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One of the primary struggles of modern humanity is the battle against our base instincts. We instinctively seek out sugar, fat, and salt. We instinctively do th

by orev 9y ago

One of the primary struggles of modern humanity is the battle against our base instincts. We instinctively seek out sugar, fat, and salt. We instinctively do things that give us dopamine hits. We instinctively want to do things that are fun and easy and avoid things that are dull and hard. Modern parenting is largely a battle against these things, as modern society makes them so easily accessible. The very concept of allowing kids to choose what they want is so completely flawed, as kids are driven more by instincts as they don’t have other more modern mental structures to rely on. Learning stuff is hard because it actually changes the brain, and kids need to be pushed because they will avoid it otherwise, as per the instincts mentioned above.

jdmichal 9y ago
My experiment with my son will be to take advantage of lack of understanding of false dichotomy. Allow him to choose from preselected options with controlled outcomes. Then hold him accountable for that choice, whatever it means. I base this on the idea that decision making is a skill, and you build skills by practicing. Well, not necessarily decision making itself, but rather the mental constructs that surround decisions -- weighing alternatives, short- vs long-term planning, etc. Hopefully, then, when he starts coming up with his own options and breaking the false dichotomy, they'll be well-considered.
- softawre 9y ago
  Like a variation on the marshmallow experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
  - laumars 9y ago
    We do this all the time with our kids. eg Halloween: you can eat <large percentage> your sweets now but we will eat the rest when you've gone to bed, or you can have <smaller percentage> now but have some left for tomorrow and the rest of the week. Our eldest (he's 4 now but we've been doing it for a couple of years) responds really well to that. In fact a 100% pass rate so far. Which is unusual for a boy of that age from what I've read.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  This works on adults too, as it happens. People are most satisfied when they're offered a relatively small number of choices. If you offer them no choice at all, they're generally dissatisfied because they feel a lesser sense of ownership and assume that there's probably a better option that they weren't offered. If you offer them too much choice, the perceptual costs of processing alternatives skyrockets and there's far greater opportunity for post-choice introspection and buyer's remorse. Easy, inconsequential choices can significantly improve satisfaction in many contexts. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/18ec/2947a5358610a2215412f310b507865ad455.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/18ec/2947a5358610a2215412f3...
Retric 9y ago
There are several experiments where giving children unlimited access to a wide range of foods for extended periods results in them eating a fairly healthy diet. That's impractical in your day to day life as it would involve wasting a lot of food. But, most children really do crave nutritious foods as long as they are tasty and available right now.
- orev 9y ago
  Please cite, otherwise that’s counter to the overwhelming experiences of almost every parent (in the US) who has no choice but to feed their kids pizza or mac and cheese every day just to get them to eat something. You can say that parents are just weak, caving in, etc... but then that’s the point I’m making anyway — that parents need to fight and can’t let kids give in to their instincts.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Most children I observe who have poor diets, have parents who also have poor diets. We don't have to look far to find the source of the pizza.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Oldest study on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626509/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626509/ This dates back to 1939, and is a rather over the top experiment still: Accordingly, Davis devised the experiment to let children do for themselves because she suspected that children's bodies instinctively “knew best” what the individual child should eat. Her intellectual model, a view that would later be called “the wisdom of the body,” likened a child's instinctive appetite to the way various autonomic body systems effortlessly adjust themselves to compensate for external challenges — think of sweating on a hot day, and breathing faster when you start to run. Initially, it seemed that this conceit didn't apply to Davis's test children and their food preferences. None of the eat-what-and-how-much-of-what-you-want infants had the same diet on any given day, week or month. “Every diet differed from every other diet, 15 different patterns of taste being presented, and not one diet was the predominantly cereal-and-milk diet, with smaller supplements of fruit, eggs and meat, that is commonly thought proper for this age,” she told her Montréal audience. Yet, she and others later saw that the infants' fanatical heterodoxy turned into what appeared to be 15 uniformly well-nourished, healthy children. ... The important bits: It is actually beyond easy to imagine how Davis's orphans could have eaten themselves sick with healthy foods. Had one or more chosen only meat, fish and eggs, within short order they would likely have come down with scurvy. Had another been a fanatical vegan and eaten only fruits and vegetables, there is a good likelihood that he or she would have experienced a vitamin B12 deficiency and megaloblastic anemia. Thus, the issue, really, was the extent to which an inner nutrition-seeking mechanism might lead children through the maze of choices they actually would face in the modern, eating world. PS: Several versions of this experiment have been preformed including some with plenty of junk food, though the setting up an orphanage bit was rather extreme. Also, diets that seem odd are not necessarily unhealthy.

by orev 9y ago

jdmichal 9y ago

My experiment with my son will be to take advantage of lack of understanding of false dichotomy. Allow him to choose from preselected options with controlled outcomes. Then hold him accountable for that choice, whatever it means. I base this on the idea that decision making is a skill, and you build skills by practicing. Well, not necessarily decision making itself, but rather the mental constructs that surround decisions -- weighing alternatives, short- vs long-term planning, etc. Hopefully, then, when he starts coming up with his own options and breaking the false dichotomy, they'll be well-considered.

softawre 9y ago
Like a variation on the marshmallow experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
- laumars 9y ago
  We do this all the time with our kids. eg Halloween: you can eat <large percentage> your sweets now but we will eat the rest when you've gone to bed, or you can have <smaller percentage> now but have some left for tomorrow and the rest of the week. Our eldest (he's 4 now but we've been doing it for a couple of years) responds really well to that. In fact a 100% pass rate so far. Which is unusual for a boy of that age from what I've read.
jdietrich 9y ago
This works on adults too, as it happens. People are most satisfied when they're offered a relatively small number of choices. If you offer them no choice at all, they're generally dissatisfied because they feel a lesser sense of ownership and assume that there's probably a better option that they weren't offered. If you offer them too much choice, the perceptual costs of processing alternatives skyrockets and there's far greater opportunity for post-choice introspection and buyer's remorse. Easy, inconsequential choices can significantly improve satisfaction in many contexts. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/18ec/2947a5358610a2215412f310b507865ad455.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/18ec/2947a5358610a2215412f3...

Retric 9y ago

There are several experiments where giving children unlimited access to a wide range of foods for extended periods results in them eating a fairly healthy diet. That's impractical in your day to day life as it would involve wasting a lot of food. But, most children really do crave nutritious foods as long as they are tasty and available right now.

orev 9y ago
Please cite, otherwise that’s counter to the overwhelming experiences of almost every parent (in the US) who has no choice but to feed their kids pizza or mac and cheese every day just to get them to eat something. You can say that parents are just weak, caving in, etc... but then that’s the point I’m making anyway — that parents need to fight and can’t let kids give in to their instincts.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Most children I observe who have poor diets, have parents who also have poor diets. We don't have to look far to find the source of the pizza.
- Retric 9y ago
  Oldest study on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626509/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626509/ This dates back to 1939, and is a rather over the top experiment still: Accordingly, Davis devised the experiment to let children do for themselves because she suspected that children's bodies instinctively “knew best” what the individual child should eat. Her intellectual model, a view that would later be called “the wisdom of the body,” likened a child's instinctive appetite to the way various autonomic body systems effortlessly adjust themselves to compensate for external challenges — think of sweating on a hot day, and breathing faster when you start to run. Initially, it seemed that this conceit didn't apply to Davis's test children and their food preferences. None of the eat-what-and-how-much-of-what-you-want infants had the same diet on any given day, week or month. “Every diet differed from every other diet, 15 different patterns of taste being presented, and not one diet was the predominantly cereal-and-milk diet, with smaller supplements of fruit, eggs and meat, that is commonly thought proper for this age,” she told her Montréal audience. Yet, she and others later saw that the infants' fanatical heterodoxy turned into what appeared to be 15 uniformly well-nourished, healthy children. ... The important bits: It is actually beyond easy to imagine how Davis's orphans could have eaten themselves sick with healthy foods. Had one or more chosen only meat, fish and eggs, within short order they would likely have come down with scurvy. Had another been a fanatical vegan and eaten only fruits and vegetables, there is a good likelihood that he or she would have experienced a vitamin B12 deficiency and megaloblastic anemia. Thus, the issue, really, was the extent to which an inner nutrition-seeking mechanism might lead children through the maze of choices they actually would face in the modern, eating world. PS: Several versions of this experiment have been preformed including some with plenty of junk food, though the setting up an orphanage bit was rather extreme. Also, diets that seem odd are not necessarily unhealthy.