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 Let Your Children Do. I dont dedicate children. I borrow my friends children, so(Laughter)take all this advice with a grain of salt. Im Gever Tulley. Im a contract computer scientist by trade,but Im the founder of something called the Tinkering School. Its a summer schedule which aims to help kids to learnhow to build 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 around sending your kid to Tinkering School,they do come back bruised, scraped and bloody. So, you know, we live in a worldthats subjected to ever more stringent child resort regulations. in that respect doesnt see to be whatsoever limit on how crazychild safety regulations can get. We put suffocation warnings on all the on every go of plastic filmmanufactured in the United States or for salewith an item in the United State s. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell usthat the contents may be hot.And we seem to think that any itemsharper than a golf ball is too sharpfor children under the jump on of 10. So where does this trend stop? When we round every corner and eliminate every sharp object,every pokey bit in the world,then the setoff condemnation that kids come in contact with anything sharpor not made out of round plastic,theyll hurt themselves with it. So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety z superstargrow ever smaller, we cut off our children from valuable opportunitiesto learn how to interact with the world around them.And despite all of our best efforts and intentions,kids be unendingly going to figure outhow to do the most dangerous thing they can,in whatever environment they can. So despite the provocative title, this presentation is sincerely about safetyand about some simple things that we can doto raise our kids to be creative, confidentand in control of the environm ent around them. And what I now present to you is an excerpt from a book in progress. The book is called 50 Dangerous Things. This is five dangerous things.Thing number one play with fire. nurture to control one of the most elemental military groups in natureis a pivotal moment in any childs personal history. Whether we remember it or not,its a its the first time we really getcontrol of one of these mysterious things. These mysteries are only revealedto those who get the opportunity to play with it. So, playing with fire. This is deal one of the great 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 good controlled fire. And you can think of the open-pit fire as a laboratory. You dont know what theyre going to learn from playing with it. You know, let them tantalize around with it on their own terms and trus t me,theyre going to learn thingsthat you cant get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys. look two own a pocketknife. Pocketknives are sympathetic of drifting out of our cultural consciousness,which I think is a terrible thing. Laughter)Your first your first pocketknife is like the first comprehensive tool that youre given. You know, its a spatula, its a pry bar,its a screwdriver and its a blade. And its a its a powerful and empowering tool. And in a lot of cultures they give knives like, as concisely as theyre toddlers they have knives. These are Inuit children cutting whale blubber. I first saw this in a Canadian Film Board 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 down a couple of very simple rules always cut away from your body, keep the blade sharp, never force it and these are things kids can understand and practice wi th. 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) Number three throw a spear. It turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing thingsand, like muscles, if you dont use parts of your brain,they tend to atrophy over time.But when you exercise them,any given muscle adds strength to the whole systemand that applies to your brain too. So practicing throwing things has been shown tostimulate the frontal and parietal lobes,which have to do with visual acuity, 3D understanding,and morphologic problem solving, so it gives a sense it helps develop their visualization skills and their predictive 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 deconstruct applia nces. There is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher. Next time youre about to throw out an appliance, dont throw it out. Take it apart with your kid, or send him to my schooland well take it apart with them. Even if you dont know what the parts are, confuse 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 Byzantine 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 two-parter. Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. There are laws beyond safety regulationsthat attempt to limit how we can interact with the thingsthat we own in this case, digital media. Its a very simple exercise debauch a song on ITunes, write it to a CD,then rip the CD to an MP3 and play it on your very same computer. Youve just broken a law. Technically the RIAA can come and persecute you.Its an important lesson for kids to understand that some of these laws get broken by accidentand that laws have to be interpreted. And its something we often reproof about with the kidswhen were fooling around with things and breaking them openand taking them apart and using them for other things and also when we go out and drive a car. capricious a car is a 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 this is a great stage for a kid.This happens about the same timethat they get latched onto things like dinosaurs,these big things in the outside worldthat theyre move 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 it gives them a handle on a wo rldin a way that they wouldnt that they dont often have access to. So 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.