| Original Message |
Wayne (no login)
Posted Jan 16, 2005 6:02 PM
More comments:
I was looking at a parenting site (I have two granddaughters) for an answer to a question and found something interesting. There was an extensive discussion of a boy and girl sharing a bedroom, and at what age they needed to stop. The question had come up because a lot of the parents were to poor to be able to afford a bedroom for each child.
One group of parents thought that they should stop sharing by about age 5, and the other well before puberty. However, there were also a lot of postings by parents who had shared a bedroom as children. These all thought that, as long as the kids wanted to share, kids should be allowed to continue sharing longer than they had. The ones who had stopped sharing when the were little thought that it was OK until puberty, and the ones who had shared until puberty thought that it was OK through high school. The ones who had shared through high school didn't understand what the fuss was about. They hadn't had any problems.
There were also ones who had shared and didn't like it, but their complaints were the same as those who had shared with a sibling of the same sex.
Two other interesting things were mentioned. Sharing was much more common in other countries than the US, and not sharing in the US was only a middle class phenomenon. The lower class couldn't afford a bedroom for each child. The upper class thought that independent bedrooms didn't properly socialize their kids. Someone pointed out that the Kennedys son and daughter had shared a bedroom in the White House.
I, like my son, was an only child, so I missed out on all of this. There are advantages to being an only child, but there are disadvantages too.
I remember the Coppertone ad, and yes, advertisers have changed for the worse with the times. Innocent things, like this, are becoming bad, while many obviously bad things are acceptable.
I remember when the movie ratings first began, and I couldn't remember what they meant until I read about some kid telling his mother how to remember them: R=raw, X=extra raw, G=gooey, and PG=pretty gooey. I thought that the ratings were useless. I didn't see anything wrong with kids seeing any of those. What I didn't want them to see was violence, and the rating system has always been worthless to those of us who see sex as normal and violence as abnormal.
I read an interesting book that I found at www.books-reborn.org about the connection between sexually repressive societies and violence. It was Infant and Child Sexuality, A Sociological Perspective, by Floyd Martinson. Unfortunately, books reborn is "temorarily unavailable." I suspect until we get a less sexually repressive government, as they had a number of books on the subject. The book basically said that if the society attempts to supress sexuality of both children (birth to puberty) and those just past puberty, the result is a violent society. The book was written in the 1970s. What bothers me now it that I see that our society is becoming increasingly sexually repressive and increasingly violent and now I can't even find anything on the Internet to ask someone to read to learn about the connection.
An obituary for the author is nteresting http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2372/is_4_37/ai_72276005 because it shows that even a religious college used to be willing to publish this kind of information.
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