SpenniesRobot Parenting
February 15th 2007 04:53
My friend and I were sitting at MacDonald’s one day. We were talking and just watching the kids play in the playground when we witnessed some disturbing behaviour.
A few parents were calling their children to come and eat and the children were not answering and telling their parents ‘no’, with one boy (about 9 years old) even telling his mum to ‘shut up’ because he ‘wanted to keep playing’.
This of course made both my friend and I raise our eyebrows and we began talking about bad parenting and how it generally leads to bad behaviour in adults.
It's no secret that children develop their behavioural patterns early in life, before the age of 5 or so. Both Freud and Alfred Adler agreed that early childhood experiences are vital to a child’s development.
Anyway so say a kid grows up in a negative environment due to bad parenting – mum and dad always swearing, maybe beating each other up, alcoholism, discouragement, neglect, not feeding the intellectual and emotional needs that every child has. Then this kid is likely to be a reflection of his parents when he grows up (i.e displaying the same behaviour) and therefore be a bad parent himself, and so the cycle goes.
The problem of genes is not really a problem at all here, because while genes obviously play a role in a person's mental behaviour, that person's environment plays a bigger role if we're talking about the early stages of development (before the age of 5 years). So it's not your typical nature vs nurture debate. thing.
Now, if you were to take every 18-month old child and have it ‘raised’ by robots until the age of 5, you'd get generally less ignorant, violent and more intelligent adults. It's a work in progress but...there’s obviously a few things to go through.
1. The robots – I’m not talking primitive robots here but (since this is all in the future), but robots who have been specially designed for this purpose. They act as teachers and teach the kid everything – morals (just the basics) human interaction, brain growth and development, etc etc. – pretty much everything good parents teach their children in between those ages. It’s especially designed and programmed to do this, has its commands all set out, so there’s no room for doubt as to what it will be teaching the kid.
2. ‘Raised’ – I’m not talking about taking away the kid from his parents between the ages of 18 months and 5 years with no interaction. Because as we all know kids need emotional nurturing, which is obviously impossible with robots (no matter how advanced) and you don’t want a kid getting attached to robots anyway because that could lead to all sorts of psychological problems down the track. So, the robot is a teacher only – the parents still get to interact with their child etc but they’re obviously instructed not to teach him anything. Also, the kid cannot witness his parents interacting with each other in a negative way (yelling, screaming, etc) – need to think about how this will work a bit more.
3. After 4 years, when the kid’s got the behavioural pattern all worked out, hopefully well due to the robot’s teaching, he can go back to his normal life and develop his personality in whatever way he sees fit.
| 112 |
| Vote |
subscribe to this blog
