Daily
Shouts
Limiting Your Child’s Fire Time: A Guide for
Concerned Paleolithic Parents
By Rachel
Klein February 7, 2018
According to the most recent cave
drawings, children nowadays are using fire more than ever before. And it’s no
wonder: fire has many wonderful applications, such as cooking meat, warming the
home, and warding off wild animals in the night. We adult Homo erectus, with
our enlarged brains and experience of pre-fire days, can moderate our use, but
our children—some of whom never lived during a time when you couldn’t simply
strike two rocks together for an hour over a pile of dried grass to eventually
produce a spark that, with gentle coaxing, might
grow into a roaring flame—can have difficulty self-monitoring their
interactions with fire.
Gentle coaxing: Kind persuasion
You don’t want to be the bad guy,
but you also want to make sure that your child engages in other activities,
like mammoth hunting and the gathering of rocks and bones with which to make
tools. So, how do you set appropriate boundaries for your child on fire usage
without jeopardizing the family unit so crucial to the
survival of the species? Here are some tips:
Jeopardize: To put in danger History and Etymology for jeopardy: Middle English jeopardie, from
Anglo-French juparti, jeuparti alternative, literally, divided game
Establish clear but firm limits: Fire is nice, but there’s a time and a place
for it. So institute specific fire-watching times, and stick to them.
After dinner, when the fire is lit, anyway, is one
good option, as well as early in the morning, when a fire is just the thing to
warm a chilly cave. Those living in glacial areas may
have a harder time curtailing the use of
fire, but just remind your children that when you were their age several layers
of animal pelts were enough to keep you perfectly warm. Remember, you’re the
patriarch (or matriarch, depending on your community’s customs surrounding
familial power structures), and you make the rules!
Lit: Lit is a past tense and past participle of light
Chilly: Something that is chilly is unpleasantly cold
Curtailing: Restricting
Have a designated “fire room” in your dwelling: Those with smaller caves or huts might find
this suggestion difficult, but even establishing a “fire corner” can help to
create separate “fire” and “non-fire” spaces in your living area. In the
non-fire spaces, encourage traditional activities, such as conversation (as
much as your current vocabulary will allow), arrowhead-shaving,
or stick-drawing in mud or soft stones. Reminding your
children of the pleasures provided by these traditional activities can help
reduce the seductive lure of the fire’s dancing flame.
Dwelling: Home. A dwelling or a dwelling place is a place where someone lives.
Arrowhead: An arrowhead is the sharp, pointed part of an arrow
Stick: A stick is a thin branch which has fallen off a tree.
Watch for changes and communicate concerns: For many children, fire is a harmless, pleasant addition to their lives. But for some it
can become an all-consuming passion. If your child seems to be growing
unhealthily attached to the fire, don’t wait to talk to him about it. A few
common fire-obsessed behaviors to look out for include:
Harmless: Inoffensive, innocuous
• Distraction: ignoring people when
they are in the same room as fire
• Preoccupation: talking or thinking
about fire, even when there is no fire present
• Deception: going off to secretly
find/make fires; lying about fire usage when confronted
• Anthropomorphization: talking
to/interacting with the fire as if it were a sentient being, which the elders
we consulted say is highly unlikely, though they have yet to entirely rule out
the presence of powerful magical beings within the inferno.
Commit to non-fire family time: This last tip is the most important, because, if all you’re doing is
restricting your child’s behavior and environment, he’s bound
to resent you. So introduce non-fire activities that the whole family can enjoy
together, and commit to them on a regular basis. These
activities will depend on your region and climate, of course, but hunting
and/or gathering is always a great way to be active and insure your family’s
survival. If your tribe has already discovered music, carve a bone flute and
work on a family song. Believe in a god (or gods)? Carve some rudimentary icons
in his/her/their image. There’s no end to the fun you can have when you put
your significantly-larger-than-a-chimpanzee’s mind to it!
Commit to: If you commit money or resources to something, you decide to use them
for a particular purpose.
Bound: If you say that something is bound to happen, you mean that you are sure
it will happen, because it is a natural consequence of something that is
already known or exists.
Basis: If something is done on a particular basis, it is done according to
that method, system, or principle.
In the end, just remember that fire,
like most innovations, is both a blessing and a curse.
Sure, it’s made our lives easier, our survival likelier, and will probably lead
to the greatest evolutionary paradigm shift in human history. But it’s also
dangerous, destructive, and, yes, possibly infested with demonic forces that
wish us ill. As with everything in life, balance is key. If you can imagine
what it was like a few thousand years ago, when the first humans started
walking upright, and how much grief they probably got from their parents,
you’ll have some empathy for your children’s unique place in the evolutionary
narrative. At the same time, don’t forget that you’re the boss, and that, until
they mate and produce viable offspring, what you say goes. And, of course, it goes without saying that,
in the (again, very unlikely) event that fire is both sentient and vengeful, we
humbly beg its forgiveness for our insolence
and pray to be spared our fleeting
and insignificant lives.
Curse: If you say that there is a curse on someone, you mean that there seems
to be a supernatural power causing unpleasant things to happen to them.
Humbly: Modestly
Be spared: Not damaged
Fleet: transient, constantly changing
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