It was fun! I swear though, I saw at least two different cars with their flashers on, flowing their kids as they trick or treated. This is a tight neighborhood, you can hit like 20 houses just going down two streets. One was a mini van and I overheard the adult driving tell their kid (the doors and trunk were open) "no you get out and walk".

I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt here, maybe the parent is disabled. But 10 minutes later I saw another car on a different street doing what looked like the same thing.

Maybe its just a fluke thing! First time I've seen that though.

How was everyone else night?

My wife mentioned that her aunt wanted to buy our kids some history books. Come to find out, it was the fucking Tuttle Twins take on US history. I shot that down pretty quick, but realized my kids have zero US history books on their shelf. Because it's honestly really hard to find history books that don't, for example, glaze the founding fathers, downplay genocide and slavery, or portray the USSR as the "bad guys" in the cold war.

So I'm trying to find what I can, and it's a bit challenging. Most actual leftist history books for kids are more for that older kid / pre-teen age group, and my kids are still little. Does anyone know of some good US history books for kids? While I'd love an actual Marxist, historical materialist perspective, afaik no one's written that for little kids yet. I would settle for a more "liberal / progressive" take on US history so long as it's largely factual and avoids the reactionary crap most US history books for kids fall into.

I did find this Honest History Magazine that seems interesting, if anyone's familiar with it. They have a book on economics that from the little information provided, includes a correct definition of capitalism and talks about a time before capitalism, so right there it seems more correct that most.

How's the fam?

Hostess is a bougie white yoga lady. They're not gonna have pizza but "homemade hummus and salmon spread" and apple pie, and healthy cake lmao. No booze.

Lady my kid eats chicken nuggets... Barely

Starts at one and ends "whenever" and they've already told some of the kids there will be s'mores as the finish for "the second half"

Also it's hot as fuck, no breeze, and I am hungover.

Family this is violence.

I thought we all understood that these things were OBLIGATIONS that we endured for the sake of our kids. You scratch my back, I scratch yours, nobody goes a birthday with no guests. But the agreement is thus: you get three hours between noon and 3PM, there is an activity, you serve kid friendly snacks or pizza, cake and everyone leaves. This isn't a kids birthday party, it's performative bullshit. It's a hostage situation.

My wife asked the hostess if we should feed our kids if the expectation is that we will be there for, you know, 7 hours.

The response was, "I would say, go ahead and eat, but come ready to eat more"

What are you the fucking sphinx lol I can't even

For the past year the topic of a safe and suitable internet for children has been on my mind. Recent laws in various places, combined with parental outcry and action groups have made this matter more pressing. In this period, I connected with others and we have slowly started to work on a solution. The idea boils down to a general scheme that can be adopted by the Nostr ecosystem to provide an interoperable solution. Our group will lead the charge, but we are very open to dialogue and we encourage everyone to think and develop alongside us. The purpose of this article is above all a call to action for anyone interested and with opinions or ideas on the matter, to get involved.

I identify the situation as follows. Essentially it is a matter of risk management through trust. The risks are varied, from unwanted content to unwanted interactions. You want to avoid bad content like gore, you want to avoid bullies or worse and you want content that aligns with the norms and values of the upbringing you have in mind for your child. Given that the internet is a vast space, we need a method that is practical in achieving this. The complicating factor in all of this is that, especially when children get older, your ability as a parent to enact control over what your child is exposed to wanes. Their social circles grow and they become more crafty in escaping whatever blockades you have set up. Becoming more independent is a crucial part of growing up, but the internet itself contains so many harmful elements that the risks quickly become too large.

It is for this reason the resolute urge to ban, block, limit and clamp down on the internet and the hardware and software to access it, for the sake of the children, is at the very least understandable. Unfortunately it is a road that certain jurisdictions are already going down to varying degrees. Banning smartphones, mandatory government ID uploads; they are all exponents of a method that can only move in the direction of being more totalitarian. That is to say, the logic is that the entirety of the internet has to adjust to the risk tolerance we have in relation to children, forcing adults to give up their free and open internet.

The best way to counter this dynamic is to come up with an alternative, simply because the demand for a safe and suitable internet for children won’t go away and is reasonable to begin with. It is a hard problem, not just because it is a matter of moderation, but perhaps more importantly one of incentives. Creating separate locked-down environments for your child is not that hard. The issue is as mentioned before, at a certain point children have motivation to break free from that environment. The older they get, the more these restrictions become more apparent because they realize there is more out there, perhaps via interactions with peers who operate in less or differently restricted environments.

This leads me to the following:

1. No Bubble Boy: any demand for zero-risk is unreasonable. Instead, the demand should be on the ability to control for risk, such that freedoms can increase as they grow older, in line with what a parent deems a reasonable level of responsibility in relation to the child’s level of development.
2. Overly restrictiveness is motivation for escape. Following 1, the system should be flexible in its ability to adapt to the ever-changing social context of a child while growing up, and allow for interactions with others to the degree that moderation overlaps.
3. Internet hygiene. As with anything, what is appropriate depends on time, place and crowd. The system should be able to enforce what occurs where, and under what name. Teaching children how to navigate the internet while protecting them from mistakes.
4. Practicality. Parents should actually be able to operate the system, given that they have more to do in their lives other than judging content, and figuring out complicated settings.

With those four things in mind, I think Nostr specifically is able to provide a solution. To be clear, this is a moonshot project. It will require all aspects and tricks in the Nostr toolbox, from cryptography, clients, relays, web of trust and signing bunkers. With the long list of requirements and low risk tolerance involved some complexity is unavoidable. Yet this will only succeed if it remains simple enough such that developers actually bother to implement these things in an interoperable way. Months of thinking and internal discussion has led to an initial proposal of something that is semi-concrete. Hopefully it is enough of a starting point that open discussion can be had such that it can be optimized and find support in the broader ecosystem.

In the next article I will provide a technical description of the system I have in mind.

Title. My kid is 11 and I'd love to get them started on leftist thought. Something like a gentle introduction to how the world works and how of could be better. A manga format would be awesome, but I know that's asking a lot.

Deep in the comments is a user crying about communists.

My 4-year-old has reached a big milestone. We’ve been sending surprise messages from across the living room with our Lego train all morning. They’ve produced their first Trogdor the Burninator. Look at all of its majesty.

I have ADHD and was diagnosed as an adult. Even when I'm caught up on meds and everything I'm having a severe mental block when it comes to playing with dolls and action figures and similar toys.

My kid is just barely 4 and loves playing with toys now more than they ever have before. I feel like such a shit dad because it's so hard for me to give the scene my undivided attention and I clearly don't play for long enough intervals to satisfy them.

Any tips? They're an only child and i try to deflect and go outside or suggest books or arts and crafts but once again that makes me feel like I'm telling them what to play instead of playing with them.

I am looking for advice however i will say now that just powering through and playing with the dang toys works sometimes but not nearly as often as I'd like

Just wanted to pass this along to people! Read more here: https://www.feelyourbestself.org/introduction

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5983815

My kid’s been doing art for a while now and is feeling their first plateau of improvement. Anyone have any formal resources online that are free and would be appropriate for them? They’re about 10.

How do ya'll handle infant childcare in regards to Covid? Trying to figure out if me and my partner should put our less than 6 month old into daycare or not. Really really worried about exposing him and us to repeat infections. But my partner and I both work full time almost entirely in person. I think I could swing a remote job with childcare help from grandparents (who are vaxed, but don't mask and travel a lot :/) potentially. Kinda leaning towards that especially since hearing the news that Covid vaccines might be banned in good ol' AmeriKKKa by the time we can get it for them. Not feeling great about going out of the country for it and potentially getting detained at the border on the way back either.

And once our kid is old enough to go to school, is virtual maybe worth it? I know not seeing other kids/teachers in person is not great, but neither are the long term health complications from getting Covid constantly. Hoping maybe I can find some cool parents that also care about Covid to meet up with, but I'm not holding my breath for that.

I look my baby in the eyes every morning when they give me a big dumb gummy smile and I just want to do the best I can. I don't want them to get sick, I don't want them to be isolated completely from any peers, I love them so goddamn much. I just don't even know what doing my best looks like in a country that would rather let its most vulnerable die out of sight than mandate even the most basic precautions.

This shit sucks.

The fam, how is?

I love the toniebox it's so great and I'm so so happy that we became parents before AI becomes a part of raising kids... This stuff is so bleak...

For those who don't know what a toniebox is, it's a speaker connected to the internet. You can buy figurines (or borrow them from the local library) which have an NFC code to identify the figurine to the box, download the audio associated with it and play it. Effectively the toddler can choose what they want to listen to by selecting the figurine. Seeing them choose which story or songs they want to listen to is very cool.

And if they change their mind, then can just autonomously select a different figurine.