— VerifyYourBrain

Watch out, you'll be doing the Bob Ross thing of taking them in your house to raise them soon!

As for the kids thing, yeah, I know. I grew up as maybe you did. Gen X, parents kind of leaving us to fend for ourselves, kicked outside till dinner time so riding bikes all over the city with our friends. It was a different time. Now even the best of parents are often too scared of things they hear on the media to even consider letting their kids outside alone.

I'm not sure where kids pick up that urge to smash creatures, but they all seem to have it. With my kids I used it as a teaching experience, always reminding them to be kind to creatures, bugs, and nature itself like trees and "weeds". Even though my oldest has entered a phase where he's terrified of creatures, he still tries to be kind to them like I've taught. For example, if he sees a spider even a big one he will try to catch it to throw it outside instead of smashing it (I tell him to leave it alone actually and let it stay inside, but he's too scared to allow that right now).

Lol, I had no idea he did that but it doesn't surprise me! We watch his channel on YouTube sometimes. That's how I grew up too, we had loads of unstructured time outside and were unsupervised 99% of the time. I guess, statistically, it's safer now than it was then but I question the accuracy of that data sometimes. It must be super safe there in Japan. Are the young children there as addicted to devices or do parents impose some kind of limits'boundaries?

Good idea to use the opportunity to teach. I don't remember having that instinct to harm as a kid. There were definitely one or two kids on the block that had a sadistic streak though. My mom taught us to do the same thing with creatures that got into the house. I think my brother and I still will "catch and release" if possible. We had a bat problem in our last house and we got quite proficient at herding those things out the door.