jazzfes

When I tell someone that I run a centre that brings philosophy into children’s lives, much of the time I’m greeted with puzzlement, and sometimes open scepticism. How can children do philosophy? Isn’t it too hard for them? What are you trying to do, teach Kant to kindergarteners? Or, somewhat more suspiciously, what kind of philosophy are you teaching them?

These reactions are understandable, because they stem from very common assumptions – about children and about philosophy. Central to our work at the Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington is the conviction that we ought to challenge beliefs about children’s limited capacities, and to expand our understanding of the nature of philosophy and who is capable of engaging in it. As one seven-year-old put it: ‘In philosophy, we’re growing our minds.’

Most of our philosophy sessions with children are in public elementary schools; the aim is to discover what topics the children want to think about, and to foster discussions and reflection about these subjects. I don’t think of what I do as teaching philosophy, though. The point is not to educate children about the history of philosophy, nor to instruct them in the arguments made by professional philosophers.

So when my kid was a bit over a year old, it became clear that there was an unprecedented sportsman in the making!

I immediately went out and bought a balance bike similar to this one:

Anyway, turns out that no amount of tape, even construction style one, was enough to keep the little one on the bike in an upright position at a reasonable speed. After a couple of bumps, I decided that the reasonable thing is to wait a little.

After what felt like eternity, but probably wasn't too long, he started to use it more and more. Jumps were made over garden hoses. Little hills were mastered, gaining more and more speed.

At about two / three years of age, my kid was pushing his balance bike with verve downhill on skate tracks!

He absolutely learnt to love it super quick and he still uses it now and then while learning how to use a peddle bike. The balancing side of the peddle bike worked pretty much from the start as a result of the balance bike. The peddle bike is a fair bit bigger however and he needs to build up some confidence with it though.

Anyway, I can wholeheartedly recommend a proper balance bike for toddlers. They are great fun and give them a great sense of freedom.

Things to look out for:

• Ensure it is light weight... you will carry it for extended times
• Get a proper two wheel one. The three wheel ones don't give them a chance to learn the balancing mechanics.
• Make sure they wear a helmet
• Great way for a parent to maintain some form of exercise, while you are chasing after the kid
• Once they learn how to balance, put trust in them regarding how fast they are going.... they can go pretty fast for sure! I've seen this not only with mine, but also others. Obviously look for a save environment where nothing serious happens if they loose control

I've got very little lemmy experience in general, so this is a bit of an experiment for me.

The experiment is about sharing parenting experiences, and discuss how to survive and enjoy parenting while getting better at it.

It's also about managing partnerships that may have caused parenting and/or are impacted by it.

Let's discuss our problems, solutions, and breakdowns.

Parenting has been easily the most intense relationship I've had. It's enjoyable and fu**ing stressful. I wouldn't want to miss it yet I'd love it to be easier....

Can we work towards this?

Parents of lemmy, unite!

I installed FreeBSD a few days ago. So far the experience is pretty good:

While it starts with a very minimal system, it's relatively easy to build it up to something "normal", in my case a KDE desktop.

The biggest change compared to linux I have to get used to is that the documentation seems often to be better than a search on the internet.

Case in point was my 60 minute effort fixing a DNS leak with my VPN:

After spending some time managing the openvpn connection and automating it on startup, I noticed that I'm leaking DNS...

Spent some time searching the net, until I found and followed 30.7.2. DNS Server Configuration in the handbook, which explains how to set the system DNS. After getting the public DNS from my VPN provider, and following the instructions in the manual, the leaks were gone...

I remember having chased DNS leaks in linux for weeks.... Quite happy so far :)

Looking into FreeBSD at the moment and quite like what I read so far. Looked for books and got this...

Thought the opinionated search engine was quite funny :)

Will still install it anyway... :P