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Welcome to "5 Dangerous Things you should let your children do"

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I don't have children I borrow my friends' children, so ...

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Take all this advice with a grain of salt

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I'm Gever Tulley

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I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the "Tinkering School"

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It's a summer program which aims to help kids learning how build things that they think of, so

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We build a lot of things and i do put Power Tools into the hands of second-graders

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So, if you're thinking about sending your kid to Tinkering School, they do come back bruised, scrapped and bloody, so

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You know, we live in a world that is subjected to ever more strengthen child safety regulations

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There doesn't seem to be any limit on how crazy child safety regulations can get

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we put suffocation warnings on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the US

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or for sale with an item in the US

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we put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot

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and we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball

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is too sharp for children under the age of 10

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so, where does this train stop?

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when we round every corner, and eliminate every sharp object, every poky bit in the world, then

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the first time that kids come in contact with anything sharp or not made out of round plastic they hurt themselves with it

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so, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zone grow ever smaller

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we cut off our children from valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them

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and despite of all our best efforts and intentions

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kids are always gonna figure out

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how to do the most dangerous thing they can

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in whatever environment they can

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so, despite the provocative title, this presentation is really about Safety

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and about how some simple things that we can do to raise our kids to be

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creative, confident and in control of the environment around them

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and what i now present to you is an except from a book in progress

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book is called "50 dangerous things..." this is "5 dangerous things..."

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Thing number 1: "Play with fire"

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learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature

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is a pivotal moment in any child's personal history

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whether we remember it or not, its the first time we really get control of one of this misterious things

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these misteries are only revealed to those who get the opportunity to play with it

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so, playing with fire, this is like one of the great things we ever discovered: fire

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from playing with it, they learn some of the basic principles about fire

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about intake, about combustion, about exhaust

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these are the 3 working elements of fire that you have to have, to have a good controlled fire

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and... you can think of the open pit fire as a laboratory

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you don't know what they're gonna learn from playing with it, you know,

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let them fool around with it, in their own terms, and trust me

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they're gonna learn things that you can't get out of playing with "Dora the Explorer" toys

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Number 2: "Own a pocket knife"

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Pocket knives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness

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which i think it's a terrible thing

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your first pocket knife is like the first universal tool that you're given

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you know, it's a spatula, it's a pry-bar, it's a screwdriver and it's a blade, yeah

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it's a powerful and enpowering tool

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and a lot of cultures they give knives like as soon as

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their toddlers have knives

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these are Inoui children cutting whale blubber

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i first saw this in a canadian filmboard film, when i was 10

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and if left a lasting impression

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to see babies playing with knives

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and it show that kids can develop an extended sense of self through a tool

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at a very young age

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you lay down a couple of very simple rules:

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1: always cut away from your body

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2: keep the blade sharp

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3: never force it

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and these are things kids can understand and practice with in

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yeah, they're gonna cut themselves, i've some terrible scars in my legs

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from when i stabbed myself but, you know,

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they're young, they heal fast, so

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Number 3: Throw a Spear

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it turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing things,

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and like muscles, there... if you don't use parts of your brain they

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then to atrophy over time, and ...

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but when you excercise them, any given muscle, adds strength to your whole system

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and that applies to your brain too

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so, practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the

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frontal and parietal lobes which had to do with visual accurity,

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3D understanding and structured problem solving

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so it helps develop their visualization skills and their predictability

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and throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skills

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so it's very good for you, kind of whole body training

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these kinds of target-based practice

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also help to our kids develop attention and concentration skills so

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those are great

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Number 5: Deconstruct Appliances

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there's a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher

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next time you're about to throw out an appliance, don't throw it out

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take it apart with your kid

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or send them to my school and we'll take it apart with them

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even if you don't know what the parts are

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puzzling out: "What they might be for?"

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is a really good practice for the kids to get sort of the sense that

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they can take things apart

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and no matter how complex they are, they can understand parts of them

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and that means that eventually, i can understand all of them

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it's a sense of "knowability", that something is knowable

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so this black boxes that we will work and take for granted are actually

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complex things made by other people and you can understand them

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Number 5: Two-parter!?

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Break the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act"

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there are laws beyond the safety regulations

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that are tempted to limit how we can interact with the things that we own

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in this case: digital media

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it's a very simple excercise: buy a song on iTunes, write it to a CD

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then rip the CD to an MP3 and play it on your very same computer

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you've just broken a law, technically the RIAA could come and prosecute you

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it's an important lesson for kids to understand that some of these laws

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get broken by accident and that laws have to be interpreted

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that's something we often talk about with the kids

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when we're fooling around with things

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and break them open and take them apart for using it for other things

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and also when we go out and drive a car

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Driving a car is a really impowering act for a young child

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so this is the ultimate...

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for those of you who are unconfortable actuallly breaking the law

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you can drive a car with your child

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this is a great stage for a kid

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this happens about the same time that they get latched on the things like dinosaurs

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these big things in the outside world that they're trying to get a grip on

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car is a similar object, and they can get in a car and drive it

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it's a really like... gives them a handle in a world in a way

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they wouldn't... they don't often have access to

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so it's perfectly legal: find a big empty lot, make sure it's nothing in it

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and it's on private property, and let them drive your car

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it's very safe actually...

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and it's fun for the whole family!

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so let's see... i think that's it

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that's number 5 and a half. OK