Entry tags:
"Stupid" kids who "don't listen"
Had to put myself back in the mindset of my younger (primary school) self to work out some reactions of a character that age.
That got me thinking about a few other things, both in other stuff I was reading and bits and pieces from various real world events, both very old and recent.
And it struck me that a lot of times, perhaps even most of the time when adults complain about kids being "stupid" or "not listening" (at least for pre-teens) what they *really* mean is that the kid acted (or failed to act) in accordance with the way the adult would have acted in the situation.
What's going on is that the adult sees the kid as actingt contrary to a "rule" or instructions. And they Either expect the kid to know that the rule is a variation on one the kid dooes know or a "reasonable" corrolary of such a rule.
Or in the case of instructions they feel that the instructions have been ignored.
Heck, they may even consider the kid's protests to be an attempt at rules lawyering.
But what I recall from when I was that age (and from observing some adult child interactions since) is that often the adult is assuming that the kid has the same base of knowledge AND EXPERIENCE that the adult does.
So what is clear and "obvious" to the adult is sometimes anything *but* to the kid.
A classic example surfaced a few decades back when some kids were being put thru the typical "don't talk to strangers" etc indoctrination at a school and someone (as I recall) decided to do so live practice to see how well the kids got it. To their surpridse (and horror) the kids would walk right up and start talking to the folks playing "stranger".
When they asked the kids why the response was "But they weren't strangers!". Further questioning elicited that the kids had never been explicitly *told* what a "stranger" was, so they'd come up with a "definition in their heads that ran along the lines of "weird and scary person". Which kinda makes sense given the context that they'd encountered the word in.
Thinking upon it now, I suspect they were also trying to work things out from the "obvious" relationship between "stranger" and "strange". With them knowing that strange meant "weird" but not the other connotations of "not known".
Anyway, that was quite a shock to a lot of folks, including many educators.
And it's the principle that I think applies far more broadly than most want to admit. Most words are *never* explicitly defined to kids. They have to pik up meanings from context and it's way easy to get things wrong that way.
So the "stupid" kid acts on his best knowledge and gets it wrong because the *adult* assumed that what he told the kid meant the same thing to the kid as to the adult.
Or the kid "didn't listen" because the kid didn't do what the adult expected.
Sad to say, this is actually a big problem in adult-to adult communications as well. Read any of the various fora where tech support types or even customer service types have to deal with adults who "know" things that aren't so (like "wireless" routers don't need to be plugged in)
The idea that other people do *not* necessarily think the way we do, nor have the sane "background" knowledge we do is often a shock to people. And in too many cases, it's utterly rejected as just not *possible*. Which results in the "they must be willfully misunderstanding out of sheer malice" reaction.
Take a look at some child-adult confrontations and you'll see that (not that kids *don't* play that sort of game, but there are times when they *aren't* but the adults refuse to believe that they aren't).
Likewise some thorny political & social problems run into the same morass.
Not easily solvable without a *major* overhaul of our culture and our educational system.
That got me thinking about a few other things, both in other stuff I was reading and bits and pieces from various real world events, both very old and recent.
And it struck me that a lot of times, perhaps even most of the time when adults complain about kids being "stupid" or "not listening" (at least for pre-teens) what they *really* mean is that the kid acted (or failed to act) in accordance with the way the adult would have acted in the situation.
What's going on is that the adult sees the kid as actingt contrary to a "rule" or instructions. And they Either expect the kid to know that the rule is a variation on one the kid dooes know or a "reasonable" corrolary of such a rule.
Or in the case of instructions they feel that the instructions have been ignored.
Heck, they may even consider the kid's protests to be an attempt at rules lawyering.
But what I recall from when I was that age (and from observing some adult child interactions since) is that often the adult is assuming that the kid has the same base of knowledge AND EXPERIENCE that the adult does.
So what is clear and "obvious" to the adult is sometimes anything *but* to the kid.
A classic example surfaced a few decades back when some kids were being put thru the typical "don't talk to strangers" etc indoctrination at a school and someone (as I recall) decided to do so live practice to see how well the kids got it. To their surpridse (and horror) the kids would walk right up and start talking to the folks playing "stranger".
When they asked the kids why the response was "But they weren't strangers!". Further questioning elicited that the kids had never been explicitly *told* what a "stranger" was, so they'd come up with a "definition in their heads that ran along the lines of "weird and scary person". Which kinda makes sense given the context that they'd encountered the word in.
Thinking upon it now, I suspect they were also trying to work things out from the "obvious" relationship between "stranger" and "strange". With them knowing that strange meant "weird" but not the other connotations of "not known".
Anyway, that was quite a shock to a lot of folks, including many educators.
And it's the principle that I think applies far more broadly than most want to admit. Most words are *never* explicitly defined to kids. They have to pik up meanings from context and it's way easy to get things wrong that way.
So the "stupid" kid acts on his best knowledge and gets it wrong because the *adult* assumed that what he told the kid meant the same thing to the kid as to the adult.
Or the kid "didn't listen" because the kid didn't do what the adult expected.
Sad to say, this is actually a big problem in adult-to adult communications as well. Read any of the various fora where tech support types or even customer service types have to deal with adults who "know" things that aren't so (like "wireless" routers don't need to be plugged in)
The idea that other people do *not* necessarily think the way we do, nor have the sane "background" knowledge we do is often a shock to people. And in too many cases, it's utterly rejected as just not *possible*. Which results in the "they must be willfully misunderstanding out of sheer malice" reaction.
Take a look at some child-adult confrontations and you'll see that (not that kids *don't* play that sort of game, but there are times when they *aren't* but the adults refuse to believe that they aren't).
Likewise some thorny political & social problems run into the same morass.
Not easily solvable without a *major* overhaul of our culture and our educational system.