Post Punk Kitchen Forum

I think that if the child was not deaf his name would be a non-issue whether it was Hunter (hardly an uncommon name) or Shooter.

It would seem that more of this is about the tension over the form of sign language and philosophical issues about deaf children than about his name.

I agree. Unless we want to ban the names entirely (I'm okay with this).

The SEE and ASL thing is so interesting. I've never heard of SEE and I work with someone who speaks ASL as a first language who often tells me how hard it can be to translate between English and ASL and how often things he sees in the world have a "spoken accent," meaning the person doing the interpreting doesn't really speak ASL and get its syntax. I wonder how things will evolve now that more and more kids get early hearing implants and are mainstreamed - will we see a significant withering of deaf culture leading to loss of ASL? It seems like you wouldn't have your kid speak SEE unless there was sufficient support for it in the world (enough SEE speakers already).

Also, it doesn't seem like there's any rule about what your sign-name is. I was going to give Malka a sign-name of an M making the "king/queen" sash movement, so combining the English meaning of her name with the first letter of her name, and my co-worker said I should wait until her personality is obvious and then pick a sign or let her invent a sign. It isn't a one-to-one translation or at least it doesn't have to be.

I thought the point was that applying a zero-tolerance no-weapons policy to the finger shapes of a little kid's hand was absurd.

Wow, I'm not a parent, so maybe I'm totally out of line here, but it seems sort of mean to snark on people because the father suggested naming his kid after a country music singer and then the parents came up with a compromise name. People give their kids all sorts of names I don't like for reasons I find absurd, but whatever, it's their choice. It doesn't make me think less of them as parents or as people.

Also, his sign really does not look that problematic and as a FF said, enforcing a zero tolerance weapons policy because a kid makes a sort of gun shape with his fingers is ludicrous. They're forking fingers. Also, if it's a matter of just teaching different types of sign language, I don't understand why he couldn't use the sign for his name in either language . Is that something I just don't understand about sign language?

Again, I'm not a parent and I don't know either form of signing, so I might be totally wrong here.

I *do* understand why schools (and parents) would have an issue with kids in general pretend shooting each other. And it's hard to apply nuance when it comes to policy decisions. Obviously they should let it go (and they did), but I could see why they'd have some kind of conversation around his sign-name. That seems totally reasonable - the unreasonable part is raising it to the level of a national media conversation.

Here's the truth- kids will pretend shoot at each other. Kids will turn: pencils, pens, pipe cleaners, drum sticks, and anything else into a pretend weapon. You can't insulate your kids against that sort of play.

Is there some sort of valid connection between that sort of play and real world violence that I've missed? I get the philosophical dislike of play with guns, swords, and the like. Technically, making the sign for Hunter is no more pretend shooting than saying "HUNTER! SHOOTING! BANG!" is pretend shooting. Frankly, the school deserves to be mocked for making such a silly demand to begin with.

Hells, I best run to the gaming thread and post a link to Mazes and Monsters before it's too late.

Zero-tolerance policies always devolve into these ridiculous situations. Kids getting in trouble for having inch-long "gun" toys, making drawings of guns, mistakenly bringing butter knives to school, wearing T-shirts with pictures of guns on them. The adults need to act like adults and use their reason and judgment, instead of clinging to the letter of the law.

I don't understand how kids are supposed to play cops and robbers without pretend guns. That was a fundamental part of my childhood.

Oh, and I think this stuff is all dumb even though I hate guns and gun play, and I think the name Hunter is not a good name.

Anyway, maybe we're all behind this one?

Australian school forbids cartwheels and handstands unless performed under the supervision of trained personnel, with appropriate equipment.

I am still waiting for the rational argument which explains why anyone would think any of that stuff is a good idea.

My sister was sent to the principal's office when she was a little kid for wearing a Guns 'N Roses shirt.

The name 'Hunter' and the actual act of being a hunter are completely separate in my mind. When I hear the name I don't think about the physical act at all. Weird.

Lenore Skenazy, a former journalist who has championed the "free play" movement, cheekily launched the after-school program to try and encourage parents to let their children to play without structure or supervision: unsupervised play time in Central Park for $350.

Skenazy, who authored the book "Free Range Kids" and writes a blog of the same name, said that she noticed when her two sons, who are now 14 and 16, were growing up that children were never just outside playing. Fears of kidnappings and other dangers have led parents to keep their children indoors or enroll them in structured after-school activities, she said.

"I'm always trying to figure out ways to get kids back outside playing with each other," the mother of two told ABC News. "It's a great thing that has sort of evaporated from the American landscape." "And New York City is used to paying money for things so that's the money thing," she added.

http://gma.yahoo.com/nyc-mom-charging-p ... ories.html

I was just happen to be perusing this thread and know someone with a girl named Hunter and she is deaf. I would've never imagined it being an issue.

Well, this makes me feel significantly less like a rip-off artist for charging $322 for my next executive training.

(that said, I agree with Lenore on most things and respect her greatly. Probably just the liability insurance for this thing costs that much).

Not being a parent, my perspective is that kids still do play outside.

The neighborhood I live in now doesn't seem much different than when I was young. You see kids playing, going to the nearby park, playing in the street and you may or may not see the parents outside. My neighbors used to sit outside while their kids were outside but the kids weren't always in their view. Now that their kids are a little older, you don't see them as much anymore and you see the kids in various locations around the neighborhood. It seems normal to me? I live in the suburbs with a mix of blue collar/white collar type families and only some petty crime.

When I grew up, I grew up in a relatively high crime area (gangs, drugs, burglary, occasional violent crime, etc) and it was the type of environment where I'd head out the door and let my mom know I'd be back in a couple hours. My friends and I would wander, maybe up to a mile from home. We'd often play at the local school as we didn't have a park (there is a park but it was further away than the school) and we would walk to the local store as well. When I got a little older (12? 13?), I got a bus pass so my friends and I might've been anywhere in the city.

I guess I don't know if there is that big of a change everywhere. Maybe urban environments are different but it also sounds like it is more of a (possibly upper?) middle class issue? Especially if you are paying $300 to have your kids play freely with other kids.

It might not be true everywhere, but times have changed. Unstructured time away from parents is far rarer. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a "playdate." Kids get together in scheduled, structured ways now. (Not all kids at all times, of course.) Walking or riding bikes to school is rarer. Scrutiny of adults (especially men) is more intense.

I think parents' attitudes have changed. School policies have changed. And so on.

I'm glad to hear the creeping dread hasn't spread to all corners yet, but watch out. It's on the way.

Yeah, I grew up in the same sort of free range latchkey environment with little adult supervision at playtime. My similar-age friends and I were mostly on our own, sometimes with older siblings around to play and also look out for us to some extent, so that was something. I had my own key, came home from school for lunch by myself and went back every day by, I think, around third grade, so I would have been eight? And was on the bus alone or with friends by around age 10 or thereabouts. It wasn't a big deal or much frowned upon then but to me, today, that seems awfully young for a child to be left on her own.

We used to also go collecting door-to-door around the neighborhood to raise funds for the bands we were in and stuff. Like selling chocolate bars and the like. I wonder if schools still encourage kids to go to strange neighborhoods and knock door-to-door to fundraise. We didn't blink an eye about that sort of thing at the time and no one's parents ever did to my knowledge but in today's world, I feel like that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, but I don't really know.

I don't think you can tell how much more stranger-danger/fear-oriented parenting is just by looking at the kids who are outside. You see it in the interactions with authorities (everything on FRK and personally, a friend had DYFS called on her for letting her child (10) walk a mile home (in a straight line) unattended), with friends (another friend's 14 year old has a best friend who is never allowed to do sleep-overs). And it is because there is so much fear of pedophiles and bad stuff happening to your kids.

I know that as a new mom with a daughter, I am really easy to terrify with the stories about Very Bad Things happening to little kid. And some websites like Cafe Mom are just wall to wall stories about children being abused, molesters going free etc. Some days I just want to home school Leela in a bubble until she turns 70.

I never heard about possible molesters and being bad touched when I was a kid (1970s holler!), but know that my cousin struggled with it with her kids (mid 80s to early 90s) and now it seems like its a standard part of the parenting role - to teach your kids that there are people out there who want to hurt them. Which has its positives and its negatives.

I remember bad touch and the bad men in vans offering candy stories when I was young. Of course, I think that children are more likely to be molested by relatives than strangers. The people I know who we're molested was by their own relatives.

I heard all about "bad secrets" from my mother, didn't keep me from keeping a secret about being abused. Abusers abuse and they make kids keep quiet. It's hard to teach a kid around that.

In the neighborhood I work in (middle/upper middle class), it seems like kids do a lot of walking on their own. Many kids in my after school/weekend program are "walkers" (allowed to walk home alone, don't have to be picked up). When I was in a similar after school situation, being a "walker" wasn't even an option, even though I walked there in the first place. Our school has actually become more lax in the past several years. There was a major security crackdown after 9/11 and now we basically keep the school doors unlocked all the time (sometimes propped open) and it's like, whatever. We know we're in a safe place. All the security in the world will not keep terrible things from happening to us if something terrible is going to happen and no security we have here will keep kids from being abused at home, which is the most likely scenario.

I think that the door-to-door sales thing was largely stopped after Eddie Werner was killed.

Yeah, I heard the van story too. Don't take candy from strangers. And when I was home alone, I was not allowed to answer the door to anyone and had to call my mother immediately at work to let her know that I had gotten home.

In 1977 in Toronto, there was a horrifying murder of a young boy downtown (Emanuel Jaques) that shook my mother and surely every other parent in the community. This was a boy who was downtown shining shoes to pick up a few dollars and he was abducted and murdered. From what I remember of the tenor of the news stories at the time, it was less about "what was a boy that age doing working downtown unsupervised?" (EJ was around 11 or 12 when he was killed) and more about "are our kids no longer safe on Toronto streets?" But I feel like had the same thing happened today, there would be bloggers and media asking the first question and not so much the latter because it wasn't so unusual for young, unsupervised children to be downtown by themselves back then. Now, it seems an anomaly. I rarely, if ever, see kids alone when I'm at the Eaton Centre today (the area whereabouts the Jaques murder occurred so many years ago).


Interesting. I've often wondered about that. I would have a problem with door-to-door canvassing today were I a parent, but back then, no one blinked an eye. It seemed a perfectly safe thing to do and encouraged by the school.

And just secondhand through my job--babysitters.