cube to be made into gravy, i truly do.

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Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Hilbert Space
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I don't think that people are any cleverer today than they were a thousand years ago, really. Better educated, on the whole (but in the UK, I don't think that kids are as well educated as they were 40 years ago) but I don't see any reason to assume that there is higher potential.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Boston
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Children have a different thought process than adults. Quite honestly, I wish more people could hold onto some of those ways of thinking throughout their lives. It is amazing what they can and will think up, their imagination just runs so wild and free. I try to hold onto that. It is hard to, but it is worth it.

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Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:

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Originally posted by Phil
I fear any future children of mine finding my pot and thinking it is a stock cube to be made into gravy, i truly do.

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Registered: Jan 2002
Location: UK
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quote:

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Originally posted by Pinecrika
If your dope looks like a beef stock cube, I wanna get stoned with you. That sounds like hash, my good Phil.

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Registered: Dec 2002
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It wasnt that long ago that i was considered a child and yes it does get tiresome being the smartest person in the room and still having people talk down to you or assume you dont understand things. By the time a kid is 10 he should be able to understand any concept hes presented with.

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Registered: Aug 2001
Location: is futile
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I agree with Smug here. The potential for intellectual capacity has been more or less the same in the last few tens of thousands of years... BUT... a few changes has happened in the last few millenia that has allowed us to
take better advantage of this potential.

1) increase in cumulative knowledge.
This is due to the fact that 90% of all the humans that ever lived are alive today, producing more knowledge, the large-scale adoption of writing, which retains that knowledge, and globalisation, which spreads the knowledge and allows us to utilize it (by breaking down local dogmatic approaches to childrearing).

2) more and more people treat their kids as human beings, instead of essential labour. (This has gone overboard in China, where the one-child policy is giving rise to a generation of antisocial egomaniacs [the "little emperor" syndrome]).

I think the trick to "intelligence" (in a broad cultural sense), is to delay the parts of the process of growing up that stunts "learning through play".

Because I strongly agree with the notion that kids have a much easier time learning things than adults. I think adults are "hardened" into a state of increased learning inertia through cultural processes.

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Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:

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Originally posted by mudded
Because I strongly agree with the notion that kids have a much easier time learning things than adults. I think adults are "hardened" into a state of increased learning inertia through cultural processes.

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I think it's something to do with the fact that the young brain still has new brain cells growing, which stops happening at a certain point in their growth. At that point, learning becomes somewhat more difficult, and they've more or less settled into their patterns of thought.

Or something like that.

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Registered: Aug 2001
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A smart guy once pointed out that 'Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of 18' (Albert Einstein was that guy, as I have posted before).

I'm not convinced that modern British educational methods, in part designed to take advantage of the impressive capacity of children to learn, are actually achieving that effect in all cases (not so much a fault of the methods, as such; I put the problem mostly down to poor discipline in many schools, because modern techniques do seem to work well in those schools that have pretty powerful control over the kid's behaviour).

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Registered: Sep 2000
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I bet students call teachers by their first names there too, eh Smug?

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Registered: Aug 2001
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That is in interesting idea Rosh, but it doesnt explain why some regions of the brain keep growing well into adult life, especially when learning.

The brain keeps growing later than was thought just 5 years ago, and there is a good chance that learning is a key factor in this anomaly.

the cranium sets physical limits for brain size, but the network between neurons can, as far as I'm aware, keep growing in complexity after that.

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I just said that after a point, NEW brain cells stop growing. The neuron network continues to grow throughout your life (thus, learning).

I'm just figuring that once you've stopped getting new brain cells, learning gets a little harder since you've got to rewrite what you've got instead of just adding more.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Nutrimentia
I bet students call teachers by their first names there too, eh Smug?

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Registered: Aug 2001
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Rosh: But the learning curve stops before brain growth slows down, no?

That is why I think that there is a lot more to it than just brain physiology

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