Automated Baby Care Is So Wrong

I'm a modern woman who has decided I can't help out with kids. In the few times I've been in a role where I'm supposed to watch them, I was paranoid the entire time. I don't know what to do. I have never babysat. NEVER. I honestly would not know what to do if children started acting up, and the only thing I do is treat them the same as I would anyone: tell them to please stop and tell them the reason why and possibly the consequences of their actions. For example, please don't push one another near the stairs, as they could end up falling down the stairs and cracking their head open. Or to please not ride those scooters quickly in and out of aisles in the store because they might not see someone and end up colliding with them.

Sure, it's logic and reasoning, but so far it works. Then again, I treat kids the way I would have wanted to be treated: if you tell me to do something and explain why I should, I'll listen.

I'm not sure I follow. You start out by saying you can't deal with kids, and then write something very thoughtful that suggests you do just fine with them.

?

That's the only thing I know how to do. Don't ask me to feed them or play with them or change a diaper or anything. Or look at my apartment. If I had a child, FACS would take them within a week, I'm sure.

You can learn those things pretty quickly.

I think dealing with children is like dealing with the elderly. Everyone should be able to do it in a pinch to help out: we were all kids once, and we'll all be old one day, and it's the least we'd want from the people around us, I imagine. Children and old folks aren't a different species. :)

I prefer helping out with the old folks. :) I don't know why some people find it so amazing how patient I can be with some elderly, even if they keep asking the same question every few minutes. Well, I can mentally pretend to be in their position, and it's hard when every few minutes you think you're asking for the first time. I mean, you'd get upset too if you asked a question and someone replied a bit hostily and angrily. No sense getting mad or impatient with someone because it's not as though they can do anything about the Alzheimer's (for now).

My favourite part about seniors is talking with them about when they were younger. I love the stories about how they met their loved ones, the jobs they had, the games and clothes they did back then that my generation never knew, etc. It gives you the "human" side of history, the part that feels more real than any textbook could provide.

Maybe one of the things that bugs me about kids is that until they reach a certain age, you can't hold a conversation with them. lol Ah well. We're all different and some of us are better at caring for our elders and some are better helping raise the youth. We can't all do everything, even in a village.

As an only child who had no contact with cousins, I can say that the concept of what is "age appropriate" was my first lesson as a parent. Your example would work find with older kids, but not with toddlers. The good thing about having your own kids, is that you can train them your way. I trained my then 2 year old that counting to five out lout or with my fingers (for quiet environments such as a library), meant that if I got to five, and you didn't obey, there would be a negative consequence. You seldom have that relationship with other people's kids.

That's the thing. I was raised as an only child and had no siblings or surrogates. My two close friends HARDLY count as sisters. I've never been responsible for the care of any child under the age of 6, so I wouldn't know what to do. I don't even want to hold an infant b/c I don't know how (not that I'd want to hold one anyway).

And you're right, my method only works with older kids who have capacity to reason and converse. You can't reason with a 3 year old.

In my family, kids were treated mostly like adults. My cousins never got a chance to be "just kids" so I was a bit luckier that way, but it's not like my mom really played with me. Not that she didn't do things like take me camping and to Canada's Wonderland and Marineland, but that's not quite the same as playing Lego or My Little Pony, either. Becuase most of my contact was with adults, I've always been able to converse with people 30 and older much better than anyone younger than that. I mean, on school trips I always hung around the adult and talked with them, because I couldn't relate to my peers.

The flipside of this is that from the time I was 4, we had cats in the home. I always considered our first cat my "brother" since we both literally grew up together. I can converse (body language or vocalisations) with cats relatively well. I know how to hold cats or kittens, and I know how to make the noises cats recognise as mommycat sounds. I kinda socialised myself more to relating to my cat than to other humans, so all the things I do NOT know how to do with a human child, I know full well how to do with felines. The oddest part is that I don't see that as a problem, either. lol

Thankfully, with living in the same building as my two friends and one of them having older siblings, I got the (small) social network and did get that sense of.. "togetherness?".. elsewhere. I mean there are things I learned from my best friends' older sister that I didn't learn from my mother, but there are other things my mother taught me that I didn't learn elsewhere. I loved living in our building because of that sense of community, of our three families sort of co-raising all 3 of us. :)

Well to be fair, it's the same sort of reasoning I use with my cat. You can't train a cat just by telling it to do something, you have to show them that it's in THEIR INTERESTS to do something. Mind you, with Carl body language is as important as words, since he doesn't understand English THAT well. So with kids or cats, sometimes it's important to tell them that if they continue doing what they're doing, they'll hurt themselves. Ignore the fact they might hurt others (altruism comes later in life), you have to make it about THEM. And make it easy. Cats and kids are really more similar than we like to credit, on a mental and behavioural level.

Also, I'm well aware that the frontal lobe does not attach to the rest of the brain until we're about 18 or 19, so we can't REALLY understand the consequences of our actions until adulthood. In retrospect this does make sense. When you're, say, 16, you know intellectually what could happen if you drive drunk but only because you're TAUGHT that. Any consequences were things you learned by seeing it happen to other people. If you hadn't experienced a consequence, it wasn't possible to imagine its possiblity. I'm sure all of us can recount times in high school where we hadn't known the potiential consequences of what we were doing, until the consequences met up with us.

When I was a kid, the one thing I HATED was "Because I said so" or "Because God made it that way." I knew that couldn't be the answer but I couldn't think of a rebuttal, either.

It might not be exactly 18, but it's probably no younger than 16. It's easy for us to think we can understand the consequences and I didn't believe the notion at first. But imagination and basic problem solving probably can make up for it.

It's one of the reasons that it has been discussed that the driving age should be raised to 18. The fast pace at which you need to be making those decisions (and consequences) just isn't happening on a physical scale.

Technically the brain itself doesn't stop growing/maturing until well into our 20's, one way or another.