If you want to know why kids are growing up retarded, tune in to Discovery Health.

[Rebel Yell]

Sunday at 1 pm.


I watched a program my wife recorded last night called Radical Parenting. It should have been named When Retards Reproduce.

The first family they showed were Home Unschoolers. They kept their kids at home, but did no schooling. "We like to let them learn through experience." There are no rules in the house, they just let the kids do whatever they want. Bathe, or don't. Brush your teeth, or don't.

These were college educated parents. The mother had her masters in nursing. If they'd been "white trash" from the trailer park doing this, it wouldn't have been "edgy". Those kids would have been taken away.

Check it out, or DVR it. This is how kids turn out to be DUmmies.

From the Discovery Health website, Top Ten Radical Parenting Methods (these are the ones they showed) .....


1. Raising a Child as Gender Neutral

Often, society dictates a child's predilection toward "boy stuff" or "girl stuff" even before birth. Attend most any baby shower across the country and you'll find that parents expecting boys are likely to end up with lots of blue clothing and accessories with sports or automotive themes while parents expecting girls are bombarded with pink and yellow clothing and accessories with floral or princess themes.

Some social scientists believe these gender-specific colors and themes can limit a child's imagination and, ultimately, his or her options. You end up with hyper-masculine men and hyper-feminine women who often can't get along, theorizes biologist Lise Eliot, a critic of traditional pink and blue parenting.

She and other gender-neutral advocates suggest that parents toss gender-geared clothes and provide gender-agnostic toys. The approach, they say, expands both girls' and boys' horizons; girls, for example, can practice competitiveness and assertiveness through activities like remote-control-car racing or rough-and-tumble play. Boys, meanwhile, can play with kitchen sets and dolls to hone nurturing and people skills.

Eliot acknowledges that gender-neutral parenting takes effort and can be challenging because we don't live in a gender-free world. Women are still expected to be the primary nurturers. And "feminine-boys" are made fun of in school. The gender-free movement hopes to change all that.


6. Attachment Parenting

A baby's sleeping, emotional and feeding needs always come first with this approach. Popularized by the pediatrician William Sears and derived from psychological research on parent/child attachment, attachment parenting holds that children fare best when they've bonded early and well with a guardian, usually the mother.

Attachment parents abide by eight principles, which, according to Attachment Parenting International's Web site, are:

Prepare for pregnancy, birth and parenting
Feed with love and respect
Respond with sensitivity
Use nurturing touch
Ensure safe sleep, physically and emotionally
Provide consistent and loving care
Practice positive discipline
Strive for a balance in personal and family life


Critics say this child-centered approach is too hard on parents and can foster kids who are spoiled and demanding.

This next one is basically, the Unschoolers.

4. Unparenting

This term makes it sound like parents should just disown their kids. However, unparenting actually means turning off the auto-parent button -- the one that makes you lecture and issue mandates. For a better outcome, deprogram yourself and guide from the side, advises the movement's leader, professional coach Nathalie Tucker Miller. Too often parents get caught up in the drama of their children's choices, argues Tucker Miller: They respond angrily or with judgment and prohibition, which usually backfires.

Through unparenting, parents learn to be objective, learning to "abandon assumptions and listen cleanly" to their children, writes Tucker Miller on her Web site, UnParenting.com. Of course, this approach is not popular with the tough-love parenting camp, with its position that youngsters are too immature to make good decisions.
http://health.discovery.com/tv/baby-week/articles/radical-parenting-methods.html

[Gingersnap]

Well, they've been trying gender-neutral parenting for 30 years now and the little girls make dolls out of their Legos and the little boys make guns.

I've never heard of a special kind of "attachment" parenting. I thought you had to be attached to your kids or they'd grow up to be psychos.

'Unschooling' is every homeschooler's worst nightmare. Every time homeschooling is portrayed in a negative academic way by teachers and lawmakers, it's unschoolers who are held up as examples. This is the doomed Rousseau-type approach to learning: trust a child's natural interests to guide him or her in the learning process.

Sadly, 99% of human children are only interested in learning about how to set things on fire.

[Milly]

Sadly, 99% of human children are only interested in learning about how to set things on fire.

99% of the BOY half maybe. I don't know of that many pyro girls.

The unparenting thing might not be a bad idea in this age of helicopter parents. In the 50s we were sent outside to play and told to be back for meals. A great way to grow up.

[noonwitch]

My brother tried that with his girls, to some extent. It worked to a degree-his girls were never really into dolls and are more into athletics. They are not as irritating as most 13 year old girls, in that they don't squeal over Zach Efron.

When my sister asked if, since he was raising his kids so gender neutrally, she could give his little boy a pink shirt, his response was "Hell, no".

My sister's girls played with dolls and girlie toys, and they are as equally into athletics as my brother's girls. They just have long hair and actually wear dresses on special occasions. They squeal over Zach Efron, though.

[Gingersnap]

99% of the BOY half maybe. I don't know of that many pyro girls.

Clearly, you didn't grow where I grew up. :D

[Speedy]

My oldest daughter was a huge tomboy, even to the point of getting into fights with boys. Her forte was climbing and jumping off of stuff. She had a unique way of climbing onto the roof of our house. She would get a good running start, then jump, grab hold of the gutter then swing herself up. She would jump off the roof or climb onto the tree that had branches hanging low over the roof. She got an article 15 in the army because her room was on the second floor and she would run out the hall way and then vault over the guard rail and land on the ground below. She loved doing that crap, until her Platoon sergeant saw her doing it.

She played sports the same way. She was unafraid to slide head first or to barrel into the catcher (in fact she loved to do this). But she was always into the girly things. She dressed tight and sexy and wore dresses alot more than her sister did.

I could never do the "unparenting" thing. The way I raised my kids from birth until they left home was, "I don't give a fuck what you want or think, THIS is the way it is."

[Apache]

99% of the BOY half maybe. I don't know of that many pyro girls.



Gender profiler!




:D

[Wei Wu Wei]

http://kimag.es/share/36281077.jpg

[Rebel Yell]

http://kimag.es/share/36281077.jpg

Your point is?

[Milly]

Your point is?

That carrying signs is gender neutral?

[Gingersnap]

Your point is?

That Wu Wu can't seem to stay on topic. I'm pretty lenient about off-topic wanderings but if Wu Wu keeps on deliberately dragging threads off-topic, I'm going to start dumping those posts into a special thread in the Whiny Zone.

Just because he doesn't like us doesn't mean that he can disrupt the forums.