Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Parents Vs PC (or don’t blame the kids)

Recently I joined the OpenIDEO community to share my ideas into a knowledge base for open innovation. If you don’t know what open innovation is you should start googleing it right now! (GIMF!)

The project is a great idea for it seeks to build a huge community of thinkers, designers, entrepreneurs and people in general that will work together to solve big social problems (which they call “challenges”).

Currently they have two challenges running and I joined the one focused on creating a way that kids would be more interested in eating healthy foods.

Great ideas came from all around the world and a network of both people and interconnecting ideas was quickly born.

It’s sad though to see how so many ideas, or “inspirations” as the OpenIDEO team calls them, are focused on creating web solutions or creating political or social pressure to the big restaurant corps such as McDonald’s and so.

It’s sad because with so many ideas pointing to the same direction it beomes clear how we’re losing the sense of responsibility in educating our children.

Yes, it’s lots simpler and easier to let a computer educate our kids, and also it’s easy to go and blame McDonald’s for not feeding our kids with the propper nutrients.

It will always be easier to blame someone else or throw the problem into someone else’s head.

Kids, and specially small kids, need a good example from their parents, they need to see and they need to be told what to eat and how to eat it (meaning: amount). We just can’t let a 4yo kid go to a pc and learn that carrots are good to his health and then come back to the kitchen and ask for a healthy carrot snack. We have to teach the kid why and how eating carrots will be benefical for his/her health.

A couple of months ago I also heard a local radio famous DJ woman (which presumes to talk about what society needs to do) talking about how evil McDonald was to our kids, that they should sell healthy food and that Cocacola should remove some sugar from their famous soda. Yes, it sounds great, but why not talk about how parents should avoid taking kids to McDonald’s and giving them fresh water instead of Cocacola? Kids nutrition is not in their hands, it’s a direct responsibility of their unwilling parents.

So, as I’ve seen, “Modern” society’s parents are each day less interested in dedicating enough time and effort to educate their children, and IMHO, I think this is the real problem that we should be focusing in.