My Taiwan wife’s family is applying a very interesting experiment on a living child in Taipei. Not my wife’s kid, let me make this clear. The kid is basically raised by his grandma (mother too busy with shopping) and besides school and english school the kid is sitting the whole day in front of the TV watching (99% of the time) japanese cartoons - many hours a day. It was leading to very interesting medical results.
First, the kid is fat, had several eye operations and does hardly know where to find his shoes, if they are a few meters away from him. Since a few month, he is developing interesting nervous symptoms. His face muscles are suddendly moving in all kinds of directions, sometimes accompanied by strange noises. Questioning of the subject revealed, he is now trying to copycat 10 different cartoon characters, but all of the same time.
I cannot wait until they introduce “smell TV” here, will provide interesting results with the little subject.
As a therapy, I suggested “playing football” or anything away from the TV. “Not possible” the family repeats in chorus: kidnapping, traffic …
he be kidnapped or hit by 10 chars in 5 minutes.
I keep you updated, when he develops other symptoms.
[quote=“bob_honest”]As a therapy, I suggested “playing football” or anything away from the TV. “Not possible” the family repeats in chorus: kidnapping, traffic …
he be kidnapped or hit by 10 chars in 5 minutes.[/quote]
Did the family consider actually playing WITH the kid as opposed to just sending the little bugger out there on his own? I see kids outside playing all the time in my neighborhood, often with parental supervision. Can’t grandma at least take him to a park where there may be other kids to play with?
Experiment my ass! These people sound lazy to me. It’s much easier to sit “xiao pangdz” in front of the TV all day then interact with him - tai duo mafan.
I will make a list of what I have seen concerning parents/kids but first I gotta ask Maoman and Gus if they have enough space on this site…my list is kinda large. :s
What was the name of the American psychologist who did fear experiments with babies in the 20’s or 30’s? The ones where, through negative reinforcement the babies learned to fear anything furry…
I saw a film of that once. Hard to believe anyone ever thought that was o.k.
Perhaps someone did similar experiments with Fred Smith as an infant except the negative reinforcement was with all things French.
We should write a book together. I think it would make a child psychologist’s head spin.
I could include the story of the 4-year old I had three years ago who spent 6+ hours in front of a computer, force-fed with a bottle while he slept because he refused to eat healthy food (actually, as his mother told me later when I confronted her about his red bean bun and chocolate milk lunches, he didn’t eat “anything that was not sweet”), and was fed chocolate cake instead of his usual school snack of Oreo cookies for a week because the cookies were too hard for his recently filled molars.
The boy could barely walk, talk, run, climb, and was always coated with a layer of sweat from simply sitting down and standing up again. His mother bowed to his every whim, even letting him drag her away by simply tugging on her shirt as she took a step toward him while I was trying to have a discussion with her.
He was a big boy, even though developmentally he was lower than the children a full year younger than him.
I would love to see him now. Then again, I might be saddened by it.
… after reading the post above, I will never complain again how they treat him. At least my gunieapig has a little “brother” from other sister to play with.
Most experiments that I have done were on non-living children. I find that sitting a dead child in front of the TV has little effect on them in the main.
ImaniOU this sounds sooo familiar. My boss and his wife treat there 4 year old exactly the same! He can’t even talk, cause they don’t talk to him and if they do it’s either no, no, no or similiar short sentences in either Chinese, English or German and the little fellow just doesn’t know what to answer…poor guy.
I think this or something like it is going on all over the world and has been for quite some time.
[quote][In the late 19th century, in the West,] [t]o pacify children, chemists, confectioners, and door-to-door salesmen sold narcotic lozenges, prepared with morphine and opium. Teething, which was considered a major health problem for infants and was described as a period filled with “terror to a mother’s imagination,” was often recorded as the actual cause of death of a child, although now it is thought that the deaths were probably caused by the teething powders themselves, which were made of chloride of mercury and opium.[/quote] (footnotes omitted) Please see pediatrics.aappublications.org/c … 114/3/e378
[quote]Undernourished, yellow-skinned [i.e., probably from jaundice], in the words of one contemporary observer, [these opium-addicted children] “shrank up into little old men or wizened like a little monkey.” [/quote]Please see bookfinder.us/review1/0312206674.html
I think the things that this thread refers to, and other things that strike us as especially bizarre or disturbing (even when we take human beings’ poor track record into account), are evidence of some kind of force in the world that is beyond anyone’s control to stop, and that it’s probably going to take us where it will.
Taiwan is in flux as it seeks to fully connect to the latest version of this modern, commercial-industrial thingamajig that the West has been hooked up to for several centuries. I don’t know what to do about them any more than I know what to do about my own society.
[quote]We’re caught in the trade winds
The trade winds of our time [/quote]
“Trade Winds,” Ralph MacDonald & Bill Salter (ca. 1972)
I hada six year old bring whiskey bottle to school as a water bottle. his mom thought it was cute and that it was ok. I took it away and he screamed for an hour. he also usedto let the snot drip from his nose into his mouth alot.
You could try relating to the parents some medical facts concerning childhood obesity and the way it effects the rest of the child’s life. (I don’t know what those facts are but I would guess that they would be easy to find.) If that doesn’t work you could try taking him out for a walk yourself. Or you could phone the police annonymously and report a case of child abuse. You would want to make the call from a pay phone of course. Don’t forget to record the call. Then send the tape to the newspapers and if the police happen to show up at the child’s house, phone the TV stations (they love that stuff) or else secretly film the entire episode yourself on your handy handicam. Perhaps the TV stations will give you a few grand for the footage.
… hmmm now he and my wife are singing “Laowai” the whole day when they see me and are making some duck-dance (german: Ententanz) gesture running behind me. I think it is getting worse.
By the way, my wife watches the same tv cartoons.
I try to keep them at distance by throwing chocolate flakes and gum drops to them, but it does not really help.
… I know, next time I will turn on the TV quickly, this should make them both quiet again.
:s
