Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Fairness?!

When my boys who are 6 and 7 won't share I will sometimes take away whatever they are not sharing.
  Yesterday Soren (the younger) came up to me all proud because he had made things fair by destroying the cave the Ben had made and would not share. Soren's caves kept collapsing. I spent five minutes explaining how destroying(his word) did not make things fair it made things worse. ( A novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. )
  Later I realized that my taking things from them was exactly the same in his mind as him destroying the cave. Now what?

4 comments:

  1. Among other things, I suspect that 6- and 7-year-olds are cleverer than us adults. They don't have a lot of extra information and assumptions to distract them, so they use what they do know and improvise. They are assembling the rules of how the world works from the information they receive. Fortunately, one of the lessons they need to learn is that the world isn't always consistent (kinda lets us off the hook, there).

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  2. I just hope he doesn't get so creative when big bank doesn't want to share

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  3. Or so creative it's legal, you know like derivatives, hedge funds, congressional office, something like that.

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  4. As long as I am in his tribe I am okay with that.

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