I Want to Hold Your Hand - The Beatles
“I’ll tell you something, I think you’ll understand…”
Lets play a game.
The FIRST power you get is the power you have in a zombie apocalypse.
Reblog and add your power, how does it help you survive?
“Enhanced Chakram Skill: the ability to possess great skill in wielding chakrams. A variation of Weapon Proficiency.”
So I get to be a Xena/TRON combination? Deal.
“Angel Soul: the ability to have the soul of an Angel.”
Empathy, Invulnerability, Physical Godhood - would be nice to have gotten some powers I didn’t already have, but what’s a frog to do? I suppose I’ll take it.
Childhood movies taught me the most important thing of all: parents aren’t always right and they don’t always know what’s best for you.
look how many notes this thing has
Which doesn’t mean that you should brush off everything your parents say which you don’t agree with as unimportant or ‘not what [you] need right now’, I should like to add, because that’s a load of bollocks which has unfortunately become a trend.
Parents (almost) universally want what’s best for their children - because that’s what love is. However, they don’t always know what’s best - because that’s what being human is. Of course, the same goes for children; neither position comes with a manual that explains what’s actually best, so we’re all just left to guess and hope we guess right. Occasionally that means we’re going to disagree.
What we all need to realise (and this applies to more than just parenting) is that a difference of opinion is not an obstacle or a threat, but an opportunity - if we always agreed with each other we’d never learn anything new, and by talking through our disagreements we all stand to learn something. I know it seems clichéd to say parents and children need to talk more, but communication really is the most powerful tool that human beings have access to, and it’s a pity that we’re often so reluctant to use it. Parenting (and growing up, for that matter) certainly isn’t easy, and if you’ve got access to a tool like that you really ought to be using it…
(Source: dreamberks)
While these are all great I’m sure, I’d like to point out that allowing your child to drink alcohol before the legal drinking age (whether it’s 16 or 18), even in a family setting, is not a good idea. Whichever way you turn it, alcohol damages the body, and to allow a child to consume it while he or she is still growing is not going to do them any favours, to say the very least.
Moreover, there is no certainty that the child in question will not start rebelling or drink less than their peers whose parents have kept them away from alcohol altogether. My parents let my younger sister and I have a taste of alcohol before we were of drinking age (16 here in the Netherlands, so you can guess quite how young we were), and while I have never felt a need to start drinking myself into a stupor, my sister was of a whole different mindset. There have been quite a few nights where she came home so drunk that she started throwing up in the garden and was still at it when my father finally managed to get her in the bathroom.
My point is that hypothetical parents would do better to talk with their children about alcohol. Don’t be preachy, don’t be indifferent. Just talk about it. Of course I can’t guarantuee that your hypothetical kids will not want to drink after that talk, but that’s human nature. They’re going to want to experiment anyway, so as far as that goes I absolutely do agree with the child being able to call mum or dad when things go awry.
I absolutely agree with you, and the same can be said about everything: talking to children as though they’re actual people (which, it turns out, they are) is really the only rule of parenting. They’re not computers to be programmed or dogs to be trained, and they can’t be tricked or coerced into doing what’s right - like every other person they have to understand the value in doing something to do it, and the only way that’s going to happen is if you communicate what you understand to them. Putting it so simply makes it sound easier than it often is, but that’s really all there is to it so it’s generally worth the effort.
As for alcohol in particular, I may be a bit biased as I don’t drink at all (for personal reasons), but I agree that exposing growing bodies to it is an especially risky practice. Brains in particular take an awful lot of time to fully develop, and that’s not something I’d feel comfortable jeopardising even in a small way. Starting in a family setting allows parents to control things like quantity and helps prevent bad decisions, but it doesn’t change the fact that alcohol is something that doesn’t belong in a body - strong, grown bodies are designed to recover from those things readily enough, but growing bodies just aren’t as well-equipped to handle it…
(Source: lower-class-brat)
raficat asked:
hehe, just joined tumblr, still figuring it out but wanted to comment re your post on "what is love": "Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." - Robert Heinlein
There’s a reason I phrased my response the way I did, and quotes like this are part of it. If you hold it to be true that happiness is always what’s best for a person, then it follows that love is simply about wanting them to be happy - the thing is, I don’t personally believe that. I was trying to avoid infusing my personal opinions on what’s best for a person - as that’s a whole other can of worms - which unfortunately also means forgoing the handy quips.
Happiness is a perfectly natural thing of course, but so are sadness and anger and fear - each of those has their place and their purpose, and I simply don’t hold any of them to be inherently ‘better’ or more valuable than the others. I think the deification of happiness (and similarly, the demonisation of sadness and pain) are more obstacles to true wellbeing than they are ways of achieving it…
