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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by loathar Maybe if we can get the ignorant parents to stop buying their kids cell phones, video games,bling bling, and home entertainment centers for their rooms,kids would gravitate towards trains instead of prisons or cemetaries. [/quote] Gee loathar, what a radical concept :) I called my cell phone company for some support a few weeks ago. Their parting gesture was to try and sell me on a phone for my 5 year old! We go into the video store, to get to the kids videos which now seem to be buried in the middle of the store, we have to go past all the X-Box and PS/2 games. Not to mention running the gauntlet of the candy to get out of the store! Somebody else posted inthis thread pondering if what kids are exposed to has an effect on them. The answer is, of course it does. Whatever we might think about kids, they will be influenced disproportionately by the influence we attempt to exert over them. As an example - why did my 5 year old get up this morning and ask if I would come and play trains with her? She gets to do it with dad. I never say no to anything reasonable. She has her own layout, her own loco's (currently inexpensive LifeLike sets of GP38 A+B and a caboose which cost maybe $25 new on eBay) and rolling stock (mostly a set of 12 Industrial brand for $20 on eBay). She can, within reason do what she likes with it. So this morning she cut up some pieces of construction paper to make an engine shed. Decorated it with crayon and sticky-taped it together. You should hear the chuckle as she backs a loco in and out of the shed! She wanted a passenger car that she could put people in. So we got a flat-car and put some blobs of plasticine on it, A set of (as it happens) HO scale people from the LHS now get picked up at the passenger station, made from plastic drinking straws, scraps of cardboard and construction paper, and sat in the plasticine! And you should see the dinoasur theme park! She knows it is okay to play trains, whetgher it is her little N scale layout or the wooden trains she has had since she was about 9 months old. And even more amazing is to here her when her friends want to play trains. "you have to be careful", "dont make it go too fast", "don't try picking them up, they are hard to get back on the rails", "if you break it then I have to save up out of my allowance to replace it". So she gets two boys, 8 & 5, who are known as the "four legged demolition derby" amngst many other parents, to place nicely for as much as 3 hours at a time with narry a thing getting broken, dropped, thrown or kicked. If you let kids be kids and encourage them to use their own imagination then they will turn out to be very different. John
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