The Eight Never-Nevers

Posted by CircuitGuy 8 years ago to Education
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My kids' school plays this exact video, has them sing the songs, and promotes the message. Just read this summary because you can never get those two minutes of your life back if you watch the video.

Your grown-ups will protect you and sure things are good. They're there for you to keep you safe.
1. Never-never touch a gun.
2. Never-never play with fire.
3. Never-never go on wheels without a helmet.
4. Never-never dive right in. Ask before you get wet.
5. Never-never use sharp tools alone.
6. Never-never pet a dog without asking your grownup.
7. Check for traffic both ways before you cross the street.
8. Never-never ride in cars unless you're buckled up.

The cool thing is my kids seem to detect intuitively it's crap.

My son mentioned that adults who are old and gray and remember when kids could run around and play without adults constantly keeping us safe take it less seriously.

Possible reasons for the hyper-safety:
- Maybe there's a segment of the population, a segment >>50% women, who wants to focus on kids, but starting in the 90's started feeling uncomfortable saying their wants aloud. They did feel comfortable saying circumstances demand they make sacrifices. So they made parenting more complicated and difficult to get what they wanted without admitting it.
- Maybe people who were old enough to be aware of the Sept 11 attack but under 18, people who are now 21 to 34, were affected in such a way to make them more cautious.
- Maybe the hyper-safety stuff in the school is motivated to help the few kids whose parents are really irresponsible and leave dangerous things lying out without teaching their kids to respect them.

I do not believe there's a figure like Toohey behind it asking young people their dreams and then purposely quashing them. I do not believe politicians in Washington are the cause either; they respond to the zeitgeist rather than drive it. The only part I believe might be have a political motive is which one got the top Rule #1 position.

At any rate, the video reminds me how important it is to teach kids to handle guns, fire, and tools responsibly and to be skeptical.


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  • Posted by $ allosaur 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Nobody was riding bicycles when my kid went to school.
    When I was a kid a sizable percentage, including myself, rode bicycles to and from school.
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 8 years ago
    Ipswich, UK, Ostende, Belgium, Ejby, Denmark, and Drachten, Germany are among the towns in Europe that have taken out traffic controls and let people manage intersections on their own. It seems to result in fewer accidents.
    Der Spiegel auf Englisch hier:
    http://www.spiegel.de/international/s...
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Fireworks stores in trailers pop up in Alabama before New Years Eve and the 4th of July.
    Stores that sell fireworks year round are rare but I can think of a couple, though I've never shopped at either. I'm an old dino now.
    Outlawed in Alabama are the cherry bombs and M-80s that were legal during my childhood. Either explosive can mangle a hand.
    But kids can have .22 rifles and anyone can make a fire bomb,
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    I was a crossing guard. We had the responsibility in the 6th grade. It was an old program when I came into it. (When the baby boom caused disastrous crowding and we went to half days, the crossing guard were pushed down to the 5th graders.)

    We also had indoor patrollers for the school building.

    It would be hard to argue whether all of that taught "responsibility" or "authority." Our parents and teachers had to rein in a bit of (ahem) "germanophilia." (:-)
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    Haven't listened to Carlin in a long while. Your link was pretty funny. Like the bit about a losing kid receiving a "last winner trophy."
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  • Posted by 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    "people go to jail for not watching their kids these days,"
    I have been to many against the war on drugs and the invasion/occupation of Iraq. I have never been arrested, detained, or even been the target of any abuse or overbearing treatment from police officers at protests.

    So it will be so ironic if the thing I get arrested for is letting my kids ride their bike to the same park in Madison I road to as a kid.
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  • Posted by STEVEDUNN46 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    My brother and i made little bombs from asperin bottles and match heads. Then we learned how to make gun powder from ingredients we bought at the grocery store. Filled empty co2 capsules with it. We survived some how. Made rockets from short pieces of conduit. Entertained the neighbors in sure
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  • Posted by preimert1 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    We had to drive all the way from Atlanta to the South Carolina line to buy fire works because some do-gooder legislator bitch decided they were unsafe. ...like a bunch of half-drunk rebel boys on the road was safer?
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  • Posted by 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    That's so true. The new standard is to act as if the kids were dressed up for an event and couldn't get dirty even if they're just running around playing and not dressed up.
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  • Posted by 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    I was born in '75 and haven't read about kids before then. The big change I see is the need for "structured activities" or the aversion to kids playing unstructured. I also see that TVs have simply gotten much more easier and convenient, so kids don't have to learn to entertain themselves.

    That fact that even against a week opponent President Trump only lost by 3 million votes is encouraging, but it should have been more and it does not give me confidence about these issues. I don't see national politicians getting involved, and I actually think that's a good thing because I do not want any action from Washington.
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  • Posted by GaryL 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    This is why we are raising a generation of Girly men today. Heck, we donned double sweatshirts and pants and wore motorcycle helmets with shield and had BB gun fights all the time. No one ever lost an eye but I did have to dig a couple BBs out of my hands. We had a blast and all my mother ever said was make sure you keep the face shield down.
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  • Posted by walkabout 8 years ago
    John Rosemond, Ph.D traces most of today's idiotic "psychological parenting" to the '60's when a bunch of Mental Health Types -- w/o invitation -- interjected themselves into parenting essentially declaring everything humans have been doing to raise their kids for the last 5 thousand years as wrong. As a psychologist specializing in children I am very concerned by a number of sociological changes in the last century which lead to the bizarre state of affairs now. The good news is common sense seems to be winning (for example, Trump won).
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  • Posted by Ben_C 8 years ago
    How about:
    9) Never-never get dirty. Wash you hands at least once an hour with germ killing soap.

    This is dedicated to the germaphobic paranoid moms.
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  • Posted by ReneeDaphne 8 years ago
    Or maybe....if you train people young to be risk-adverse, they will forego anything that might remind them of a possible fear.

    Tah-dah - perfect slave class in two generations.

    Looking for opportunities to encourage, entice, goad, cajole, tease people into moving a little outside their comfort zone of risk, provides a platform to reverse what the enslavers are trying to do.

    We have a lot of work to do.
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  • Posted by 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    "Never talk to a stranger "
    I know what you mean, but I state it a little different. It's good to talk to strangers, but never go off with a stranger. If someone's doing something wrong in public, I want my kids to feel comfortable telling a stranger. When you're not in public, be weary even of people you know, e.g. friends and relatives of friends from school, if they are doing something that seems questionable. That's the most likely scenario of them encountering a weirdo.
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  • Posted by 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    "Sometimes I wonder if school crossing guards breed a false sense of security."
    I like the idea of giving the older kids (maybe 10 y/o) who have shown responsibility the job of crossing guard, like when I was kid. It's a tiny step into the world of taking adult world of life-and-death responsibility, which we hope they are only a few years away from.

    I think failure to launch kids into adulthood is one of the most popular PPACA provisions is having young adults on their parents' health insurance until age 26. Setting aside the other issues, it's odd that people well into adulthood would even think of being on their parents' insurance. Now people in that group call doing basic life management activities "adulting".
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  • Posted by GaryL 8 years ago
    IMO they missed the most important one these days. Never talk to a stranger and never do anything he or she wants you to do without first talking about it with a trusted adult.
    A few of the others are pretty lame.
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  • Posted by 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    "I would actually point my finger and mimic gunfire sounds while pretending to ride a horse."
    If you had asked me what could possibly be wrong with this behavior before I had kids, I would have been confused. I would have asked if the kids were skipping school or something. If you confirmed it was during recess, I would have had no idea. I think pointing my finger and mimicking gunfire was all I did during recess.

    Apparently kids are not even allowed to pick up sticks anymore. I don't mean pick them up and fight or pretend to shoot. They're not allowed to play with sticks in any way. As George Carlin put it, kids aren't allowed to sit there with a F-ing stick anymore. https://youtu.be/K0MKBdD2FGA
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    What would have really caused seizures would have been the sight of me playing with my kindly next door veteran neighbor's nonoperational souvenir M3 "grease gun."
    Looked like a blow torch had roasted the sub gun's innards and the clip could not be removed.
    http://www.koreanwaronline.com/arms/g...
    "Ratatatatat! Gotcha, Jap!"
    That cheaper and easier to produce than the Thompson gun wasn't just used in Korea.
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 8 years ago in reply to this comment.
    I was always shooting imaginary bad guys.
    Buried memory now emerges!
    Recall a best friend's "big sister" (also a half pint) introducing us to cops and robbers.
    Here we are at the police station.
    Karen pretends the phone rings. She answers. "What?" she'd always begin.
    "What?" we'd ask her.
    "They're robbing the bank!"
    You should have seen us silly little kids pile into an imaginary police car and run across the yard close together (because we;re in this here car) and simulate siren sounds.
    "Wreee! Arrrr!"
    Banksters loved what we did to gangsters.
    Pow! Pow! Pow!
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