[rant]

[kandrathe]

Oh, I agree. There is a huge difference between 3, 8, and 17. The younger they are the more of a "happy cloud" they need.

After said that, I believe that keeping your kid in this nice little cloud of happiness (sorry for exaggeration) a waste, the kid will grow and your ability to control what gets into him is diminished incredibly, therefore making the entire thing pointless.

Hopefully that is what happens. As he discovers more and more about life (hopefully age appropriate stuff), my wife and I can be there to help him process and deal with it. Children are not adolescents, and adolescents are not adults. There is a time when I can see my sons and I going to action movies or martial arts films and enjoying the gratuitious blood splatters as only male homo sapiens can. Hell, when he is ready and responsible I will teach him all I know about hand to hand combat and martial arts myself.

Another idea you bring up is "my ability to control" -- I'm also hoping that I will be giving that up progressively over time. At 3, or 4 I'm in control by neccesity. By 8-12, he should be able to be in control part of the time as his responsibility level indicates, and by the time he is 15-18 I can let him be in almost complete control because I will have taught him everything I can, and if not he will learn it his own way anyway. Kids need rules and structure -- that is the way our society works too. So for example, one set of rules for my children are that they will not be allowed to break the law. These are societiy's rules and so as a parent and member of the society I will communicate them as my expectations and enforce them.

What I do believe in is that the kid should not be put in a blind fold against certain things, on the contrary, you must show those exact same things you wish him to avoid, only isntead of letting him working it out on his own, you, as a parent, could channel this new information, explaining it to the kid and letting him understand what it really is at an early age, when there's a greater impact of the parents on the child, letting him grow up and finding all this stuff on his own can be a very dangerous thing as he'll probably exposed to it much earlier than you intended as he'll have to deal with this new information alone and he'll might come to entirely different conclusions then the ones you wished for.

Not on day one. Parenting is a reveal, and the trick/art is knowing when. All too often (which is the lament of the originator of the thread) they do learn something too early, from an unintentional source and are not able to process it even with parental help. Why? Because their brains are not developed enough to understand.

Again, my understanding of why things like Columbine can happen is because of too little intervention by parents helping their sons cope, and too much media inspired fantasy.