My baby makes a lot of shouts and cries, but isn’t verbal yet, so no Das Kapital just yet. Any parents out there with 2-4 year olds who ask loads of questions? I’d like to try to outline the child-accessible topics that we might run into in the course of a day: sharing items, roles of people in society (“daddy why does that man want to pick up trash?” Etc), the value of money (“I want that one [toy/candy]!” “Why can’t I have it?” Etc), polite behaviour to others. Anyone have any experiences with this? Or any useful “buzz words” that kids might use that open up a teaching opportunity? Have a great weekend comrades, take care of yourselves!

  • @Odinkirk
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    44 years ago

    I’ll share a few things my dad did:

    • He stressed the value that “nobody is free unless/until everybody is free”
    • I remember him taking the box of breakfast cereal and going into detail about how the people had to grow the grain, how people had to take the grain to be processed, how people would work to turn the grain into cereal and box it up, how people would take the boxes to distribution centers and then stores. Then, people working at the store would stock the shelves and keep the store running so we could buy the cereal. And that’s just for the cereal. So much work by so many people so that we could have breakfast. It broke my little brain, in a good way.
    • He stressed critical thinking skills from a young age and wouldn’t accept sloppy reasoning. He encouraged exploration of a topic and his teaching method itself was dialectical in nature. He wasn’t unkind about it but he was firm.

    Also consider Tales For Little Rebels

  • Free PalestineA
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    35 years ago

    I wish I could be more engaged with this community, but my child lives with her mother and I’m somewhat forced to be absentee for reasons I don’t wanna get deep into, so I live a bit vicariously through a friend who has a daughter of similar age. My friend likes to use terms like “friendship”, “compassion”, “justice”. etc. when her smol human starts on that neo-liberal shit. Sometimes that works, but sometimes the child’s just too young to internalize anything that’s said to her.