the full piece on The Local<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI’m glad to see adults outside alternative education taking note of how condescending and authoritarian adults’ treatment of children is. It does, however, chalk up the children’s inferior planning skills to their age, which isn’t really fair (besides being ageism.)<\/p>\n
I bet these kids would be much better at planning if they were allowed to plan more. Since their parents “aren’t hippies” \u2013 which apparently means they go to traditional schools \u2013 they’ve spent the better part of the day every day for years in an environment in which a clock tells them what to do when. How on earth are they supposed to learn how to plan anything<\/em>?<\/p>\nNot to mention budget management. In a Sudbury school, the Metzger children would have had the right to participate in school budget decisions \u2013 which are boring, so they probably wouldn’t, but if they did they’d know more about budgets \u2013 and they would be able to consult with friends amongst the students and staff who have more experience with money.<\/p>\n
I guess the thing that disturbs me most about this is that even when a couple is willing to give their children serious responsibility, they do it in this temporary, schizophrenic way. Children actually can<\/em> deal with real responsibility and control over their life, but that doesn’t mean the children should swap roles with the parents. There’s quite a lot of room for treating each other equally and respectfully within a parent-children relationship, without either side going all authoritarian on the other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I came across this piece on English-language Germany news site TheLocal.de: Family puts kids in charge for a month A German author and his wife put themselves to the biggest test of their lives last year by handing over the family power to their two children for a month. The biggest challenge? Managing the budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[29,43,44,56,487,66,96,97,101,102,133,135,147],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2178"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2612,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178\/revisions\/2612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}