darkoshi | Entries tagged with children

M, the 5-year-old, was watching videos on TV via the Firestick. I don't know if my niece turned it on for her or if M already knows how to turn it on herself. I'd be surprised by the latter as it involves plugging in a power cord, turning on a power strip, turning on the UPS, waiting for the UPS light to stop flashing, then turning the TV on and changing the TV to the correct input Source.... or maybe pressing the button on the Firestick remote does that last part automatically*.

However, M seems perfectly familiar with using the Firestick remote to search for and navigate videos in its YouTube app. She mostly uses the voice-search option to search for specific things**, but also scrolls thru video thumbnails to select items that look interesting or familiar to her.

There were a few videos that came on which didn't seem geared to or appropriate for a kid her age. So I started looking up how to set it up to only show kid-friendly things.

After M left to go get ready for bed, I installed the "PBS Kids" and "YouTube Kids" apps on the Firestick.
I tried them out and found that doing a voice-search (via the mic button on the remote) from within those apps searches content from all the apps rather than just the current app, letting one jump right back out to non-kid content.

So next I created a new "Kid" profile on the Firestick and set it up to have access to a few kid-specific apps including the 2 mentioned above. I connected the YouTube Kids app to one of my YouTube accounts, so as to have access to more settings for it, but I don't see much extra you can do that way vs when not connected to an account.

I've got a PIN set up on the Firestick so the child can't simply switch back from the kid's profile to an adult profile.

Now that I have gotten all that done, I'm unimpressed with the results.

In the Firestick Kid's profile, the voice-search option does not work. You have to search by using the remote and on-screen keyboard to type in the words. I don't think M knows how to spell most of the things she would search on, and even if she does, she would probably have trouble doing it via the on-screen keyboard. Even when typing the searches in, the results don't seem to include content available in the PBS and YouTube Kids' apps. Maybe it only shows content from Amazon? I don't know.

Likewise, the home screen for the Kid's profile seems to only display Amazon content. (I'm not certain as it doesn't say where the content for each item is hosted.) To get to the other apps' content, you have to scroll down and find, select, and open the app.

Within the YouTube Kids app, I don't see a way to set up favorites. This page: Subscribe to channels on YouTube Kids says you can tap on a "Subscribe" button... Okay, some videos do have a Subscribe button. But it's not there for the "Kiya & the Kimoja Heros" videos - those looked good so I wanted to favorite/subscribe them so they'd be easy to find next time. But no luck.

*I just tested this, and while it switches to the correct input Source, now I can't even get the Firestick input on the TV to work again. It seems to be switched off. The power button on the Firestick remote only seems to be turning the TV on and off, not the Firestick. Argh.
Is it that once you reach 45 years old or so, TV and audio technology magically knows it should never work for you on the first or second try, only after multiple tries and/or hours of frustration? I remember how when I was in my 20s, it all made sense, and it usually worked as I expected. Now it's a mess of cables and inputs and switcheroos and switching from the regular TV to something else never works right off anymore.

Earlier today I got out what I thought was a DVD to play an animated movie for the child. It's one I'd bought last year but hadn't watched yet. (The Secret of Kells, part of the Irish Folklore trilogy. In retrospect, it doesn't seem so great for a kid her age. Rather scary and grim.) The disk didn't work in the DVD player. So I thought maybe it had a non-U.S. region code and needed to be played from VLC on a laptop. But VLC locked up trying to load it. I finally realized it was a BluRay disk, not a DVD, so it needed to be played via the BluRay player.

Sigh. I guess the Firestick won't work again until the next time the youngsters come out to use it.

**It seems to work better for her than it does me; it recognizes the things she says better than it recognizes what I say.

I've been letting my niece and her daughter M, who is now 5 years old, stay at my place again.

M, after talking to her dad on the phone, walked over to her mom and said, "I know he didn't just hang up on my face." "I know he wouldn't do that."

At Target a few weeks ago, they had a couple of racks near the entrance with cloth face-masks for sale. Not having seen that in a physical store before, I thought it was great and started browsing through them. But all the ones with pretty colors and patterns were for children, child-sized. The ones for adults were bland boring colors.

I saw a school bus drive by today and realized it's been so long since I've seen school buses. Unlike the past, I didn't hear a cacophony of children yelling as it went by. Though I'm not sure if I had the house windows open at the time or not.

My mom stopped by and talked to me on the porch. She had a cloth face mask on which kept slipping down under her nose. So I guess all those people you see on TV and in photos with masks under their noses aren't necessarily, maybe not even mainly, wearing them that way on purpose. Do they sell small clips that people could just snap onto ear loops to make them tighter? Or what else works well for that? On one of mine that was too loose, I sewed the loops tighter. On another I used safety pins. I suppose stapling them might work, if the straps are wide enough.

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Charleston County Sheriff's Election:

Kristin Graziano won a historic bid to unseat the longtime incumbent, Al Cannon, who has been sheriff in Charleston County since 1988. She is the first woman and first openly gay person elected to serve as a county sheriff in South Carolina.

I had out all the things to fix the tongs, and the tongs were there an hour ago when I checked if this small bolt would fit to replace the rivet. But now I can't find the tongs anywhere. Sigh. Maybe they don't want to be fixed.

Note to self: Don't trust a 2 year old when she brings me a half-full bottle of Gatorade wanting me to open it for her, and when she replies Yes to my question of does she drink it straight from the bottle. The liquid went straight down the front of her jacket onto the floor.

Anyone else really dislike the sound of auto-tune? It seems like so many songs nowadays (and in the past however many years) have this sound, where it switches back and forth like a tremolo between a voice and an electronic version of the voice. That grates on my nerves*.

Yet I watched a few videos now comparing some artists singing, with and without autotune. Surprisingly, they didn't sound much different to me. In some cases the singer was made a high-pitched tremolo with their voice even without the autotune, so I guess I just don't like those songs period. In some cases, the autotune didn't bother me, and I couldn't easily say whether I prefer the songs with or without autotune. So I guess it depends on how the autotune effect is done, as well as the song in the first place.

*I'm not sure why. I've always loved the electronic voices of the cylons from the original Battlestar Galactica TV series, and similar voice effects in 80s songs (electro funk? not sure of the genre name). I guess none of them did that switching back-and-forth effect like they do nowadays.

But anyway, I came across this which is pretty neat in spite of also having that sound that grates on my nerves:
Auto-tuned Baby Cry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMNCNyn_s7E

...kids will still want to swap for a different color or style.

This search phrase returns what I was looking for on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google:
school facemask "paw patrol" spiderman lunch swap

That is unusual, and speaks well of DDG. Replacing "facemask" with "mask" brings back the wanted result on Google too, but it's odd that their algorithms aren't doing that replacement automatically. Normally Google returns as many or more relevant results for me than DDG, but not this time.

This is what I was looking for, a wryly prophetic* tweet I'd seen shared on FB yesterday:

You gon send your kid to school with the Paw Patrol mask and he gon come home with a Spider Man mask because he made a trade at lunch. Whole school gon be shut down the next day.

*I'd have written premoniscient, but the dictionaries are telling me that isn't a word no matter how much it sounds like one to me. "Premonitory" is a word but it doesn't sound right to me at all. "Prescient" is also a word, but isn't exactly the meaning I intended.

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Auditory illusion, "Brainstorm or Green Needle?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pRY3wlKwm8

I only hear green needle. The first part could be either brain or green; those words sound similar. But how can the 2nd part possibly be "storm"? - it has clearly 2 syllables!? Even if I stretch out "storm" in my mind to be as long as 2 syllables, it sounds nothing at all like the sound in the video clip.

My 2 year old grand-niece reminds me of baby Groot sometimes. They must have modeled Groot on a toddler. Unlike baby Groot, she's going through a learning-language phase where she makes a lot of conversation sounds, all the right kinds of intonations like someone having a long discussion on the phone, without saying actual words most of the time.

She has a small toy shopping cart with assorted (empty) toy food boxes in it, as well as a few plastic fruits. Also a wind-up fish toy that twirls its flippers.

She's come to me with the shopping cart 2 evenings in a row. I was trying to finish up work, but oh well. It's not nice to ignore a two-year-old. The first time she took each item out of the cart and put it on the table. Then put them back into the cart. Then out on the table again. Etc. Back then I was still trying to avoid touching her or her toys to prevent spreading germs. So I only talked with her, discussing the toy grocery items. Later she tried winding up the fish toy but was having trouble. I gave up and helped her wind it up. Eventually she took the items out of the cart again, this time putting them on the desk right next to me. I unflattened some of the boxes. We stacked a few of them. I counted them out loud. I juggled two fruits, which she then tried to emulate. Etc etc.

Only today with her not here, did it finally occur to me that maybe she expected me to play the cashier, to scan the items and put them back into the shopping cart. I slightly recall someone else saying "beep", simulating a check-out scanner... maybe they were playing that with her before.

I decided to send my cousins' kids in Germany some gifts for Christmas. So I stopped by Target and bought some neat stuff. 4 different cute little hats. A pseudo-bag (with a carrying handle and a tiny zipper compartment) in the shape of a "My Little Pony" with a rainbow-colored mane and tail. An orange yo-yo. Some stickers. 2 little toy cars. A "Pinpressions" toy.

I bought a red light saber for myself and Qiao. It lights up, has a motion sensor, and makes light-sabery noises! I couldn't resist.

After getting home, I realized that I had lost the yo-yo on the way to the checkout counter. It wasn't in my bags nor listed on the receipt. So yesterday I went back and bought 2 yo-yos (so that both older kids can have one; can a 6 year old handle a yo-yo?), another PinPressions toy (because they are so much fun), another My Little Pony bag (this one yellow with a pink mane)(because so cute), and another 2 little toy cars (so each kid could potentially have one).

I combed the one pony's mane as it was tangled. I'd like to try out the cars, as I didn't have any of those when I was a kid. Taking them out of their packages would reduce the shipping weight (excuse). I already took the yo-yos out of their packages. I'm tempted to try on the hats, but won't, to avoid stretching them out of shape.

Now if I would stop playing with the toys and actually pack them, the kids might possibly get them before January.

I was debating how to avoid gendering the gifts. Giving the boys My Little Pony bags might not go over so well, while giving them only to the girls could be unfair. The kids are still fairly young - 3 to 10 years old, and I don't know them well enough to know what kind of things they like. Two of the hats were from the boys' section, and two were from the girls' section. But the girls might not necessarily prefer the girl hats or vice versa.

The solution I decided on was to let the kids choose which items they want. Oldest kid can choose one item first, then younger kid can choose 1, and so on until everything is taken.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/587823.html

This is a sweet story about a boy who likes wearing skirts and dresses, and what his father decided to do about it.

The original German version is here.

Excerpt from the end:
When other boys (it’s nearly always boys) want to make fun of him, he smiles and says, "You just don’t dare to wear skirts and dresses, because your dads don’t dare to either."

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/485984.html

I was thinking about this post which discussed someone's child pointing to his pajamas and saying that he didn't like the color pink in them, because other people had told him that boys don't like pink. The parent responded in what seemed a quite good way.

But it made me think about what are good ways of discussing the topic of gender-based rules with children? It isn't necessarily wrong for a boy or a girl to want to fit in with other boys or other girls, and to do so by following society's rules for their gender. But it would be good to explain to the child that those "rules" are not "facts", and that not everyone agrees on the rules, and that everyone is free to choose to follow the rules or to go their own path, without it indicating that anything is wrong with them.

Suppose that there is a group of people that you esteem and relate to, and you feel that you belong to that group, and you want the other members of the group to accept and admire you as one of them. If the majority of the other members of the group indicate that there are certain things that they as a group like or dislike, aren't you (subconsciously?)(especially when you are a child?) likely to adopt those same likes and dislikes yourself, unless your own prior opinion of something was much stronger than your desire to be part of the group?

It must be subconscious, because I can't think of any situation where I as a child consciously decided to change my likes/dislikes, based on what other people liked/disliked. But if someone you admire expresses an opinion, it colors your own views; your admiration causes you to esteem the other person's opinions, and makes you more likely to adopt them as your own.

Aren't gender-based rules themselves silly and arbitrary? But if there were no rules, could there be groups? If there were no separate social rules and expectations for girls and boys, and if boys and girls were only distinguished by their anatomy, would there be any reason for a child to identify strongly with belonging to the group of boys versus the group of girls? Or would boy/girl-ness be like one's eye-color? I don't think that most people identify more strongly with people of the same eye-color than with people of other eye-colors. It is simply a physical attribute, not a group identity.

But gender is not simply a physical attribute; children do tend to form group identities based on sex/gender. Why does this happen... Is it mainly due to positive and negative feedback that children receive in their early years? Boys are mocked and ridiculed by other boys and admonished by some adults, when they don't follow the rules for being a boy. They are accepted and praised when they do follow the rules. This teaches them what the rules are. Observation of other people also teaches them rules. Or does the group identity (gender) mainly come about because the child relates more to people of a certain sex? Do the boys actually tend to prefer playing with toy trucks more than with dolls, and do the girls tend to prefer the dolls, and is that how the group identities form? And then, when they find out that the other truck-playing or doll-playing kids prefer orange soda to grape soda, does it affect their own soda preferences? It may be a combination of both relating to a group and getting the positive/negative feedback.

People who relate to a group but who aren't accepted by that group have difficulties. If you are a boy who likes the color pink and who likes to wear dresses, you may not be accepted by other boys or by other girls. You may get a lot of flak from both kids and adults. If you relate to the boys, you may decide to stop wearing pink and to stop wearing dresses, so that the other boys will accept you and so that you'll get positive instead of negative feedback. If you relate to the girls... in today's culture, you'll probably have a hard time no matter what you do.

In addition to gender, there are some other group associations/identities that are also taught from birth - religions, cultures, national identity. But other group associations tend to be chosen by the individual. If you enjoy playing sports, you may identify with other sports-playing people. If you enjoy learning about science, you may identify with other people interested in science. By then you are usually older and less influenced by other people's opinions. But you may still be subconsciously influenced.

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So, back to the youngsters. What can one say to them about gender-based rules?

"It's not true that boys don't like pink. There are some boys that do and some that don't.

People who say that boys don't like certain things, or that girls don't like certain things, or that boys are one way and girls another, are just saying what other people have always told them. But those things aren't true for everyone. They're only true for some boys and some girls, not for all of them. People who say things like that are trying to get you to follow *rules*. They have rules in their mind about how boys should be and about how girls should be. But there aren't any true rules. You can choose to be however you want to be - you can choose your own rules for yourself. You'll still be just as much a boy or a girl as you were before."

Qiao has several times expressed disdain for certain methods of child-rearing / discipline. He thinks that "touchy-feely" types of discipline don't work on all children, and that they wouldn't have worked on him or his brother. He's scoffed at the Super-Nanny TV show. Nevertheless, I turned the show on yesterday to watch it, because I find it interesting, and because SuperNanny is awesome. (SuperNanny seems able to see exactly what the problems are in a family, and how to fix them.) Qiao commented that we must not usually be home on Fridays when the show is on, because we've very rarely watched the show together. He didn't realize that we haven't watched it precisely because I don't feel very comfortable turning it on when he is here, due to his negative comments about it.

Yesterday, he scoffed at the show again, calling it "psycho-babble". He says that time-outs may work for about half of children, but not the others, and that it wouldn't be so bad if shows like this at least admitted this fact instead of pretending that time-outs work on all children.

Things like that get under my skin. It's a conservative versus liberal thought-pattern thing, and it feels like an attack on me for being liberal as opposed to being conservative like him.

I don't totally disagree with him. It is possible that time-outs won't work in a good way for all children. It makes sense that a single method would not work for everyone, because people differ a lot. But having him use words like "touchy-feely" and "psychobabble" irritates me a lot.

I'm not even totally against physical discipline such as spanking. Perhaps spanking works best for some children; I don't know. It probably depends on the child's personality, as well as how it is implemented - how forceful and how often, and for what kinds of infractions. From people's own accounts of how physical discipline affected them, I know that it can emotionally scar some people, while other people feel it was necessary for them to to grow into the well-mannered and successful adults they are now. Perhaps the difference is due to the physical discipline not having been done correctly in some cases, assuming there is some "correct" way that would work in all cases. Likewise, perhaps time-outs don't always work, due to them not being done correctly. Or perhaps the difference is due to whether or not the child feels accepted and loved for who they are during the time when they are not being disciplined.

So anyway, today I was reading this article, What Makes Time-Out Work (and Fail)?.

One of the points made by the article is that in order for time-outs to work, the rest of the time (the time-ins) must be a rewarding and positive experience for children:

A child’s daily environment must be pleasant and full of positive attention from caregivers if time-out is going to work. In short, if a child spends most of his day being bored, ignored, belittled, and yelled at, going to time-out might not seem that much different and consequently will not change his behavior. In fact, many children will misbehave on purpose, even during time-out, just to get some kind of attention, resulting in their parent’s faulty thinking that even more severe discipline strategies are needed.

So basically, when rearing a child, you have to spend a lot of time at it.

I don't want any children. If forced to take care of a child, I'd want to spend as little time at it as possible. I'd be looking for quick simple solutions, ways of getting the child to behave and not cause me grief, and hoping to be able to ignore them most of the time. But there aren't any quick and simple solutions.

It's similar with the puppy. She's a cute puppy, and she deserves love and affection and a caregiver's time. But I don't really want to have to spend any time on her. I feel sorry for her when she's outside or in the garage alone while I'm in the house doing other things, but neither do I want to spend hours playing with her, cleaning up after her, and training her. When thinking about giving her away, my main concern is that she ends up in a good home where she will be happy and well-taken care of, and that she won't feel sad that I've abandoned her. I don't feel sad in thinking that I'll no longer have her around.