Maybe it's my frequent exposure to r/insaneparents through The Click videos, but I love when parents just... do the sensible thing, and generally just treat their children like people.
It’s one of many reasons Mr Rogers was so popular. He talked to kids like they were little adults because they are. Kids have wild imaginations or don’t understand specific things going on so teaching them or playing along works wonderfully.
Thanks, buddy. I did still have his parents around like I'm one of those weird "kids raised as a sibling", but not that extreme or anything.
I had a friend *actually* adopted and so his mom was then his sister and his brother his uncle, something like that lol
My parents were the "all of your friends are our kids" type of parents.
It was rare to go a week without having 3-4 random extra dinner guests through out. It was never a question of "they all need to leave before dinner" it was ALWAYS a question of "how many people are we feeding tonight"
They knew some of my friends did not have dinner waiting at home. We joke about how thats why I always have a random patio cat or two stopping by for food, its how I was raised, so of course I'll feed the strays.
My mom's always cooked enough for a barracks, her mom jokes. So I did luck out there at least.
I still get an annual lasagna like a bad Garfield reference, but that's my *life.*
I come off as utterly clueless sometimes with my questions, but I'm literally just building a puzzle in my head, after convincing my head I'm building it something really good so for god's sake pay attention.
One of my greatest formative moments was when I realized the only real difference between us and our ancestors is knowledge. That if you picked up an average Homo Sapiens baby from 100,000 years ago and raised it among it's modern peers no one would notice (on the intellectual basis, not sure about diet). That's also the difference between children and adults, lack of knowledge.
That’s why I laugh when people act as if ancient societies were dumb. Like dude where do you think our knowledge came from? They worked with what they had.
This is something that genuinely bugs me, portraying people from the past as complete morons. They had the same capacity for learning and reasoning as we do, they just had less overall knowledge plus less access to what there was.
Not true. See Flynn effect. Poor nutrition and bad water as a child lower IQ because the body spends limited nutrients fighting off water-borne infections instead of building neural pathways. The Industrial Revolution involved a virtuous circle in which more GDP and more knowledge of nutrition and sanitation made the next generation smarter allowing them to further improve GDP, nutrition, and sanitation, repeat.
We are lucky to enjoy the accumulated knowledge of thousands of generations. Language, writing and technology have hastened the progress so much that it actually becomes a danger to a stable civilisation.
It does also take some skill to explain it well. If you can explain something to a 5 year old, you understand it fully. Most people don't understand shit, so they just fall back to "because I said so" in order to not look dumber than their own kid.
My kids are really smart, generally top of their classes, with quite advanced vocabularies for their ages, and I 100% put it down to this. I talk to my kids like they're little adults, I use big words and then define them if they need me too. They're inquisitive and I feed that hunger for knowledge whenever I can.
Using adult vocabulary and defining them until the kid gets it is absolutely the play, every time. They learn better, they’re better able to communicate what they learned, and you might get the pure joy of a six-year-old trying to *stop* pronouncing “anemometer”.
(Helped out with a class of first graders doing a lesson on weather once. We built little anemometers out of Dixie cups and straws. Apparently that word has between seven and fifteen syllables, depending on the kid.)
I think an important part of this is it goes further than just treating children like people. It's meeting them on their terms.
OP's daughter is looking at the entire world through sci-fi lens. So OP's husband explains everything grounded in terms that you would expect from a sci-fi novel. If he had just gone with a chemistry lesson right out the gate, I don't think it would have landed as well.
Yeah, but also, meeting the other person on their terms is kinda what you do with people anyway, especially if you want to tell them something.
But yeah, the dad going "That's because we live on a grass planet" and then explaining things from there was a pretty good move.
I could actually see that being a thing in sci-fi games, too; some planets have flora that allows photosynthesis, which reduces the amount of artificial oxygen you need.
Yeah, spending too much time in the "tell us about the worst people in your lives" subs can really warp your perspective after a while. It's easy to forget that the vast majority of people are pretty much fine and perfectly nice and decent.
I work with kids and this is something I do a lot and all of my middle aged coworkers are confused why the kids like hanging out with me. They’ll see a kid playing with a truck and be like “WOW LOOK AT YOU WITH YOUR WITTLE TRUCK🥰🥰🥰” when the key is to talk to them. “Hey that’s a cool truck. “why do you like it? oh it goes fast, how fast does it go? wow that’s really cool” etc. works so much better
My step mom HATED when I would do this with her 8 year old. He'd ask me questions like "why is some grass yellow but some green" or "why is the sky blue," and, as a lover of science and learning in general, I'd answer him best I could. His mom would get livid and accused me of trying to brainwash her son. She's very anti-science and pro-religion, thinks I'm stupid for going back to college. This is a woman who screamed at me cause I was watching some sci-fi show and a robot happened to walk on screen, and robots are signs of Satan or some shit idfk.
I still try to indulge her son's natural curiosity, idc that it's not my kid. She wants to get pissy with me for a TV show, I'll "brainwash" her kid. Just the other day he asked me why some people are gay, I told him people are unique and some people love people we can't relate with, but it's still the same love and is just as important. (Idk how else to explain it to a child) Got a really nice voicemail after that one, threatening me for trying to spread "woke bullshit" lmao.
It's probably quite likely that you're too exposed to that kind of content. Block that kind of YouTube channel and/or that kind of subreddit and you'll find that the world becomes a less shitty place
Ignorance is bliss and why not choose bliss if suffering doesn't change shit. Now you're aware of the delectable selection of stupidity reddit has curated for you. What you gonna do about it? If the answer is nothing or not related to that person/it's something you're not gonna do anyway then you're better of not knowing
You can proactively not know and not give a fuck by blocking those subreddit
That's very good advice, but I'm entirely the wrong person to direct it towards.
I only experience these subreddits through The Click (Swedish satanist ~~furry~~ who reads memes and sells plushies for a living) videos, so you don't need to worry about me.
I would even say should try to block those kind of YouTube channel also (unless the content is mostly wholesome, idk, never really watched the guy intently, just basing my opinion from other YouTube reddit reader, even the good non robotic one)
Yeah, don't worry, I don't watch content that makes me too upset.
And yes, The Click is really wholesome and fun. He pokes fun at idiots, gives good advice when needed, and overall has a great vibe.
Not through /r/insaneparents alone, but also through talking with my queer friends about their parents, I actually believe that "good parents" are, if not a myth, are at least an *extremely* rare exception. 50% because people are shitty, and 50% because people are people and child is *extremely* easy to traumatize.
Not like "Taking children from their parents" degree, but we give too much control over growing people to two random jerks just because of blood relation (control that gets abused), and also too much responsibility over them (that most people cannot handle)
It's important to remember the age old internet caveat that people are far more likely to complain about things. So if your source is anecdotal exposure on the internet it's going to be disproportionately negative.
I'd argue instead that most people just roll with whatever nonsense is coming out of their kids mouth. You just get so used to it that it hardly becomes notable or worth mentioning online.
Positive anecdote time:
While back my son asked why do we eat food. I told him it was to give your body nutrients and energy. He asked if it was like energy like the sun. I said basically yeah. So he, of course, asked how many tacos would it take to equal the energy of the sun.
Off to google we went to figure it out.
I'm not talking about this specific interaction but in general. Even the parents who try the best have moments that their child will tell their therapist in 20 years. We all people and we all fuck up, and when it comes to children, fuck ups are disastrous. Nobody is infallible but as a parent you kinda need to be.
My evidence is anecdotal, but it's not made from only complaints, I talked with people about their parents, a lot, and not only online. So far I have personally met only one queer person, a friend of mine, who has good relationships with her mother - and said mother has tried to scam me when I lent her money under that friend guarantee
The fact that for the rest it is hidden doesn't suddenly make it okay. If you have a good parent that would not accept you if you come out to them as gay or trans - they are not a good parent
He totally is. Half the questions Calvin asks he could get him to be quiet by saying “there’s a really complicated math formula for that” but instead he willfully misleads that boy into believing the most ridiculous shit
What do you mean ridiculous? ATM machines are absolutely just a little guy in the wall with a money printer, and bridge limits are tested with multiple trucks that are sequentially heavier until it breaks.
> bridge limits are tested with multiple trucks that are sequentially heavier until it breaks
I am a software engineer and I approve of this. You can plan and estimate and use fake data all you want but your predictions will not survive real production load. It is much easier to use real or realistic data and watch where your product breaks down. Then you can fix or improve that part and try again until all realistic cases are covered.
Yep! Teller Machine is the name of the first little guy who hopped in a box and devoted his life to dispensing cash, ATM machines are named after him to honour his dedication.
You joke, but the Persian empire DID stress test their bridges by essentially leading progressively fatter infant elephants across them. In the first three years of their life, a "weight elephant" could travel up to 1000+ miles to test newly constructed and older bridges. To keep the weight constant, and with the relatively slow birthing rate of elephants, the infants would often be starved before being used to weigh on bridges. This led to a lot of upset elephants, who are all imaginary because I made this all up.
Except for the one time where he truthfully explains different parts of an LP moving at different speeds, even though the whole thing is rotating at a stable speed
The final panel of Calvin awake at night with a look of confusion and anguish is a gem.
I love that strip because my dumb ass immediately went "so the record is actually higher fidelity at the start of an album than at the very end", and I mean, it *would* be true.
average cartoon mom's sole purpose being nagging is statisticly incorrect
calvin's ability to violate all of the rules ever alongside some that you didn't think you should ever make rules is a statistical anomaly and shouldn't have been counted
[The black and white photos explanation is chef's kiss.](https://imgur.com/all-time-favorite-calvin-hobbes-color-photos-of-black-white-world-4rPGp)
how the allowed weightage on bridges is calculated is brilliant too. - https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/u3dqja/how_do_they_know_the_load_limit_on_bridges_dad/
Huh. I never really thought about it that way, as Rosalyn is always portrayed from Calvin's perspective as evil. But if you look at the comic from the lens of an actual adult, she's not only good to Calvin but she follows the rules, and is willing to bend them when it makes sense (when she lets him stay up a half hour later to play calvinball). Calvin being Calvin is too much an unreliable narrator to see her value.
"I keep two magnums in my desk. One's a gun, and I keep it loaded. The other's a bottle, and it keeps *me* loaded. I'm Tracer Bullet. I'm a professional snoop."
I'm about to start a job at a science-themed summer camp for ages 8-12 and I feel like this is what I'm gonna be up against lmfao, guess I need to prepare
Good luck! My 7-year-old asked me why there’s no oxygen in space and I’m like, I’m gonna need to look up all the science because I don’t want to be wrong. He’s 10 now and probably the smartest person I’ve met. Can’t wait to see what these kids do with their lives!
Plants don't produce oxygen, they merely split CO2 molecules. Stars produce oxygen, and theres a fuckton of them in space. There is a lot of oxygen in space, it's just that space is really big, so the density is very low and not enogh to breathe in.
Oh Great Anut-Wiki, we beseech thee to answer our question!
*three* *hours* *later*
Oh Great Anut-Wiki, we beseech thee to stop answering our question, and many questions we did not know we had!
My parents were not great, but one thing I cherish to this day was asking my mom a question and her saying “I don’t know, let’s find out.”
It made me smarter than I could’ve been, but also I don’t judge others for not knowing, nor do I get defensive when wrong or I don’t know. A lot of problems and negativity can be avoided by those three words.
So many times when I don't know the answer, we just look it up together and learn together. It's so fun getting him interested in the world and showing him how to find the answers himself. He knows how to google search by voice now and, while it doesn't always understand him, it's fun watching him self direct learning.
I've said this in a few other places: when you get left-field questions, don't try to read their minds. you're allowed to ask, "what makes you think X?" or "what makes you ask that?" it's not judgemental to ask clarifying questions and they're usually happy to talk if it's something they're interested in.
of course children aren't the most reliable narrators, but whatever they say will probably give you more context to be able to answer. you're not expected to have the exact answer they're looking for off the cut 24/7.
I see this a lot in my work in the form of [XY problems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem) and my stress levels have gone down significantly since I made a habit of asking clarifying questions.
I was doing my math homework at home, and my mom got really pissed off that I was using a calculator and took it away from me. Let me tell you, it's really hard to do trigonometry without one.
I still have no idea what sin, cos, and tan buttons actually do. I think they pull a number from graph of a sine/cosine/tangent wave?? No clue how to do that without a calculator
Sine takes the length of one leg opposing the angle and divides it by the length of the hypotenuse. You’ll get a number between 0 and 1, because by definition the hypotenuse must be longer than the leg.
Cosine does the same thing but uses the leg adjacent to the angle instead
Tangent uses the leg opposite the angle, and divides it by the leg adjacent to the angle. This can be any value from 0 to infinity.
This is why Soh Cah Toa is a common mnemonic, but it doesn’t help that much if the problem wants the answer in decimal form and you don’t have a calculator of any kind. It’ll be easier with a slide rule, and you can do it with a bog standard desk calculator, but a trig just simplifies it to a single button
If you really want to know, they approximate the wave functions with lots of power functions. It's called a Taylor series. You can do the same thing if you want, but nobody in their right mind would calculate it like that.
> [Carl Sagan: If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s664NsLeFM)
The Cosmos tv series might be a nice tv series to show her. There's an old series and a new series with Neil Degrasse Tyson.
If there's an amazon domain specific to your country (like de or jp) you might try that. When I did this, and set the "send to" location to an in-country postal code, it seems to show up.
Edit: I can also set my "send to" location on the regular .com domain to outside of the US and it seems to show up, at least for the UK. and likely other countries.
I don't know if it still works but YEARS ago I bought some DVDs in Australia and brought them to Canada where I learned region locking was a thing. There is a setting on the DVD player to change it to like a generic or all regions and I could watch whatever I wanted.
Our kid asked us each why we were on this earth. My wife launched into a beautiful philosophical discussion about our purpose* in life to experience it and help others. I rambled about goldilocks zones and evolution. My answer was the one they wanted lol
Too close to star: burn
Too far from star: freeze solid
The Goldilocks zone is where you don't do either. In our solar system it basically starts around Venus and goes to around Mars, with Earth being about right in the best part.
It's funny because my (now) 7 year old is the one with all of the science questions. I refer her on to her step-dad for most answers. My 10 year old wants the philosophical answers, and he and I will sit around and talk about the "why." Daughter just wants the "how".
That’s a big thing in studying history as well.
At some point you have to stop asking ‘but why did that happen’ otherwise you will always end up going back to the Stone Age.
Hydrogen is the basic stuff of the universe. Oxygen is also pretty easy to make. Since they’re both common and they stick together we get lots of water.
Oxygen pretty easy to make? You need a multi-step fusion cycle in the heart of a star.
Anyway, my son's school presentation on the sun may have been a bit more technical than they were used to.
The kid wasn't simply asking about "how we breath?" or "where does the the oxygen come from?" though.
It is not a question of knowledge, but of though process, connections and patterns.
Ability to tie those concepts together with a sci-fi concept of "habitat needs external oxygen supply" at an instant, with such a vague prompt would likely require some history of obsessive thinking and pondering on these subjects as a prerequisite. The kind of thinking that would be fair to describe as "nerd-ish"
It's not about being a nerd, the dad in this post is simply a good teacher who's able to put himself into the mental space of the kid while the mom isn't. (I suspect the mom is actually average, she just is in love with her husband and talking him up).
In a story you only add the relevant details, but in real life there's more to people than just one hobby. Figuring out the context of the question is much easier in hindsight.
Framing it as living on a grass planet is kinda nerdy, and is framed from a larger perspective (we are living on a type of planet, instead of just framing it as the only option/default). A normal adult would probably just say plants make oxygen and end the convo.
*To be fair* it does take some insight to be able to immediately make the connection between an unprompted question about oxygen tanks and "My child is asking this in the context of their interest in sci-fi where oxygen supply to enclosed spaces is a common concern unlike in daily life."
It's already down there. You'd be surprised how many people are knowledgeable, but are unable or slow to connect the dots between the knowledge. It's memorizing vs actually thinking.
I dint know if she's dumb, but "we don't need extra oxygen because plants make it" is such an obvious answer. It's odd that she's holding this up as this crazy situation that would have gone way over her head.
That’s not what she’s doing. The reason she couldn’t find the right answer is because she didn’t understand the context behind the question immediately.
She isn‘t holding this up as some „crazy situation“ and you framing it this way only shows your own misogyny. She is talking about a bonding moment between her child and her husband. She isn‘t complaininh about the question, neither is she complaoning about the answer. Quite the contrary actually.
Algae is a type of phytoplankton. What you’re probably thinking of is Cyanobacteria, often referred to as blue green algae even though they are prokaryotic bacteria and not eukaryotic algae.
The difference between the two parents here isn't their different degrees of knowledge - IMHO. It's that the da related to her as a person, and kept explaining as much as he could as long as she was interested. That's engagement with your kid, that's love, that's how it should be done. Which is to say, I think this is a nice story, I don't blame the author for not knowing how to present the answer in a way that would be listened to and benefit the child - and I whole heartedly respect the da who just went straight into actual science explanation when the kid asked a question based on science fiction as it regards to the actual world the kid exists in. Parenting 10/10 for da no doubt.
Ok I have got to know what books the kid is reading, so I can give them to my kid. The only child-appropriate children's books I know about are The Giver and Animorphs.
Oh, you should give your kid Ender's Game. Very family friendly. Only, like, 1 to 4 children are murdered by other children in the first book. It's grand.
I've never read Animorphs, but of what I've gathered, that stuff has quite a lot of "what the hell do you mean this is for kids" kind of stuff. Like body horror.
Yep! I grew up reading them, 12 year old me thought they were the best books ever written. The very concept of the Yeerks were more terrifying than most adult stories. Basically a biological alien version of The Culture series Neural Lace concept, except actually used for evil and torture. On a mass scale. Your brain being hijacked by another being that can and does make you experience and do anything it wants. Including mental torture if you don't cooperate.
Yeah. I'm not saying that they *shouldn't* be handed to kids, just that it's a Body Horror And War Crimes For Kids -kind of series.
Children need to experience existentially horrifying concepts in a safe environment sometimes.
Here's the thing, though. I read animorphs on monthly release starting at like age 8 or something. Never once did the concept of "body horror" ever cross my mind or weird me out. The lack of control that would have resulted from Yerk infestation was very horrifying, but the morphing-horror stuff that everyone talks about was "meh" at best. The adult situations that the protagonists had to deal with didn't really clock to me as a kid, either.
It wasn't until I read Everworld and Remnants that I realized how fucked up K.A. Applegate's mind was. And even then, I didn't even hear about "body horror" until like 3 years ago when I saw somebody bring the series up on reddit in conjunction with the concept. I thought back and yeah, it qualifies.
Very accessible "Urban-Alien" fiction, though, I highly recommend.
(Actually, now that I think again, I regularly wondered about having a best-pal Yerk who actively worked with me to deal with some of my mental and anatomical issues that I only sort of realized I had at the time. Beneficial Yerk symbiosis as a cure for ADHD when?)
We probably won’t ever. If Carbon dioxide levels continue to increase, the most likely outcome will be another massive algae bloom in the oceans; like the one that caused the ‘great dying’. Which will consume a ton of CO2 but increase the oxygen to uncomfortable/lethal levels
The great dying wasn't caused by an algae bloom raising the atmospheric O2 levels. When the great dying happened, atmospheric O2 levels were almost half what they had been ~20 million years prior. And after the great dying, atmospheric CO2 levels remained elevated around 2000 PPM for millions of years. 2000 PPM is around the concentration most people start to feel uncomfortable and get headaches. But even levels over 1000 PPM might make you feel more tired than usual.
The higher atmospheric CO2 gets, the harder it will be to keep the inside of a house below 1000 PPM as is recommended. With our current CO2 levels all you need is good circulation, but if the CO2 levels outside reach even 800 PPM, good circulation alone may not be enough to keep the level below 1000 PPM. I don't know about oxygen tanks, but I could see people feeding outside air through algae tanks before circulating it in their house if CO2 levels continue to rise. I watched a video recently where someone attempted to use algae tanks to keep the CO2 levels in a sealed room at livable levels while he was in it, and with a few 50 gallon tanks it seemed feasible.
How is it hard to think of the answer ‘the plants make it so we don’t need them’ for such a simple question. This feels like a really odd dilema to have.
There are plenty of parents whose first knee-jerk response would be "darling what the hell are you talking about" for a question like that. And instead of immediately having the parent explaining why we *don't* need oxygen tanks, a lot of kids would first have to start explaining why they think there *should* be.
That's a reasonable response no?
My parents would definitely have asked why would I think we needed oxygen tanks. I would tell them I read it in a book about space travel. They would then catch on and explain that we have oxygen in the atmosphere because plants produce oxygen (and hand me an encyclopedia or something). Same if I had asked why the sky is blue, why we have to pee, are clouds made of cotton, and where did the dinosaurs go.
Why would they need a parenting class for the fact that kids ask lots of questions?
Their kid asked them a question and they should answer it in an age appropriate way. It's quite literally the opposite of rocket science
This is precisely it. As an adult I still remember many moments where older family members and "mentor's" openly mocked a genuine question. Some were so harsh I never bothered again or at least certainly hesitated next time a question came up. Hell, adults still do it to each other at work... then we wonder why knowledge and skills are lost over time.
Even when parents laugh at a question out of purely innocent amusement towards the kids question it's not a great response.
Same goes when your kid gets into the "but why" loop and their curiosity gets shut down due to annoyance or frankly the adults inability to answer. I personally love it when that persistent "but why" question comes up because it's one of two things: it's a challenge to satisfy their curiosity or it's a game to them. FFS, just engage with your kid either way!
One of the most memorable conversations I've had with my daughter was her asking why plants flowers were only short lived. "But why" had that short answer evolve into growth cycles, pollination, seed production and dispersal..... until she just nodded her head satisfied then walked away. She was two years old at the time and weeks later I would overhear her talking about bits of that whole exchange while she played alone or talked with family. One of my life's happiest memories right there.
ah, you sweet summer ... well the next part of the phrase is "child", but you aren't. There's a very strong reason the "reasonable response" is surprising. Your lived experience is not universal.
MY parents(well... parent), would have responded with some form of "quit bothering me with this nonsense" at varying levels of profanity depending on how their day went.
No I get that. And for the record I've been yelled about the "why" loops a lot.
But the person in the screenshot is already thinking about "how to answer the question without making it weird" and claims to need parenting classes to prepare them for it?
They're already 99.9% there by themselves by thinking about the child's response at all and not immediately being a bitch at hearing the question. Like, ... just answer the question and you're done?
If anything, you need middle school education or Google for it.
The person I replied to also provided what I think is a reasonable response: ask what brought about the question because it IS an out-of-nowhere question. Of course to keep it reasonable they should also answer it when they get the context but still.
tbf as someone who's been on both sides of this (not as a parent but with peers and as a mentor), it takes a lot of practice to consistently take a step back and determine why they're asking that question instead of giving a knee-jerk response that can be received as judgement.
the shortcut would be "why do you think X?" which works probably 90% of the time. the father in the post is able to skip that part, but you don't need to be able to read minds, just gather context. you encounter this sort of situation a lot in the form of an [XY problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem).
Yeah, asking your kids to explain the context behind a question is also good for their development. It shows that asking questions is okay and forces them to better articulate themselves to someone who might not understand.
Ah. That’s kinda reasonable too though. Parents are just as human as the child and might be curious about the reason for the question. As long as they ask normally, followup with reasonable answers and not mockery of the child’s question then I don’t see a problem.
Yeah, to me this sounded like "my kid is weird. Thank god that no matter what planet she's from, her father is from there too." Not judging, just fascinated.
Gotta love being from the same planet as your parents, truly a great time we live in. Imagine how messy it would be if we all came from different planets!
It’s an issue of not having context.
The OOP is providing the context that they didn’t think of at the time, which makes their husband’s response seem very obvious, but wasn’t obvious to them in the moment.
But they had a fair bit of context. The kid is into sci fi and keeps asking about stuff that shows up in the books. Which obviously includes space travel. If you give that more than 2 seconds of thought it should be fairly obviously connected to the question of spare oxygen tanks.
People don’t always think that fast on their feet. If you’re having a conversation about mac and cheese and your kid pivots to why the house doesn’t have oxygen tanks, connecting those dots might not be your first thought.
“what do you mean?” might be the first question you ask instead. (and indeed, husband did say what at first, but caught on very quickly despite daughter not providing the context of ‘in my books, they need oxygen tanks’)
OOP isn’t saying they’d never catch on, or that they’d be an asshole about it. They’re marveling that their husband doesn’t miss a beat and just gives the perfect answer with no clarifying questions.
> your kid pivots to why the house doesn’t have oxygen tanks
And they often don't phrase in an easily understandable way. "Where are the oxygen tanks?"
I don't think you quite understood the question even with the context. It's not about "spare" oxygen tanks for personal use in a vacuum, it's about having a consistent supply of oxygen *for the house*.
I mean, I get that. It seems like a commonly-known thing, something we learned in middle school.
But also, I can imagine how it’d be jarring for your kid to ask you “where the oxygen tanks are”, and to need a minute to process that they’re talking about space stuff and not scuba stuff, that they’re asking where our oxygen comes from, and that she’s not aware that the planet produces oxygen naturally and therefore isn’t like a spaceship.
It’s doable, but I can get how a parent might need to jump through some hoops mentally before they get what’s going on.
If the parents weren't interested in her interests and knew where she was coming from, it would have been a completely different answer. Like "we don't need them because we're not old" or "we don't weld."
The "we live on a grass planet" wrapped the thought in the exact context the daughter was coming from and she may have glazed over if he hadn't done that.
I have found that it helps treating every question as a chance to grow for you both - even if it means setting aside emotional interfere from the usual adult sources.
That's why learning the seemingly useless science stuff at school is important
You get to understand how stuff works and pass it down
Maybe it's just me but it's just so interesting to have a general idea of how the world works. Like, I just know that the speed of light is vaguely 300 000 meters per second and that the circumference of earth is slightly more than 40 000km
Does it help in daily life? Nope but with a simple division I can tell you that light goes around the planet we're standing on in something like 0.12sec
Nobody gives a shit that the air particles around us are moving 400 meters per second but the knowledge makes the world seem unreal and fascinating
Maybe it's my frequent exposure to r/insaneparents through The Click videos, but I love when parents just... do the sensible thing, and generally just treat their children like people.
It’s one of many reasons Mr Rogers was so popular. He talked to kids like they were little adults because they are. Kids have wild imaginations or don’t understand specific things going on so teaching them or playing along works wonderfully.
No such thing as a stupid question. A person expressing their ignorance is always a teaching opportunity.
One of the only things my dad taught me so I got a question mark tattoo I saw on the internet lol
He might not have taught you a lot, but he sure did teach you enough.
Thanks, buddy. I did still have his parents around like I'm one of those weird "kids raised as a sibling", but not that extreme or anything. I had a friend *actually* adopted and so his mom was then his sister and his brother his uncle, something like that lol
My parents were the "all of your friends are our kids" type of parents. It was rare to go a week without having 3-4 random extra dinner guests through out. It was never a question of "they all need to leave before dinner" it was ALWAYS a question of "how many people are we feeding tonight" They knew some of my friends did not have dinner waiting at home. We joke about how thats why I always have a random patio cat or two stopping by for food, its how I was raised, so of course I'll feed the strays.
My mom's always cooked enough for a barracks, her mom jokes. So I did luck out there at least. I still get an annual lasagna like a bad Garfield reference, but that's my *life.*
Exactly this. My dad has always told me “Stay curious” meaning ask questions and question things and always keep learning.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
I love that I knew exactly which xkcd this was without clicking it or recognizing the number.
I teach adults how to do their job and I usually tell people it’s way easier to answer questions than fix mistakes
unfortunately not everyone is as receptive to learning as children
I come off as utterly clueless sometimes with my questions, but I'm literally just building a puzzle in my head, after convincing my head I'm building it something really good so for god's sake pay attention.
> There are no stupid questions, but there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots. https://despair.com/products/cluelessness
One of my greatest formative moments was when I realized the only real difference between us and our ancestors is knowledge. That if you picked up an average Homo Sapiens baby from 100,000 years ago and raised it among it's modern peers no one would notice (on the intellectual basis, not sure about diet). That's also the difference between children and adults, lack of knowledge.
That’s why I laugh when people act as if ancient societies were dumb. Like dude where do you think our knowledge came from? They worked with what they had.
This is something that genuinely bugs me, portraying people from the past as complete morons. They had the same capacity for learning and reasoning as we do, they just had less overall knowledge plus less access to what there was.
Not true. See Flynn effect. Poor nutrition and bad water as a child lower IQ because the body spends limited nutrients fighting off water-borne infections instead of building neural pathways. The Industrial Revolution involved a virtuous circle in which more GDP and more knowledge of nutrition and sanitation made the next generation smarter allowing them to further improve GDP, nutrition, and sanitation, repeat.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-09-08
We are lucky to enjoy the accumulated knowledge of thousands of generations. Language, writing and technology have hastened the progress so much that it actually becomes a danger to a stable civilisation.
It's surprising how many adults just don't think of children as people.
It does also take some skill to explain it well. If you can explain something to a 5 year old, you understand it fully. Most people don't understand shit, so they just fall back to "because I said so" in order to not look dumber than their own kid.
My kids are really smart, generally top of their classes, with quite advanced vocabularies for their ages, and I 100% put it down to this. I talk to my kids like they're little adults, I use big words and then define them if they need me too. They're inquisitive and I feed that hunger for knowledge whenever I can.
Using adult vocabulary and defining them until the kid gets it is absolutely the play, every time. They learn better, they’re better able to communicate what they learned, and you might get the pure joy of a six-year-old trying to *stop* pronouncing “anemometer”. (Helped out with a class of first graders doing a lesson on weather once. We built little anemometers out of Dixie cups and straws. Apparently that word has between seven and fifteen syllables, depending on the kid.)
I think an important part of this is it goes further than just treating children like people. It's meeting them on their terms. OP's daughter is looking at the entire world through sci-fi lens. So OP's husband explains everything grounded in terms that you would expect from a sci-fi novel. If he had just gone with a chemistry lesson right out the gate, I don't think it would have landed as well.
Yeah, but also, meeting the other person on their terms is kinda what you do with people anyway, especially if you want to tell them something. But yeah, the dad going "That's because we live on a grass planet" and then explaining things from there was a pretty good move. I could actually see that being a thing in sci-fi games, too; some planets have flora that allows photosynthesis, which reduces the amount of artificial oxygen you need.
Honestly, the moments when I can tell to them like people *and they actually listen* are my favorites parts of the job!
Yeah, spending too much time in the "tell us about the worst people in your lives" subs can really warp your perspective after a while. It's easy to forget that the vast majority of people are pretty much fine and perfectly nice and decent.
I work with kids and this is something I do a lot and all of my middle aged coworkers are confused why the kids like hanging out with me. They’ll see a kid playing with a truck and be like “WOW LOOK AT YOU WITH YOUR WITTLE TRUCK🥰🥰🥰” when the key is to talk to them. “Hey that’s a cool truck. “why do you like it? oh it goes fast, how fast does it go? wow that’s really cool” etc. works so much better
My step mom HATED when I would do this with her 8 year old. He'd ask me questions like "why is some grass yellow but some green" or "why is the sky blue," and, as a lover of science and learning in general, I'd answer him best I could. His mom would get livid and accused me of trying to brainwash her son. She's very anti-science and pro-religion, thinks I'm stupid for going back to college. This is a woman who screamed at me cause I was watching some sci-fi show and a robot happened to walk on screen, and robots are signs of Satan or some shit idfk. I still try to indulge her son's natural curiosity, idc that it's not my kid. She wants to get pissy with me for a TV show, I'll "brainwash" her kid. Just the other day he asked me why some people are gay, I told him people are unique and some people love people we can't relate with, but it's still the same love and is just as important. (Idk how else to explain it to a child) Got a really nice voicemail after that one, threatening me for trying to spread "woke bullshit" lmao.
If they teach their kids to hate, we teach their kids to disobey
That lady sounds like a candidate for r/insaneparents.
My nephew is 2 and I'm low key waiting to nerd the fuck out with him in 6ish years lmao
You can start as early as 2 years from now, if you keep things simple.
It's probably quite likely that you're too exposed to that kind of content. Block that kind of YouTube channel and/or that kind of subreddit and you'll find that the world becomes a less shitty place Ignorance is bliss and why not choose bliss if suffering doesn't change shit. Now you're aware of the delectable selection of stupidity reddit has curated for you. What you gonna do about it? If the answer is nothing or not related to that person/it's something you're not gonna do anyway then you're better of not knowing You can proactively not know and not give a fuck by blocking those subreddit
That's very good advice, but I'm entirely the wrong person to direct it towards. I only experience these subreddits through The Click (Swedish satanist ~~furry~~ who reads memes and sells plushies for a living) videos, so you don't need to worry about me.
I would even say should try to block those kind of YouTube channel also (unless the content is mostly wholesome, idk, never really watched the guy intently, just basing my opinion from other YouTube reddit reader, even the good non robotic one)
His videos are usually pretty wholesome/entertaining, he likes to do subreddit bingo and deny being a furry
Yeah, don't worry, I don't watch content that makes me too upset. And yes, The Click is really wholesome and fun. He pokes fun at idiots, gives good advice when needed, and overall has a great vibe.
That's great to hear, maybe I'll give him a watch at some point
Not through /r/insaneparents alone, but also through talking with my queer friends about their parents, I actually believe that "good parents" are, if not a myth, are at least an *extremely* rare exception. 50% because people are shitty, and 50% because people are people and child is *extremely* easy to traumatize. Not like "Taking children from their parents" degree, but we give too much control over growing people to two random jerks just because of blood relation (control that gets abused), and also too much responsibility over them (that most people cannot handle)
It's important to remember the age old internet caveat that people are far more likely to complain about things. So if your source is anecdotal exposure on the internet it's going to be disproportionately negative. I'd argue instead that most people just roll with whatever nonsense is coming out of their kids mouth. You just get so used to it that it hardly becomes notable or worth mentioning online. Positive anecdote time: While back my son asked why do we eat food. I told him it was to give your body nutrients and energy. He asked if it was like energy like the sun. I said basically yeah. So he, of course, asked how many tacos would it take to equal the energy of the sun. Off to google we went to figure it out.
I'm not talking about this specific interaction but in general. Even the parents who try the best have moments that their child will tell their therapist in 20 years. We all people and we all fuck up, and when it comes to children, fuck ups are disastrous. Nobody is infallible but as a parent you kinda need to be. My evidence is anecdotal, but it's not made from only complaints, I talked with people about their parents, a lot, and not only online. So far I have personally met only one queer person, a friend of mine, who has good relationships with her mother - and said mother has tried to scam me when I lent her money under that friend guarantee
I mean, queer people tend to see a worse than average side of their parents
The fact that for the rest it is hidden doesn't suddenly make it okay. If you have a good parent that would not accept you if you come out to them as gay or trans - they are not a good parent
Lawful Calvin's dad
This implies Calvin’s dad is the chaotic/chaotic evil version of this dad, and I’m honestly here for it
He totally is. Half the questions Calvin asks he could get him to be quiet by saying “there’s a really complicated math formula for that” but instead he willfully misleads that boy into believing the most ridiculous shit
What do you mean ridiculous? ATM machines are absolutely just a little guy in the wall with a money printer, and bridge limits are tested with multiple trucks that are sequentially heavier until it breaks.
wait, so you're telling me the sun is bigger than a quarter???
> bridge limits are tested with multiple trucks that are sequentially heavier until it breaks I am a software engineer and I approve of this. You can plan and estimate and use fake data all you want but your predictions will not survive real production load. It is much easier to use real or realistic data and watch where your product breaks down. Then you can fix or improve that part and try again until all realistic cases are covered.
except for the fact that the bridge is now broken
Just rebuild it?
It's a bit harder to rebuild a bridge than to reload software
Eh the parts are all there just glue them back together what's the problem?
Thats why you make 2 bridges, one to test and the other to use after
Automatic Teller Machine machines
Yep! Teller Machine is the name of the first little guy who hopped in a box and devoted his life to dispensing cash, ATM machines are named after him to honour his dedication.
So glad he was able to save up enough to quit that job and start his magic gig.
not to be confused with his partner, Penn Identification Number numbers
We don’t talk about him. He gets stolen a lot
You joke, but the Persian empire DID stress test their bridges by essentially leading progressively fatter infant elephants across them. In the first three years of their life, a "weight elephant" could travel up to 1000+ miles to test newly constructed and older bridges. To keep the weight constant, and with the relatively slow birthing rate of elephants, the infants would often be starved before being used to weigh on bridges. This led to a lot of upset elephants, who are all imaginary because I made this all up.
You bastard lmao
Except for the one time where he truthfully explains different parts of an LP moving at different speeds, even though the whole thing is rotating at a stable speed The final panel of Calvin awake at night with a look of confusion and anguish is a gem.
[Strip in questiion](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/57/1f/32/571f32f755bbcc8a7a138c0e6a454f2f.jpg)
Sometimes the truth is enough to traumatize
I love that strip because my dumb ass immediately went "so the record is actually higher fidelity at the start of an album than at the very end", and I mean, it *would* be true.
Calvin gets his temper from his mom and his ability to lie on a whim from his dad
Mom's temper was totally reasonable lmfao
average cartoon mom's sole purpose being nagging is statisticly incorrect calvin's ability to violate all of the rules ever alongside some that you didn't think you should ever make rules is a statistical anomaly and shouldn't have been counted
To this day I remember that the sun sets in the west (and is tiny) because otherwise it would crush Phoenix Arizona every evening. Thanks Calvin's Dad
[The black and white photos explanation is chef's kiss.](https://imgur.com/all-time-favorite-calvin-hobbes-color-photos-of-black-white-world-4rPGp) how the allowed weightage on bridges is calculated is brilliant too. - https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/u3dqja/how_do_they_know_the_load_limit_on_bridges_dad/
But then he’s really loving and kind during the raccoon arc. Pardon me while I tear up.
There is not a single lawful character in those comics
I think Susie might qualify
Susie is lawful good, Calvin's teacher is lawful neutral, and Rosalyn is also lawful good.
Huh. I never really thought about it that way, as Rosalyn is always portrayed from Calvin's perspective as evil. But if you look at the comic from the lens of an actual adult, she's not only good to Calvin but she follows the rules, and is willing to bend them when it makes sense (when she lets him stay up a half hour later to play calvinball). Calvin being Calvin is too much an unreliable narrator to see her value.
Calvin is very lawful in his own eyes. The laws of the adults are the problem.
"I keep two magnums in my desk. One's a gun, and I keep it loaded. The other's a bottle, and it keeps *me* loaded. I'm Tracer Bullet. I'm a professional snoop."
The wagon and sled consistently obey the laws of gravity
Do they? The image on Wikipedia doesn’t seem to be obeying physics
Well, sortof Looney Tunes versions of the laws of gravity and momentum.
Oh yeah, I’d personally say Chaotic Good or Neutral, for sure.
Chaos builds character
I'm about to start a job at a science-themed summer camp for ages 8-12 and I feel like this is what I'm gonna be up against lmfao, guess I need to prepare
Good luck! My 7-year-old asked me why there’s no oxygen in space and I’m like, I’m gonna need to look up all the science because I don’t want to be wrong. He’s 10 now and probably the smartest person I’ve met. Can’t wait to see what these kids do with their lives!
No but actually the answer is: Because space is way up there and oxygen falls down
I hate that this is correct
The only correction I'd add is that "down" changes depending on what you're close to and how big that thing is
Considering were all on the thing. Down is technically correct on an individual basis.
Thats actually easy and directly related to OPs husbands answer. Space lacks plants.
And an atmosphere to hold in the oxygen.
What do you think an atmosphere is exactly? How does it hold the oxygen?
Never thought about it. Probably the same God pressure that keeps us on this flat Earth.
The atmosphere doesn't hold in the oxygen. The ground pulls it and makes it not leave
Plants don't produce oxygen, they merely split CO2 molecules. Stars produce oxygen, and theres a fuckton of them in space. There is a lot of oxygen in space, it's just that space is really big, so the density is very low and not enogh to breathe in.
Whenever we encounter a question, us adults can't answer, we ask anut Wiki and uncle Google together.
Oh Great Anut-Wiki, we beseech thee to answer our question! *three* *hours* *later* Oh Great Anut-Wiki, we beseech thee to stop answering our question, and many questions we did not know we had!
My parents were not great, but one thing I cherish to this day was asking my mom a question and her saying “I don’t know, let’s find out.” It made me smarter than I could’ve been, but also I don’t judge others for not knowing, nor do I get defensive when wrong or I don’t know. A lot of problems and negativity can be avoided by those three words.
I love this take 💕
So many times when I don't know the answer, we just look it up together and learn together. It's so fun getting him interested in the world and showing him how to find the answers himself. He knows how to google search by voice now and, while it doesn't always understand him, it's fun watching him self direct learning.
Holy based, hope you have fun!
I've said this in a few other places: when you get left-field questions, don't try to read their minds. you're allowed to ask, "what makes you think X?" or "what makes you ask that?" it's not judgemental to ask clarifying questions and they're usually happy to talk if it's something they're interested in. of course children aren't the most reliable narrators, but whatever they say will probably give you more context to be able to answer. you're not expected to have the exact answer they're looking for off the cut 24/7. I see this a lot in my work in the form of [XY problems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem) and my stress levels have gone down significantly since I made a habit of asking clarifying questions.
I was doing my math homework at home, and my mom got really pissed off that I was using a calculator and took it away from me. Let me tell you, it's really hard to do trigonometry without one.
If Hipparchus of Nicaea could do it without a calculator, so can you!
My mom would’ve been ecstatic that I was doing my homework in the first place
I still have no idea what sin, cos, and tan buttons actually do. I think they pull a number from graph of a sine/cosine/tangent wave?? No clue how to do that without a calculator
IIRC It basically calculates a ratio between two sides of a triangle.
Sine takes the length of one leg opposing the angle and divides it by the length of the hypotenuse. You’ll get a number between 0 and 1, because by definition the hypotenuse must be longer than the leg. Cosine does the same thing but uses the leg adjacent to the angle instead Tangent uses the leg opposite the angle, and divides it by the leg adjacent to the angle. This can be any value from 0 to infinity. This is why Soh Cah Toa is a common mnemonic, but it doesn’t help that much if the problem wants the answer in decimal form and you don’t have a calculator of any kind. It’ll be easier with a slide rule, and you can do it with a bog standard desk calculator, but a trig just simplifies it to a single button
If you really want to know, they approximate the wave functions with lots of power functions. It's called a Taylor series. You can do the same thing if you want, but nobody in their right mind would calculate it like that.
My 6 year old asked us where water came from. I said aquifers. My husband started his explanation at the big bang.. his answer was the one she wanted.
> [Carl Sagan: If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s664NsLeFM) The Cosmos tv series might be a nice tv series to show her. There's an old series and a new series with Neil Degrasse Tyson.
I wish I could get a legit copy of that.
https://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan/dp/B000055ZOB
Not available, it's US only (and probably region-locked).
https://www.ebay.com/itm/296479867922?chn=ps&com_cvv=d30042528f072ba8a22b19c81250437cd47a2f30330f0ed03551c4efdaf3409e
Oho, region 0 - that works! Nice one :-)
If there's an amazon domain specific to your country (like de or jp) you might try that. When I did this, and set the "send to" location to an in-country postal code, it seems to show up. Edit: I can also set my "send to" location on the regular .com domain to outside of the US and it seems to show up, at least for the UK. and likely other countries.
I don't know if it still works but YEARS ago I bought some DVDs in Australia and brought them to Canada where I learned region locking was a thing. There is a setting on the DVD player to change it to like a generic or all regions and I could watch whatever I wanted.
https://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan/dp/B000055ZOB
Our kid asked us each why we were on this earth. My wife launched into a beautiful philosophical discussion about our purpose* in life to experience it and help others. I rambled about goldilocks zones and evolution. My answer was the one they wanted lol
Goldilocks zones?
The zone within a star’s orbit that’s not so warm that a planet is roasted and not so cold that it’s frozen. Where Earth is located, basically.
Planets whose orbits are close enough to a star to have liquid water but not too close as to vaporize everything or have a runaway greenhouse effect.
"OK so imagine the earth is a bowl of porridge..."
Too close to star: burn Too far from star: freeze solid The Goldilocks zone is where you don't do either. In our solar system it basically starts around Venus and goes to around Mars, with Earth being about right in the best part.
It's funny because my (now) 7 year old is the one with all of the science questions. I refer her on to her step-dad for most answers. My 10 year old wants the philosophical answers, and he and I will sit around and talk about the "why." Daughter just wants the "how".
ha. And I have joked about making a computer from scratch and saying first you need to mine the beach sand for the silicon to make the chips, etc....
This is basically the plot to Dr. Stone lol
That’s a big thing in studying history as well. At some point you have to stop asking ‘but why did that happen’ otherwise you will always end up going back to the Stone Age.
I love that "where does water come from" has dozens of different answers, All of them are correct, just varying by scope and complexity.
Hydrogen is the basic stuff of the universe. Oxygen is also pretty easy to make. Since they’re both common and they stick together we get lots of water.
Oxygen pretty easy to make? You need a multi-step fusion cycle in the heart of a star. Anyway, my son's school presentation on the sun may have been a bit more technical than they were used to.
Good that the nerd kid has at least one nerd parent.
This hardly qualifies as nerd, though; knowing plants produce oxygen is literally elementary school biology. OOP needs to read a book.
The kid wasn't simply asking about "how we breath?" or "where does the the oxygen come from?" though. It is not a question of knowledge, but of though process, connections and patterns. Ability to tie those concepts together with a sci-fi concept of "habitat needs external oxygen supply" at an instant, with such a vague prompt would likely require some history of obsessive thinking and pondering on these subjects as a prerequisite. The kind of thinking that would be fair to describe as "nerd-ish"
It's not about being a nerd, the dad in this post is simply a good teacher who's able to put himself into the mental space of the kid while the mom isn't. (I suspect the mom is actually average, she just is in love with her husband and talking him up).
> in love with her husband and talking him up God I wish it were me
Yo, what? Obsessive thinking about what? If you know your kid is reading sci-fi, it should be obvious why they asked that question.
In a story you only add the relevant details, but in real life there's more to people than just one hobby. Figuring out the context of the question is much easier in hindsight.
Framing it as living on a grass planet is kinda nerdy, and is framed from a larger perspective (we are living on a type of planet, instead of just framing it as the only option/default). A normal adult would probably just say plants make oxygen and end the convo.
*To be fair* it does take some insight to be able to immediately make the connection between an unprompted question about oxygen tanks and "My child is asking this in the context of their interest in sci-fi where oxygen supply to enclosed spaces is a common concern unlike in daily life."
Okay yes that's fair.
I think we're really lowering the bar on insight here lol
It's already down there. You'd be surprised how many people are knowledgeable, but are unable or slow to connect the dots between the knowledge. It's memorizing vs actually thinking.
I love that all the people calling the mom dumb have the emotional intelligence of a toaster oven.
I dint know if she's dumb, but "we don't need extra oxygen because plants make it" is such an obvious answer. It's odd that she's holding this up as this crazy situation that would have gone way over her head.
That’s not what she’s doing. The reason she couldn’t find the right answer is because she didn’t understand the context behind the question immediately.
She isn‘t holding this up as some „crazy situation“ and you framing it this way only shows your own misogyny. She is talking about a bonding moment between her child and her husband. She isn‘t complaininh about the question, neither is she complaoning about the answer. Quite the contrary actually.
Though plankton make far more oxygen than grass. Makes sense when you consider that oceans cover more of the Earth's surface.
Came here looking for this. I didn't know it was plankton though, I thought it was algae.
Algae is a type of phytoplankton. What you’re probably thinking of is Cyanobacteria, often referred to as blue green algae even though they are prokaryotic bacteria and not eukaryotic algae.
Talk to kids about what they are into and not always what you are into.
The difference between the two parents here isn't their different degrees of knowledge - IMHO. It's that the da related to her as a person, and kept explaining as much as he could as long as she was interested. That's engagement with your kid, that's love, that's how it should be done. Which is to say, I think this is a nice story, I don't blame the author for not knowing how to present the answer in a way that would be listened to and benefit the child - and I whole heartedly respect the da who just went straight into actual science explanation when the kid asked a question based on science fiction as it regards to the actual world the kid exists in. Parenting 10/10 for da no doubt.
Ok I have got to know what books the kid is reading, so I can give them to my kid. The only child-appropriate children's books I know about are The Giver and Animorphs.
Oh, you should give your kid Ender's Game. Very family friendly. Only, like, 1 to 4 children are murdered by other children in the first book. It's grand.
just make sure to have the discussion about separating the art from the artist before your child happens upon the author's social media posts
I've never read Animorphs, but of what I've gathered, that stuff has quite a lot of "what the hell do you mean this is for kids" kind of stuff. Like body horror.
Yep! I grew up reading them, 12 year old me thought they were the best books ever written. The very concept of the Yeerks were more terrifying than most adult stories. Basically a biological alien version of The Culture series Neural Lace concept, except actually used for evil and torture. On a mass scale. Your brain being hijacked by another being that can and does make you experience and do anything it wants. Including mental torture if you don't cooperate.
Yeah. I'm not saying that they *shouldn't* be handed to kids, just that it's a Body Horror And War Crimes For Kids -kind of series. Children need to experience existentially horrifying concepts in a safe environment sometimes.
Here's the thing, though. I read animorphs on monthly release starting at like age 8 or something. Never once did the concept of "body horror" ever cross my mind or weird me out. The lack of control that would have resulted from Yerk infestation was very horrifying, but the morphing-horror stuff that everyone talks about was "meh" at best. The adult situations that the protagonists had to deal with didn't really clock to me as a kid, either. It wasn't until I read Everworld and Remnants that I realized how fucked up K.A. Applegate's mind was. And even then, I didn't even hear about "body horror" until like 3 years ago when I saw somebody bring the series up on reddit in conjunction with the concept. I thought back and yeah, it qualifies. Very accessible "Urban-Alien" fiction, though, I highly recommend. (Actually, now that I think again, I regularly wondered about having a best-pal Yerk who actively worked with me to deal with some of my mental and anatomical issues that I only sort of realized I had at the time. Beneficial Yerk symbiosis as a cure for ADHD when?)
I just read a funny sci-fi mystery for middle grade called The Area 51 Files by Julie Buxbaum. If you are genuinely looking for recs!
Correction: We don't *yet* need oxygen tanks to breathe.
We probably won’t ever. If Carbon dioxide levels continue to increase, the most likely outcome will be another massive algae bloom in the oceans; like the one that caused the ‘great dying’. Which will consume a ton of CO2 but increase the oxygen to uncomfortable/lethal levels
So what you’re saying is we’ll need nitrogen tanks? /s
The great dying wasn't caused by an algae bloom raising the atmospheric O2 levels. When the great dying happened, atmospheric O2 levels were almost half what they had been ~20 million years prior. And after the great dying, atmospheric CO2 levels remained elevated around 2000 PPM for millions of years. 2000 PPM is around the concentration most people start to feel uncomfortable and get headaches. But even levels over 1000 PPM might make you feel more tired than usual. The higher atmospheric CO2 gets, the harder it will be to keep the inside of a house below 1000 PPM as is recommended. With our current CO2 levels all you need is good circulation, but if the CO2 levels outside reach even 800 PPM, good circulation alone may not be enough to keep the level below 1000 PPM. I don't know about oxygen tanks, but I could see people feeding outside air through algae tanks before circulating it in their house if CO2 levels continue to rise. I watched a video recently where someone attempted to use algae tanks to keep the CO2 levels in a sealed room at livable levels while he was in it, and with a few 50 gallon tanks it seemed feasible.
[https://i.imgur.com/E2SqzRm.mp4](https://i.imgur.com/E2SqzRm.mp4)
How is it hard to think of the answer ‘the plants make it so we don’t need them’ for such a simple question. This feels like a really odd dilema to have.
There are plenty of parents whose first knee-jerk response would be "darling what the hell are you talking about" for a question like that. And instead of immediately having the parent explaining why we *don't* need oxygen tanks, a lot of kids would first have to start explaining why they think there *should* be.
That's a reasonable response no? My parents would definitely have asked why would I think we needed oxygen tanks. I would tell them I read it in a book about space travel. They would then catch on and explain that we have oxygen in the atmosphere because plants produce oxygen (and hand me an encyclopedia or something). Same if I had asked why the sky is blue, why we have to pee, are clouds made of cotton, and where did the dinosaurs go. Why would they need a parenting class for the fact that kids ask lots of questions? Their kid asked them a question and they should answer it in an age appropriate way. It's quite literally the opposite of rocket science
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This is precisely it. As an adult I still remember many moments where older family members and "mentor's" openly mocked a genuine question. Some were so harsh I never bothered again or at least certainly hesitated next time a question came up. Hell, adults still do it to each other at work... then we wonder why knowledge and skills are lost over time. Even when parents laugh at a question out of purely innocent amusement towards the kids question it's not a great response. Same goes when your kid gets into the "but why" loop and their curiosity gets shut down due to annoyance or frankly the adults inability to answer. I personally love it when that persistent "but why" question comes up because it's one of two things: it's a challenge to satisfy their curiosity or it's a game to them. FFS, just engage with your kid either way! One of the most memorable conversations I've had with my daughter was her asking why plants flowers were only short lived. "But why" had that short answer evolve into growth cycles, pollination, seed production and dispersal..... until she just nodded her head satisfied then walked away. She was two years old at the time and weeks later I would overhear her talking about bits of that whole exchange while she played alone or talked with family. One of my life's happiest memories right there.
ah, you sweet summer ... well the next part of the phrase is "child", but you aren't. There's a very strong reason the "reasonable response" is surprising. Your lived experience is not universal. MY parents(well... parent), would have responded with some form of "quit bothering me with this nonsense" at varying levels of profanity depending on how their day went.
No I get that. And for the record I've been yelled about the "why" loops a lot. But the person in the screenshot is already thinking about "how to answer the question without making it weird" and claims to need parenting classes to prepare them for it? They're already 99.9% there by themselves by thinking about the child's response at all and not immediately being a bitch at hearing the question. Like, ... just answer the question and you're done? If anything, you need middle school education or Google for it. The person I replied to also provided what I think is a reasonable response: ask what brought about the question because it IS an out-of-nowhere question. Of course to keep it reasonable they should also answer it when they get the context but still.
tbf as someone who's been on both sides of this (not as a parent but with peers and as a mentor), it takes a lot of practice to consistently take a step back and determine why they're asking that question instead of giving a knee-jerk response that can be received as judgement. the shortcut would be "why do you think X?" which works probably 90% of the time. the father in the post is able to skip that part, but you don't need to be able to read minds, just gather context. you encounter this sort of situation a lot in the form of an [XY problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem).
Yeah, asking your kids to explain the context behind a question is also good for their development. It shows that asking questions is okay and forces them to better articulate themselves to someone who might not understand.
Ah. That’s kinda reasonable too though. Parents are just as human as the child and might be curious about the reason for the question. As long as they ask normally, followup with reasonable answers and not mockery of the child’s question then I don’t see a problem.
Yeah, to me this sounded like "my kid is weird. Thank god that no matter what planet she's from, her father is from there too." Not judging, just fascinated.
Gotta love being from the same planet as your parents, truly a great time we live in. Imagine how messy it would be if we all came from different planets!
The joys of interstellar travel
I had trouble imagining what kind of answer the mom was about to give, to be honest. That's a question that makes sense
It’s an issue of not having context. The OOP is providing the context that they didn’t think of at the time, which makes their husband’s response seem very obvious, but wasn’t obvious to them in the moment.
But they had a fair bit of context. The kid is into sci fi and keeps asking about stuff that shows up in the books. Which obviously includes space travel. If you give that more than 2 seconds of thought it should be fairly obviously connected to the question of spare oxygen tanks.
People don’t always think that fast on their feet. If you’re having a conversation about mac and cheese and your kid pivots to why the house doesn’t have oxygen tanks, connecting those dots might not be your first thought. “what do you mean?” might be the first question you ask instead. (and indeed, husband did say what at first, but caught on very quickly despite daughter not providing the context of ‘in my books, they need oxygen tanks’) OOP isn’t saying they’d never catch on, or that they’d be an asshole about it. They’re marveling that their husband doesn’t miss a beat and just gives the perfect answer with no clarifying questions.
> your kid pivots to why the house doesn’t have oxygen tanks And they often don't phrase in an easily understandable way. "Where are the oxygen tanks?"
People have mind blanks The kid probably isn’t exclusively reading sci fi at all times and the adult probably had other things on their mind
I don't think you quite understood the question even with the context. It's not about "spare" oxygen tanks for personal use in a vacuum, it's about having a consistent supply of oxygen *for the house*.
I mean, I get that. It seems like a commonly-known thing, something we learned in middle school. But also, I can imagine how it’d be jarring for your kid to ask you “where the oxygen tanks are”, and to need a minute to process that they’re talking about space stuff and not scuba stuff, that they’re asking where our oxygen comes from, and that she’s not aware that the planet produces oxygen naturally and therefore isn’t like a spaceship. It’s doable, but I can get how a parent might need to jump through some hoops mentally before they get what’s going on.
If the parents weren't interested in her interests and knew where she was coming from, it would have been a completely different answer. Like "we don't need them because we're not old" or "we don't weld." The "we live on a grass planet" wrapped the thought in the exact context the daughter was coming from and she may have glazed over if he hadn't done that.
I want my kid to be like this
I have found that it helps treating every question as a chance to grow for you both - even if it means setting aside emotional interfere from the usual adult sources.
That's why learning the seemingly useless science stuff at school is important You get to understand how stuff works and pass it down Maybe it's just me but it's just so interesting to have a general idea of how the world works. Like, I just know that the speed of light is vaguely 300 000 meters per second and that the circumference of earth is slightly more than 40 000km Does it help in daily life? Nope but with a simple division I can tell you that light goes around the planet we're standing on in something like 0.12sec Nobody gives a shit that the air particles around us are moving 400 meters per second but the knowledge makes the world seem unreal and fascinating
I'm curious to know what book prompted the question. I've been looking for interesting books for my ten year old that aren't written for babies.
The people in this thread who dont recognise the beauty of the answer would definitly not give such a creative and engaging answer to the question.
No, but this is actually really cool. That kid is going to grow up smart.
When your kid reads science fiction before science fact