My Children Need to Visit New Guinea

Jared Diamond, in his new book The World Until Yesterday, claims that among New Guinean hunter gatherers, the Andaman Islanders, and the Piraha Indians of Brazil, children of nine or ten years old often leave their families to journey to other villages and live with foster parents, cousins, or other various allo-parents -- these children are autonomous, entrepreneurial  and adventurous . . . meanwhile, my kids can barely tie their own shoes.

5 comments:

  1. your kids are fucking robinsons crusoe compared to mine. we've started deliberately making them do stuff which scares them (and us).

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  2. Maybe we can get a group rate on plane tickets. One way.

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  3. Forget your kids, was the book good?

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  4. great book, still working on it . . .

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