Newly opened Museum of Failure celebrates bad ideas, silly designs and overhyped products - CBS New York
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/museum-of-failure-brooklyn/
>> metal-tipped darts – a lawn game that used to be sold to kids.
We loved those things, but, yes, did lead to at least one death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_darts
Lawn darts:
I remember them. Seemed like every family had a set when they first came out. It was the tail end of the dangerous toy era, when nearly all the toys were designed to "thin the herd." That was my era: everything I played with was stamped steel with sharp edges, pieces a kid might swallow, shot blasts of air that could fracture an eardrum, made sparks, shot projectiles, cap guns, fire and burn hazards. Good Times!
I remember playing with lawn darts too. You guys ever see that skit from SNL on the 1970s where Dan Aykroyd is peddling dangerous toys, one of which is a bag of glass? It wasn't far from the truth.
>> Good Times!
This seems obvious, but it just occurred to me now in reading this. My nostalgia for all the freedom kids had to play with dangerous stuff was in large part restricted to boys. Sex roles were so entrenched that every boy carried a knife, but none of the girls did. Every boy lit off rockets. None of the girls did. And so on.
It makes me think (and I'm not sure this is true) that over the last half century, girls gained a lot of freedom, which is fantastic, and boys lost a lot of freedom, which is tragic. And by most measures (education, suicide rate, employment rate), girls and young women are doing much better than boys and young men, with some exceptions in some domains (body image issues above all, though that is increasingly a male problem too).
>> none of the girls did
Not true.
I'd let you say "few" but not "none".
As a Girl Guide I had a pocket knife, and to this day I always keep a Swiss Army knife close at hand. I have several!
Interestingly, both my wife and I usually carry a knife on us, she has Swiss Army she's had for 30 years, I carry a K55K because of it's very thin profile and I like having a locking blade. Some habits from childhood just kids stick with us.
I've been buying my family pepper spray to carry as soon as it is legal for them, which is sixteen here. That's also a childhood thing for me too. I used Mace when I was 11 on a teenager who was getting aggressive with my older sister.
The freedom we had as youth definitely came with more danger. Weirdly, as a kid I was much more at risk of getting hurt, either from being stupid or risk of violence, than I have been as an adult. Thinking back, a lot of girls I knew were in similar situations. It might have been a working class vs. middle class thing.
Buckworks, my apologies. I meant to say that in my elementary school growing up, all the boys had knives but to my knowledge none of the girls did. It occurred to me as I wrote that first comment that perhaps the girls simply did not display their knives so I just did not know about them since boys and girls did not mix much that I recall.
Somewhat older, it was different. By 15 my sister was leading my brother (14) and their friend (13) on a week-long backpacking trip, for which she certainly carried a knife. My mother dropped them off in a raging storm that washed out trails and destroyed buildings with the understanding that they would show up at my grandmother's house a week later. I don't think many kids would be allowed that today and my sister thinks in retrospect that maybe she should not have been allowed to do that then.
But when she wanted to try ski jumping, she was told that it was too risky for female physiology and it would not be permitted (she was literally told as a high-school girl: "What if you landed on your chest?").
It got me wondering whether what we've seen is a regression to the mean, where girls' freedom had some losses and some gains and boys' freedom mostly had losses, rather than girls being granted all the freedoms boys once had.
And I understand that some really really bad stuff went along with that lack of oversight - it's shameful the level of sexual violence we tolerated (mostly through pretending it wasn't happening). I don't have any nostalgia for that. Or for segregation. Or for a lot of how things were in the 1960s.
>> working class vs. middle class
Mine was a very mixed district. I did not know any children of doctors or lawyers, but we definitely had upper-middle-class white-collar families and plenty of kids who lived in single-wide trailers with families of four (about 1/3 of my elementary school was on some form of govt assistance, mostly housing assistance as far as I know). We all mixed pretty fluidly and had a very shared culture. The class differences were not yet obvious like they would become in high school where the big sorting started.
Maybe rural vs urban though? Fifty years ago, kids all over were mostly free-range (I think). Living in a rural area today, I see that actually most kids here still grow up living free-range childhoods.
My knowledge of the restricted lives of suburban kids mostly comes to me through the media and friends who live afar (so all secondhand). Things like newspaper stories about parents being arrested for letting a 10you play alone in the park. That may be a completely distorted vision, but I talk to the girl who we take backpacking each summer, but who lives in a suburban region of a major city, and the list of things that other kids in her neighborhood are not allowed to do is extensive (her dad tried to give her a reasonably free-range childhood).
>restricted lives of suburban kids
Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm — and the pandemic is worsening the trend | Salon.com
https://www.salon.com/2021/01/17/giving-kids-no-autonomy-at-all-has-become-a-parenting-norm--and-the-pandemic-is-worsening-the-trend/
I would be curious to hear from littleman and Rupert who have been raising kids through these years. Do you feel a lot of pressure to conform, either internal or external?
It seems like a lot of people recognize something has gone awry, but as the author of the article recounts, there are consequences to bucking the trend. Not least, if you do what is currently standard and it goes awry, you're a good parent who got unlucky, but if you buck the trend and it goes awry, you could be subject to something ranging from harsh criticism to criminal charges.
Related to the unrelated off-topic new topic...
Parents Are Paying Consultants $750,000 to Get Kids Into Ivy League Schools
Acceptance rates at the nation's top universities are plunging, and parents are doing whatever it takes to get their kids in.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-31/how-to-get-your-kid-into-an-ivy-league-college-parents-pay-750k-for-a-shot
Though honestly, I feel like the museum of failure should have at least one artifact of this practice. It is a colossal societal failure that it has come to that.
Related to the unrelated off-topic new topic...
"We (and I'm not really sure who I mean by that, but definitely Americans) have become a fearful people in general. We keep optimizing risk out of our lives. I think of all the changes in my life: seatbelts, helmets, airbags, tamper-proof packaging, children carefully supervised, police in the schools, endless rules at ski areas, huge limitations on the freedom of children compared to my childhood....
The waste of human life for a small bit of ground or because they couldn't be bothered to buckle a seatbelt is tragic.
But at the same time, I find it odd that some extreme helmet advocates have almost implied that I am mentally unstable for riding a bike or skiing without a helmet. It is not that long ago that almost nobody wore a helmet for either of those activities.
I can't really quite grope my way to a coherent though here, but I feel that our risk tolerance as a society has perhaps become too low. I also think it's part of the split between the haves and have nots. The obsessive helmet wearers are mostly haves, while the have nots still face all sorts of systemic risk on their jobs and in their environment (smoking is now essentially a habit of the have nots and nutrition is dramatically poorer among the have nots, both of which carry more risk than occasionally tooling around town on a bike without a helmet)."
Ergophobe, May 2020
http://th3core.com/talk/water-coolerextra/how-the-pandemic-might-play-out-in-2021-and-beyond/msg70114/#msg70114
LOL! I started reading that thinking, "Yeah, I basically agree with that." By the end, I knew why.
I'm like Bernie Sanders: I have my talking points and I stick to them, whether relevant to the conversation or not.
I thought it was perfectly relevant. We've talked about child bike helmets killing bike riding more than a few times over the years. I was looking for those threads when I ran across that.
>all the freedom kids had to play with dangerous stuff was in large part restricted to boys.
At age 10, I got my first boat --a rowboat. By age 11, I had begged an outboard motor from my older brother. By age 13, I was semi-feral. By age 15, totally feral.
>> perfectly relevant
I'm not saying it wasn't, I'm just saying it wouldn't have stopped me if it weren't relevant ;-)
>boat
No motor here, but when I was 10+, I would load my dog in the canoe and just paddle aimlessly around.
I was not "feral." I just had very few rules, a lot of time alone and permission to basically go where I pleased by myself as long as I was home when I said I would be home. It was when I said I would be home for dinner and dragged in hours later that I got in trouble (and reasonably so... I still get in trouble for that with my wife. Now I understand that people worry).
It was just absolutely the norm.
But I wonder how much of what's in the media about the worst excesses of helicopter/snowplow parenting are basically among the affluent.
I saw on a recent Social Security accounting of my work record that my first job went back to when I was 10 years old. I was surprised kids were allowed to do that then. It turns out they are allowed to do that now and be paid under minimum wage, as I was (and gratefully so - it was with that money I eventually bought my first motorcycle) as long as the work is non-hazardous, which includes running a tractor as long as the PTO is under 20 horsepower!
https://labor.vermont.gov/sites/labor/files/doc_library/Child%20Labor%20Information%20Poster.pdf
I bet there are still young kids doing some of that work, but I will also bet that very few of them are planning their assault on the ivy walls of Harvard.
Quoteas long as I was home when I said I would be home
same here. And for Sue. She was in trouble when they returned from living in Australia (age 8) and stopped out until dark. She had no idea that it was nearly 10 at night.
I had a collection of pocket knives. The best are now owned by Lucy, but she keeps them in a draw largely.
We have helicopter parented her compared with my life. We have tried not to. But at 6 I was playing down the fields until evening, and at 14 I was brewing my own beer. The mate I go sailing with was bought a shandy at 10 years old. It never crossed my mind she should be doing any of that, and she never showed signs of wanting to break out. We always tried to spend time
with her, so there was no time for her to go feral. We played in the streams together, climbed in the Lakes district, went campig, rides on my motorbike, trips out off road cycling, swimming in the river etc etc.
Has it harmed her? I do think so in some ways. In that she is definitely less resilient than I think I was at her age.... but University has made he grow up quicker in the last 3 years. Car crashes, relationship issues, money management and work related problems to overcome.
So perhaps it just comes later.
What are the risks of helicopter parenting if thats what we did?
Off the top of my head, I think the Inability to stand on your own feet, make your own decisions and stand by the consequences. Having the confidence to move forward, and believing you can do. A big chunk of that is a nature as well as nurture. You are supposed to be the sum of the 5 people you spend most time with. Well if 2 of those have been Sue and myself, then I am happy with that.
We will only hear about the bad stuff in the media, and I believe the world I live in is a better place than the one I lived in 40 or 50 years ago. People got away with bad stuff then. now its less likely.
I wonder if the big problem is not so much the parents driven by fear, but the tech. A parent can now ignore their children, and instead of running off to play with whoever is out there, said children sit playing on their ipad or phone
doing nothing.
related to the insulated childhood sub-topic:
U.S. playgrounds are boringly safe. New designs add a whiff of danger
https://www.fastcompany.com/90874228/playground-design-innovations-danger-risk-diversity?partner=rss
>>U.S. playgrounds are boringly safe
This past weekend we were taking our kids out to go on a hike, play at a park, etc. and as I was driving I was trying to think of any good, old school playgrounds with a wooden play structure, metal slides, metal bar climbing structures, and other stuff I used to play on as a kid and couldn't really think of any in the area. There is a park about 40 minutes away with a pretty good wooden playground so we went to that but it was still a much "safer" design than the old school stuff.
A couple years ago we were visiting friends and went to their nearest park. It had a playground I would have loved as a kid. A low kiddie climbing wall, but high enough to sprain an ankle. Some complicated structures that you could climb and play and swing and definitely get hurt on. Honestly, all six adults spent quite a bit of time playing. So they definitely exist.
And BTW, this was a very very rural and very very small mountain community.
>low kiddie climbing wall, but high enough to sprain an ankle. Some complicated structures that you could climb and play and swing and definitely get hurt on.
I know of one playground in Isle Of Palms SC that is built with a low walking wall and teetering balance beams. The main structure is rebar, steel, and logging chain. Very well done, but looks different and challenging --almost ominous. Perfect!
School playground equipment in the year 1900 : pics
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/50h4ne/school_playground_equipment_in_the_year_1900/
Okay... not as dangerous as a 1900 playground, but frankly, that looks genuinely dangerous for little kids, especially when fights break out on the high bar.