http://mannahattamamma.com/2009/11/be-careful-youre-boring-me/ Perpetually Ambivalent New Yorker...Now Living in Abu Dhabi, UAE Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:15:20 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 http://mannahattamamma.com/2009/11/be-careful-youre-boring-me/comment-page-1/#comment-82 a guy Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:15:47 +0000 http://mannahattamamma.com/wp/?p=110#comment-82 P.S. If you're interested, one reference to the adolescent morality stuff: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17IDEA.html?ei=5070&en=5ef857a4de... P.S. If you’re interested, one reference to the adolescent morality stuff:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17IDEA.html?ei=5070&en=5ef857a4de...

]]> http://mannahattamamma.com/2009/11/be-careful-youre-boring-me/comment-page-1/#comment-81 a guy Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:14:20 +0000 http://mannahattamamma.com/wp/?p=110#comment-81 You've probably already heard about the research that shows young people--up to their 20s--don't have fully formed moral reasoning. This is brain research not just mushy psych inference. One of the things that separates good adolescents from bad ones, then, is being trained into someone else's well-developed, articulated morality. I wonder if (in fact I suspect that) there's an analogous purpose to cautioning. On some level, they may be literally not capable of being careful by themselves, but they have a better shot at being so if you provide the parameters. I don't mean *teaching* them proper caution, not in any deep way. I mean offering it to them as a prosthetic device until they are old enough to have their own. Just a theory. But I remember when they (you know, them) realized that talking baby talk was actually good for infant brain development, affirming what was literally an instinct mothers have all over the world. I bet this warning stuff is similarly instinctual and similarly right and good. You’ve probably already heard about the research that shows young people–up to their 20s–don’t have fully formed moral reasoning. This is brain research not just mushy psych inference. One of the things that separates good adolescents from bad ones, then, is being trained into someone else’s well-developed, articulated morality. I wonder if (in fact I suspect that) there’s an analogous purpose to cautioning. On some level, they may be literally not capable of being careful by themselves, but they have a better shot at being so if you provide the parameters. I don’t mean *teaching* them proper caution, not in any deep way. I mean offering it to them as a prosthetic device until they are old enough to have their own. Just a theory. But I remember when they (you know, them) realized that talking baby talk was actually good for infant brain development, affirming what was literally an instinct mothers have all over the world. I bet this warning stuff is similarly instinctual and similarly right and good.

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