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Could you say something about youth and innocence not being the same thing?

Asked by
Anonymous

One could speak volumes on that, whether from the experience of having to grow up too fast to seeing that ignorance is the other side of innocence. Children can be cruel, especially in group dynamics while learning the ropes of social roles in acceptance versus individuality.

So are youth and innocence two separate things? Yes, however, the law would argue that until a certain age a juvenile is not mentally capable of comprehensive moral judgement. Having studied child psychology and having been a child myself in difficult circumstances I would have to partially agree and disagree. Some children come to understand some things more quickly than others, but those laws are placed as a guideline intending to protect the fact that children are still developing human beings. Youth and innocence are neither mutually inclusive nor exclusive. Each situation and individual would have to be assessed.

Young Children Sensitive to Others’ Behaviors and Intentions

A new study finds that young children are less likely to help a person after seeing that person harm or intend to harm someone else. The study placed nearly 100 German 3-year-olds in scenarios where they observed an adult help, harm, intend to harm, or accidentally harm another. The children were less likely to subsequently help that adult in a game if the adult had harmed or intended to harm another person in the initial scenario.

Young children’s helpfulness is tempered when they see that the person they intend to help has harmed another person. But it also diminishes when they see that the object of their attention meant to harm another, even if no harm was done.

That’s the conclusion of two new studies of 3-year-olds conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The research appears in the November/December 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.

“In finding that children are quite sophisticated and discriminating helpers, our studies show that youngsters are sensitive not only to others’ moral behaviors, but also to the intentions behind those behaviors,” according to Amrisha Vaish, postdoctoral researcher at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the studies’ lead author.

Researchers carried out two studies with almost 100 middle-class German 3-year-olds. The children participated in several scenarios in which adult actors carried out various actions involving helpfulness (taping together a drawing that someone else tore), harmfulness (tearing another person’s drawing), intentions to harm (wanting to but not being able to tear another person’s drawing), and accidental harmfulness (accidentally tearing another’s drawing). The adults then began playing a game; children’s helpfulness was gauged by whether or not they gave the adults a game piece they were missing.

The studies found that the children helped an adult less not only when they saw that the person harmed another person, but also when they saw that the person intended to harm another person without causing actual harm. When the adult was helpful and when he or she accidentally caused harm, the children were helpful, too. This suggests that children are sensitive not only to others’ moral behaviors, but also to the intentions behind them.

The research sheds light on our understanding of children’s moral development. And it raises questions about our assumptions that young children are not discriminating helpers, but help everyone in the same way.

(via ScienceDaily)

Parents keep child’s gender secret

“So it’s a boy, right?” a neighbour calls out as Kathy Witterick walks by, her four month old baby, Storm, strapped to her chest in a carrier.

Each week the woman asks the same question about the baby with the squishy cheeks and feathery blond hair.

Witterick smiles, opens her arms wide, comments on the sunny spring day, and keeps walking.

She’s used to it. The neighbours know Witterick and her husband, David Stocker, are raising a genderless baby. But they don’t pretend to understand it.

While there’s nothing ambiguous about Storm’s genitalia, they aren’t telling anyone whether their third child is a boy or a girl.

The only people who know are Storm’s brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, a close family friend and the two midwives who helped deliver the baby in a birthing pool at their Toronto home on New Year’s Day.

“When the baby comes out, even the people who love you the most and know you so intimately, the first question they ask is, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’” says Witterick, bouncing Storm, dressed in a red-fleece jumper, on her lap at the kitchen table.

“If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” says Stocker.

When Storm was born, the couple sent an email to friends and family: “We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressive place? …).”

Their announcement was met with stony silence. Then the deluge of criticisms began. Not just about Storm, but about how they were parenting their other two children.

The grandparents were supportive, but resented explaining the gender-free baby to friends and co-workers. They worried the children would be ridiculed. Friends said they were imposing their political and ideological values on a newborn. Most of all, people said they were setting their kids up for a life of bullying in a world that can be cruel to outsiders.

Witterick and Stocker believe they are giving their children the freedom to choose who they want to be, unconstrained by social norms about males and females. Some say their choice is alienating.

In an age where helicopter parents hover nervously over their kids micromanaging their lives, and tiger moms ferociously push their progeny to get into Harvard, Stocker, 39, and Witterick, 38, believe kids can make meaningful decisions for themselves from a very early age.

“What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It’s obnoxious,” says Stocker.

Jazz and Kio have picked out their own clothes in the boys and girls sections of stores since they were 18 months old. Just this week, Jazz unearthed a pink dress at Value Village, which he loves because it “really poofs out at the bottom. It feels so nice.” The boys decide whether to cut their hair or let it grow.

Like all mothers and fathers, Witterick and Stocker struggle with parenting decisions. The boys are encouraged to challenge how they’re expected to look and act based on their sex.

“We thought that if we delayed sharing that information, in this case hopefully, we might knock off a couple million of those messages by the time that Storm decides Storm would like to share,” says Witterick.

They don’t want to isolate their kids from the world, but, when it’s meaningful, talk about gender.

This past winter, the family took a vacation to Cuba with Witterick’s parents. Since they weren’t fluent in Spanish, they flipped a coin at the airport to decide what to tell people. It landed on heads, so for the next week, everyone who asked was told Storm was a boy. The language changed immediately. “What a big, strong boy,” people said.

The moment a child’s sex is announced, so begins the parade of pink and barrage of blue. Tutus and toy trucks aren’t far behind. The couple says it only intensifies with age.

“In fact, in not telling the gender of my precious baby, I am saying to the world, ‘Please can you just let Storm discover for him/herself what s (he) wants to be?!.” Witterick writes in an email.

Continue reading at ParentCentral