Great discussion! You win the shitty redditor award for Christmas Day!

You said yourself “when I have kids”, and you even did you were going to be bad at it. I’m not assuming anything. You’re the one assuming that me, a teacher of 15 years and father of 2, “doesn’t listen” to kids.

No need to be a smart ass.

> I’m going to be the worst parent when I have kids.

So you are just speculating, but you don’t actually know. Yeah there are a lot of differences between a 3 year old and a 7 year old, but can you give a percentage to determine exactly how much better at making decisions a 7 year old is than a 3 year old? How much more reliable are they verbally? It’s also heavily dependent on the actual kid - I would trust my 2 year old more in some situations than I would trust some od the high school kids I teach.

You’re advocating for giving a 2nd grader some voice in their own choices, which is fine. You have to give them some responsibility to teach them about it, yeah. But spend some time around that age group and you’ll realize that they will do shit like refuse to put on a jacket when it’s negative windchill just because an adult is asking them to. Or maybe their friend has a cooler jacket than them and they would rather freeze their balls off than feel embarrassed by their “dumb” jacket. Or maybe their dad didn’t let them play Fortnite as long as they wanted to, so wearing the jacket becomes a line in the sand against his dad.

You might think I’m exaggerating for the sake of an internet argument, but I’ll circle back to my original statement:

When you have kids, you’ll revisit just letting kids of that age do what they tell you they want to do. The parents who actually do employ the “never say no” approach don’t even realize the disaster they set up for their kids when it comes to socialization, and yes, other people can always tell.

And as far as your “nosey teacher” comment, do you actually have any concept of what would happen to a teacher if they actually let a kid outside in the cold without being dressed properly? “Johnny said he was warm enough”…don’t you think someone might eventually ask “why did you listen to a 7 year old”? If you are going to be a hyper progressive parent, that’s fine, but teachers literally don’t have the freedom to make that choice.

> if a child says theyre not cold, perhaps we should listen.

You’ll revisit this statement when you have a toddler. I get what you’re saying, but sometimes it’s literally not as simple as “just listen to them”, because they will kill themselves and others around them.