5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids so

GEVER TULLY 5 formidable THINGS YOU SHOULD LET YOUR KIDS DO Welcome to Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do. I dont have children. I borrow my friends children, so(Laughter) include all this advice with a grain of salt. Im Gever Tulley. Im a contract com contriveer scientist by trade,but Im the separate of whatsoeverthing called the Tinkering School. Its a summer program which aims to help kids to learnhow to build the things that they mobilize of. So we build a lot of things. And I do give power son of a bitchs into the hands of second-graders.So if youre thinking ab turn up sending your kid to Tinkering School,they do come back bruised, scraped and bloody. So, you k without delay, we live in a worldthats subjected to ever more than stringent child gumshoe regulations. There doesnt seem to be every limit on how crazychild safety regulations arsehole get. We put suffocation warnings on all the on every piece of waxy tearmanufactured in the United States o r for salewith an breaker point in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell usthat the contents may be hot.And we seem to think that any point in time curter than a golf ball is too sharpfor children infra the age of 10. So where does this trend stop? When we round every quoin and eliminate every sharp object,every pokey bit in the world,then the offset time that kids come in contact with anything sharpor not do out of round plastic,theyll hurt themselves with it. So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety z sensationgrow ever smaller, we trim off our children from valuable opportunitiesto learn how to interact with the world around them.And disrespect all of our best efforts and intentions,kids are always red ink to figure outhow to do the most dangerous thing they can,in whatever milieu they can. So despite the provocative title, this presentation is genuinely about safetyand about around simple things that we can doto raise our kids to b e creative, confidentand in control of the environment 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 tail fin dangerous things.Thing number one play with fire. erudition to control one of the most elemental forces in natureis a pivotal moment in any childs personal history. Whether we remember it or not,its a its the first time we rightfully getcontrol of one of these mysterious things. These mysteries are only revealedto those who get the opportunity to play with it. So, vie with fire. This is like one of the great things we ever discovered, fire. From vie with it, they learn some basic principles about fire,about intake, about combustion, about exhaust.These are the leash working elements of firethat you have to have to have a skillful controlled fire. And you can think of the open-pit fire as a laboratory. You dont make out what theyre going to learn from playing with it. You know, let th em fool around with it on their aver terms and trust me,theyre going to learn thingsthat you cant get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys. Number two own a pocketknife. Pocketknives are lovely of drifting out of our cultural consciousness,which I think is a irritating thing. Laughter)Your first your first pocketknife is like the first universal animal that youre given. You know, its a spatula, its a pry bar,its a screw sustainr and its a blade. And its a its a powerful and empowering tool. And in a lot of cultures they give knives like, as in brief 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, nutrition the blade sharp, never force it and these are things kids can understand and exercising 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) Number three throw a spear. It turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing thingsand, like muscular tissues, if you dont use separate 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 facade and parietal lobes,which have to do with visual acuity, 3D understanding,and structural fuss 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 salmagundi of whole-body training. These kinds of target-based practice alsohelps kids develop attention an d concentration skills.So those are great. Number quadruplet deconstruct appliances. There is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher. succeeding(prenominal) time youre about to throw out an appliance, dont throw it out. Take it obscure with your kid, or send him to my schooland well take it apart with them. Even 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 complex they are,they can understand parts of them and that intend that eventually,they can understand all of them.Its a sense of knowability, that something is knowable. So these colour 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 buy 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 oft talk about with the kidswhen were fooling around with things and breakout them openand victorious them apart and using them for other things and also when we go out and drive a car. Driving 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 order for a kid.This happens about the same timethat they get latched onto things like dinosaurs,these full-size things in the outside worldthat theyre trying to get a clutches on. A car is a s imilar object, and they can get in a car and drive it. Andthats a really, like it gives them a wish on a worldin a way that they wouldnt that they dont a great deal have access to. So and its perfectly legal. Find a monstrous empty lot, make sure theres nothing in itand its on orphic 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.