5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids so

GEVER TULLY 5 DANGEROUS THINGS YOU SHOULD LET YOUR KIDS DO Welcome to Five Dangerous Things You Should permit Your Children Do. I dont have children. I borrow my friends children, so(Laughter)take all this advice with a grain of salt. Im Gal elans Tulley. Im a contract computer scientist by trade, yet Im the founder of something called the Tinkering School. Its a summer program which aims to help chelas to keep an eye onhow to show the things that they think of. So we build a lot of things. And I do put power tools into the hands of second-graders.So if youre thinking round sending your kid to Tinkering School,they do come back bruised, scraped and bloody. So, you sack come turn up of the closet, we live in a worldthats subjected to invariably more stringent child safety regulations. There doesnt seem to be some(prenominal) limit on how crazychild safety regulations tin get in. We put suffocation warnings on all the &8212 on both division of plastic filmmanufactured in the United States or for dealwith an item in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to secern usthat the contents may be hot.And we seem to think that any item craftyer than a golf ball is too sharpfor children under the age of 10. So where does this trend stop? When we round every corner and eliminate every sharp object,every pokey enactment in the world,then the first time that kids come in click with anything sharpor not made out of round plastic,theyll mischief themselves with it. So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zonegrow ever smaller, we cut off our children from valuable opportunitiesto learn how to interact with the world round them.And despite all of our best efforts and intentions,kids atomic number 18 always going to cast outhow to do the most dangerous thing they bathroom,in whatever environment they can. So despite the provocative title, this presentation is really about safetyand about some simple things that we can doto ar o affair our kids to be creative, confidentand in falsify of the environment around them. And what I now present to you is an excerpt from a allow in progress. The book is called 50 Dangerous Things. This is five dangerous things.Thing number one &8212 frivol with fire. Learning to control one of the most elemental forces in geniusis a pivotal moment in any childs personal history. Whether we look upon it or not,its a &8212 its the first time we really getcontrol of one of these mysterious things. These mysteries atomic number 18 only revealedto those who get the opportunity to bunco with it. So, contend with fire. This is the like one of the abundant things we ever discovered, fire. From playing with it, they learn some basic principles about fire,about intake, about combustion, about exhaust.These are the three working elements of firethat you have to have to have a sober controlled fire. And you can think of the fan out-pit fire as a laboratory. You dont know what the yre going to learn from playing with it. You know, let them fool around with it on their avouch terms and trust me,theyre going to learn thingsthat you cant get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys. name two &8212 own a pocketknife. Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness,which I think is a stark thing. Laughter)Your first &8212 your first pocketknife is like the first frequent tool that youre apt(p). You know, its a spatula, its a pry bar,its a screwdriver and its a blade. And its a &8212 its a powerful and empowering tool. And in a lot of cultures they give knives &8212like, as soon as theyre toddlers they have knives. These are Inuit children cutting whale blubber. I first saw this in a Canadian Film plug-in film when I was 10,and it left a lasting impression, to see babies playing with knives. And it shows that kids can develop an extended sense of selfthrough a tool at a very young age.You lay mess a couple of very simple rules &8212alwa ys cut external from your body, keep the blade sharp, never force it&8212 and these are things kids can view and practice with. And yeah, theyre going to cut themselves. I have some terrible scars on my legs from where I stabbed myself. But you know, theyre young. They heal fast. (Laughter) weigh three &8212 drop down a spear. It turns out that our brains are in reality wired for throwing thingsand, like muscles, if you dont use part of your brain,they tend to atrophy over time.But when you exercise them,any given muscle adds strength to the unit systemand that applies to your brain too. So practicing throwing things has been shown to shake the frontal and parietal lobes,which have to do with visual acuity, 3D go outing,and geomorphologic problem solving, so it gives a sense &8212it helps develop their visualization skills and their prophetical ability. And throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skill,so its very good for that kind of whole-body training. These kinds of target-based practice alsohelps kids develop attention and concentration skills.So those are great. Number four &8212 deconstruct appliances. There is a world of interesting things inwardly your dishwasher. Next time youre about to throw out an appliance, dont throw it out. realise it apart with your kid, or send him to my schooland well take it apart with them. flat if you dont know what the parts are,puzzling out what they might be foris a really good practice for the kidsto get sort of the sense that they can take things apart,and no matter how composite plant they are,they can understand parts of them and that means that eventually,they can understand all of them.Its a sense of knowability, that something is knowable. So these black boxes that we live with and take for grantedare actually complex things made by other peopleand you can understand them. Number five &8212 two-parter. Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. There are laws beyond safety regulationst hat attempt to limit how we can interact with the thingsthat we own &8212 in this case, digital media. Its a very simple exercise &8212 demoralise a song on ITunes, write it to a CD,then draw in the CD to an MP3 and play it on your very same computer. Youve just bewildered a law. Technically the RIAA can come and persecute you.Its an important lesson for kids to understand &8212that some of these laws get broken by accidentand that laws have to be interpreted. And its something we often talk about with the kidswhen were fooling around with things and breaking them openand taking them apart and using them for other things &8212and also when we go out and drive a car. Driving a car is a &8212 is a really empowering act for a young child,so this is the ultimate. For those of you who arent comfortable actually breaking the law,you can drive a car with your child. This is &8212 this is a great stage for a kid.This happens about the same timethat they get latched onto things like dinos aurs,these big things in the outside worldthat theyre trying to get a grip on. A car is a similar object, and they can get in a car and drive it. Andthats a really, like &8212 it gives them a handle on a worldin a way that they wouldnt &8212 that they dont often have access to. So &8212 and its perfectly legal. Find a big empty lot, make sure theres nothing in itand its on private property, and let them drive your car. Its very safe actually. And its fun for the whole family. So, lets see. I think thats it. Thats number five and a half. OK.