June 13, 2007

The Aardvaark

Discovered an interesting web service today – ToonDoo 🙂 They allow you to create your own webcomic by dragging and dropping various components via a pretty easy to use web interface. What I came up with appears at the end of this post.

My cartoon is not a commentary on America or the Bush government or politics in general :p It’s actually about something which happened a couple of days ago in a mailing list I was on.

The thing is, I think that most people take that kind of behaviour for granted and don’t see the harm in it. We punish small children to stop them from doing something bad. Sometimes we spank them. We see nothing wrong. In fact, we’ll come up with all those old truisms like "spare the rod and spoil the child". But what are we actually teaching the kid? If we don’t explain things to them, then we are simply teaching them that it’s OK to physically intimidate somebody else.

And don’t get me started on how we carry on this kind of behaviour after we (supposedly) reach adulthood. I’ll let the cartoon speak on my behalf :p

[pg-image src=”http://www.toondoo.com//public/Fahim/toons/cool-cartoon-27612.png” caption=”My Cartoon” link=”http://www.toondoo.com/View.toon?param=27612″]

Tags: Interesting, Internet, Reflections
Posted by Fahim at 3:00 pm   Comments (3)

3 Responses to The Aardvaark

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#1
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Rajendran Dandapani 13 June 2007 at 4:53 pm

Hi,
Thanks for writing about ToonDoo, and glad you liked it.

I really appreciate the point you are making here, by the way.
You seem to have understood the biggest mistake parents make when bringing up children.
That demonstrating a different behaviour than what they preach can be the most distressing message they can send to their kids!

I would like to invite you to join the Parenting Bloggers at http://blogs.jambav.com.
We have a large community of parent and educator bloggers out there, who would love to hear more about your thoughts on child-rearing.

Thanks.

Rajendran.
ToonDude from http://www.jambav.com

#2
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Jesse Gardner 14 June 2007 at 8:48 am

What happens when the people who need to change their behavior (i.e. kids) don’t share the same values as you, and what if, worse yet, they are harming others by their behavior? At some point someone has to set up restrictions and consequences; the worst parents I’ve ever seen are the ones who take no action to correct or discipline their children. (I taught for 5 years and discovered that the hardest part of teaching is dealing with parents…)

#3
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Fahim 14 June 2007 at 8:59 am

I’m not saying that kids have to be taught certain values – what I’m saying is that physical punishment is not the way to do it because we don’t teach them much there than the fact that if you are stronger or bigger, you can enforce your views on anybody. I’ve dealt with kids most of my life and they respond fine when you explain something to them in *their* terms. It works better than saying “Because I say so!” and hopefully, it also teaches them something that they can use in turn later on in life 🙂

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