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The Case for the “Self-Driven Child”
- minibobxx 9y agowww.idmcrack.ml
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stinkytaco 9y agoThere's a certain irony in this. By putting restrictions on kids (no screens, digital downtime, etc), we expect them to become self-driven. This is a great idea in theory, but it also seems pretty likely that a kid will go to their friends house to watch Youtube videos, when I would just as soon have them (and their friends, if necessary) at my house doing that where at least I have some sense of what they are watching.
- bubbleRefuge 9y agoI cut the cable thinking that would make a difference, but youtube and Netflix have infinte content. Back in the days of broadcast only TV, you watch your show and its over, go play.
- organsnyder 9y agoThe main advantage to Netflix (and YouTube, with a Red subscription) is the lack of advertising. My kids probably see 1/20th the number of ads that I saw growing up.
- stinkytaco 9y agoMy daughter, who's primary video consumption is on Youtube, has started to get to the age that she's concerned about fashion, decoration, etc. I realized that she's getting a lot of this from Youtube, not via direct advertisements, but via "influencers" who have been "encouraged" to place a product, either via money or free products. In some ways this is far more insidious. At least with ads you can learn to tune them out, it's a whole new skill to identify where you are seeing paid product placement.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago^ this is just as bad. At least a lot of the youtube videos I watch are often sponsored by e.g. squarespace which is neutral enough. But those are unblockable ads, basically. ...just like a lot of cartoons were back when we were growing up, Transformers and He-Man and even Star Wars were all advertisements for toys (although in Star Wars' case the toys came after the movie. Still made them several times what the movies made them though). No such thing as free content.
- chaosite 9y agoBut there used to be such a thing as free content. Like the Flash animations I used to watch on albinoblacksheep and newgrounds in middle school, and early YouTube.
- detaro 9y agoIt's still around, and not necessarily less of it. But it easily get drowned out by the sheer volume of other content.
- astura 9y agoI don't know how old your daughter is, but young children haven't fully developed their cognitive skill to fully "understand" advertisements http://www.apa.org/pubs/info/reports/advertising-children.aspx http://www.apa.org/pubs/info/reports/advertising-children.as... >Basic developmental research on egocentrism and perspective taking, along with a great deal of evidence specifically examining developmental differences in the comprehension of persuasive intent within advertisements, establishes clearly that most children younger than 7–8 years of age do not recognize the persuasive intent of commercial appeals. However, there is far less research examining whether and at what ages children begin to appreciate that advertising messages are inherently biased or on when children begin to develop strategies to counteract the bias within these messages. It is clear that both of these abilities are dependent upon the child’s development of the ability to understand the persuasive intent of advertising, meaning that mature comprehension of advertising occurs no earlier than age 7–8 years on average.
- robotresearcher 9y agoMy son has managed to become obsessed with fashion brands from audio podcasts. It’s amazing how this stuff gets into the house.
- oreo81 9y agoI guarantee your kids see just as many if not more ads than you did growing up. They may not look the same to you but they're there. Seriously, if you think ads have decreased over time then you've completely lost the idea of what an ad is.
- munificent 9y agoAlas, that isn't the case. Your kids see 1/20th of the explicitly obvious ads, and probably 20x the product placements, Instagram "brand ambassadors", and other subtle tricks that advertisers devised to get past our ability to mental filter out clearly-marked ads.
- wvenable 9y agoAbsolutely. But with a lot of Youtube content aimed at kids, Youtubers are definitely promoting products indirectly.
- eddieplan9 9y agoI do the old-school thing of buying shows by episode on iTunes for this particular reason (even if the shows are available for "free" in Netflix or Amazon). My kid gets one new episode per week, and she only watches from the iTunes library, which is a self-throttle because it gets boring after a while because it's the same set of episodes. She also learns more from every show and can remember the name of species and their habitats etc way better because she has watched most shows dozens of times after some time.
- wvenable 9y agoYou might also be forced to consume more challenging content because literally nothing else is on. I remember watching the original Star Trek on Sunday mornings as a young child because nothing else was on. If cartoons were on 24/7 I might never have explored that.
- Alex3917 9y agoThe reason it's recommended that kids under age two have zero screen time has nothing to do with the content though, it has purely to do with whether the rapidly changing imagery is increasing the risk for ADHD and damaging their executive function or whatever.
- AstralStorm 9y agoAs shown by which experimental studies? Or perhaps good epidemiology at least?
- Alex3917 9y agoDecent epidemiology for the harms combined with other studies showing no benefit from screen time.
- brewdad 9y agoI had always heard that it had to do more with the development of their eyesight. Young children need visual stimulus across a range of distances to reduce the risk of vision problems when they are older. It may by BS. I don't really know.
- Alex3917 9y agoThat might be true, but (iirc) it’s not the AAP’s stated reason for their recommendation.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoIt's not just their executive function. It's their sense of time. In much video, a cut[1] happens every three seconds (I don't know if this is true for specifically children's video). This tunes their sense of time - if you don't like what you're looking at, in three seconds it will be completely different. That's not what life was like when I grew up; it's not what life was like for any generation before mine. It seems to me that there has to be some effects from this... [1] A "cut" in video is an instantaneous change of viewpoint (so called because, back in the film days, the only way you could get it was by physically cutting and splicing the film).
- tboyd47 9y agoFor some reason, whenever I hear parenting advice (especially related to technology usage) and see that it's from someone my parents' age, I automatically stop listening. I feel like they are so far removed from the challenges of parenting in this decade that they have nothing to offer us. Not that our challenges are harder than theirs, but just that they're such a different set of challenges that we can't relate to each other.
- zwieback 9y ago"automatically stop listening" is of course what young people always do to their elders but once the shoe is on the other foot you'll realize the wisdom of all that outdated advice. The details change but the basic patterns are eternally the same.
- tboyd47 9y agoIt feels like the difference between the parent as a judge and a guide and the parent as a manager and secretary. My parents seemed to worry more about preventing kids from getting into trouble or making the wrong friends. My wife and I worry more about how to get them out of the house and make friends, period... and I hear this sentiment echoed every so often on HN (this being one of them). How do you get teenagers to go outside and interact with other teenagers? That would not even be a question 30 years ago. The question would be how to stop them from doing so. The advice I hear from the older generation so often just comes down to, "let kids be kids," but what about when you have to actually teach (and in some cases, force) kids to be kids? For my kids to have a healthy childhood, I almost have to create that childhood for them.
- monkmartinez 9y agoI don't expect my kids to be "self-driven", in the sense of "productive" when I restrict screen time. They can literally do whatever they want... if that is mope around bored as hell, so be it. If that is digging a hole in the back yard, so be it. If that is getting into a little trouble somewhere down the street, so be it. If they want to read the latest "Diary of a wimpy kid", so be it. The only thing I am after is some kind of interaction with the physical world where they are making the decisions. I have no idea if that is the right thing to do, but it feels like it is.
- zachlatta 9y agoI deeply and thoroughly don't understand this mindset. Whether you like it or not, technology is part of growing up in the 21st century. It's not just an "outlet" or a place to waste time on YouTube, it's interwoven into everything in their lives. Their ability to gather information depends on it. Their social lives depend on it. Just as yours does. If you restrict access, you're pretending like a very crucial part of living today doesn't exist -- or isn't as important as it actually is. At the end of the day, I'd imagine your goal is for your child to have a happy and healthy life. As part of that, you probably want them to have a healthy relationship with technology. Restricting access instead of helping them build that healthy relationship just leads to them wanting to do things like go to the houses of friends to watch YouTube. I know this because I lived it and that's exactly what I did.
- noxToken 9y ago> Restricting access instead of helping them build that healthy relationship just leads to them wanting to do things like go to the houses of friends to watch YouTube. I know this because I lived it and that's exactly what I did. I think restricting screen time is part of building the healthy relationship. We're not an all digital society, so kids still need to interact with the outside world - this includes people. Think about how vile people can be on the Internet when the person they're shouting at is a faceless username. Breaking this immersion to have your kid run up the street to watch YouTube videos with a friend is a bit different than doing it alone. You can explain that your child's friend is also online behind and anonymous username, so if they intend to say something mean to someone, you can say that the child may be hurting their own friend's feelings without even knowing it. Restricting access doesn't have to be a "back in my day!" spiel. Sometimes it's exploring other avenues of entertainment. Sometimes it's partial restriction like reading for 30 minutes. Sometimes it's just making sure that the child still has a foot grounded in reality. I'm a huge advocate for a connected world, but even as a developer, I still have to talk to my colleagues to my left and to my right.
- bobthechef 9y agoGiving children control doesn't mean anything goes. There's a huge difference between telling your children what to do and telling them what not to do. The problem is the former i.e. when parents schedule every minute of the day, telling their kids what to do. Laying down the law i.e. forbidding them from doing certain things can set healthy boundaries without telling kids what to do within those boundaries. So yeah, no social media, no wasting away in front of a screen. They might disobey, but at least it is clear in their minds what the house rules are. Rationalizing permissiveness at home because ostensibly it lets you monitor them is precisely the wrong idea. It legitimizes the activity in their minds through your parental authority and is just another example of parental hovering. The more widely we recognize the proper duties of parents, the more successful it will be since communities can reinforce the effectiveness of parenting. If all of my kid's parents ban the use of social media, it will be difficult for my child to make use of it at a friend's house. P.S. Nice nick.
- stinkytaco 9y agoIn a vacuum I agree. But the world isn't a vacuum. If I can encourage my children to experiment in a safe space and give them the skills they need to sort out what they are seeing, they are better off doing it under my supervision than under someone else's or no one's. I posted above about how my daughter sees advertising not as I did, but via influencers who are subtly pushing a product or lifestyle. A tween does not have the skills to discern this and if I can say "look, I know that you like this Youtuber, but you should understand that they don't necessarily like what they say they like", I can at least give them a lesson. I can't do that if I don't know what they are watching or doing. I have no screen times in my house. I'm not opposed to the idea, but to call "quiet time", or "dinner time", or "bedtime" "radical digital downtime" is bullshit. If it is radical it's out of touch with modern life and if it's what most of us do anyway, it's just a marketing term to sell a book. And I can't control other kids parents, I can't make them ban screen time or social media, I can only try to stay on top of what my kid is doing and try to teach. I do that by giving her the space to explore those things like I would give her the space to explore anything she might be interested in.
- token_throwaway 9y ago100% - I don't think this article responsibly differentiated between the ideas of boundary-setting and control. The author (I think) actually means to say that we should try and make kids anti-fragile by letting them make choices and exploring the consequences, within healthy & safe boundaries. But anyway thanks academia for turning this ancient parenting wisdom into a whole book we can overanalyze
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- ElongateMuskrat 9y agoAlso an irony in criticizing both devalued community and people living at home in their twenties/thirties. In many (most?) non-American cultures, emphasizing collectivist/communal values goes hand-in-hand with living at home in your twenties, which is deemed perfectly normal. In fact, I would say it's more abnormal on a global scale to kick your kids out at 18.
- baoha 9y agoAgree, one thing I observe in many kids that have screen-time restriction is that they tend to sneakily watch at any chance they can find: at their friend house, at BestBuy, Target,.. you name it. Since my daughter turned 3, I allowed her to watch 1 hour/day (2 hours during weekend), and have been very consistent to this rule. After a few weeks, she voluntarily turns off her iPad after the quota ends and plays with her toys, lego,... And she shows no desire to sneakily watch like other kids that being restricted, and never throws tantrum over it. I don't know if this is considered "self driven" but I'm very happy with the way she behaves. Technology is part of our life, don't understand why parents chose to exclude it from their kids.
- casparMax 9y agoThe reason for amerikkkan kids' lazyness is that they realize and feel that life is easy in parasite amerikkka, sucking the toil of third world workers. The same for the sense of entitlement. And of racist beliefs of being smarter, more productive etc. As all amerikkkans on HN. For reference read the books by Zak Cope, John Smith, Samir Amin etc. On First World parasitism.
- creep 9y agoWhen I was a kid I was mostly "self-driven". As in, whatever I wanted to do, it was pretty much okay with my mom-- barring stupid shit, you know. The problem with this is that I desperately needed direction. I didn't really know what was possible for me to do, and so I tended to stick with what I already knew, especially because I was without an internet-connected computer as a young kid. I was never pushed to go beyond my comfort zone. If I didn't want to enroll in sports-- no problem. If I didn't want to do homework-- no problem! From my perspective now, I think I would have greatly benefited from some decent structure and discipline. I have that now (er, it comes and goes) but I would have liked to have been taught how to swim before I was pushed into the freezing depths of adulthood without a lifejacket.
- cortesoft 9y agoAlmost as if you need a balance....
- wufufufu 9y agoThis assumes that kids would prefer watching digital video above all else. Just get a trampoline or something. The friends will come over. If watching is what your kids truly prefer in life, then my view is that you're not going to change that.
- snambi 9y agoWatching too much ipad or phone does impact the kids' eye sight. Also kids are super restless and angry when they are glued to a mobile device. Otherwise their behavior is normal.
- io23h89y23hj 9y agoYou're seeing it in a rather reductionist way, IMO The goal is to get them to foster an internal sense of agency and imagination, etc. TV is just the mind absorbing others creative endeavors. Think like Bezos wife was recently quoted regarding their kids using knives: rather have a kid missing a finger than one who is incurious
- bubbleRefuge 9y agoI find it tough to get my kids to socialize more without scheduling them especially on weekends. Daycare is good because they exercise and run wild. But weekends are hard because the kids are just not out there anymore, so you have to coordinate with other parents.
- zwieback 9y agoIt's tough in the transition age where some kids are still leading very restriced lives and others have more freedom. Once they are in their later teens things get a little easier when most kids get themselves around unsupervised.
- AstralStorm 9y agoIn that age the kids have dual problems of many hours of "the pen" also known as school, potentially followed by extracurriculars which may or may not be at the same place, then transit times. This is essentially the same problem parents face with extended commute times and workloads. Money can lessen these to an extent, huge money a lot more... It is funny that you maker your kid get "downtime" while you cannot take any for yourself. Only a chosen few are free and in control, that is the sad fact of modern life.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoWhere do you live? We're raising our two year old in the city, and I wonder if it's easier to schedule things when other kids live close enough that you can just agree to show up at the playground at the same time that's a 10-minute walk from home.
- steaknsteak 9y agoIt's even easier when kids live close enough that it's a one minute walk down the street. There are pros and cons to living in the suburbs but it's great for kids to be able to play and socialize with other kids
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
- aglavine 9y agoAre video games still considered an addiction by someone?
- neaden 9y agoVideo games certainly can be addictive, just like gambling. That doesn't mean everyone who gambles is an addict, just like everyone who drinks isn't an alcoholic or plays the slots isn't a gambling addict. They certainly can be and worryingly they are increasingly designed to be addictive.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoYup, by me. Source: I'm 32 and if I could I'd spend all my time playing video games. This hasn't changed much from back when I was a kid. Doesn't help that games are so much better nowadays either. FACTORIO IS CRACK COCAINE. Just cheaper and with less withdrawal effects.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoSame here. I always wonder in conversations about UBI... I'm a fairly productive person because I have to be, but given the option I would drop off the grid and crush candies ALL DAY.
- TomK32 9y agoFactorio is terrible, the developers must have all TN displays, that's how dark it is on my superior IPS display. Gotta go, my dwarfen outpost needs me for some more FUN.
- barrkel 9y agoI find them much less interesting these days that I used to when I was in my 20s. I'm not sure if it's because the games are better or worse -- I haven't found games as engaging as Thief or Deus Ex since those old days -- but I rather suspect it's because there's nothing at stake. I don't walk away with anything other than the experience. The experience needs to be pretty excellent throughout, and in particular grinding and filler needs to be kept to a minimum.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bobthechef 9y ago"And since the 1960’s, we’ve seen a marked rise in stress-related mental health problems in children and adolescents, including anxiety, depression, and self-harm." "this problem has been increasing since the 1960’s because our culture has increasingly valued extrinsic and self-centered goals such as money, status, and physical attractiveness, and devalued community, affiliation, and the pursuit of meaning in life" A great deal about the 60s was culturally disastrous.
- Retra 9y agoSince the 1960's our ability to communicate with each other has significantly expanded. It's natural for everyone to end up a neurotic perfectionist when you can see every day what other people across the world are doing. Not so much when you only saw your friends and family in town and at home; your standards would be much lower then.
- temp-dude-87844 9y agoI was self-driven by the book's description, enabled by unobtrusive parenting and a stable home life. But I also turned out really well by several objective metrics, and many of my peers in similar circumstances didn't. As I think about how to parent, where you're supplying steady inputs into the system with many other inputs, I'm beginning to think we undervalue positive parenting contributions but overvalue its detrimental effects when the end result is unsatisfactory. We have vague ideas about what helps and what hurts, but every person is quite different, an any number of inputs, from genetics and inbuilt predispositions, to one random event or encounter or interaction can perturb one's mind and personality in complex ways. And all of these feed into the outcome: some judgmental, haphazard aggregate of metrics by which we -- and society -- judges new young adult's success. This book seems to strike a tone of unobtrusive enablement much like what I received and avoids descending into the nihilistic spiral that I ponder a lot, but understandable most commercial works avoid.
- padobson 9y agoThis book seems to strike a tone of unobtrusive enablement much like what I received I think this works because of the unobtrusive part. Obtrusive enablement, or the protection from natural consequences, can stunt growth just as much as over-parenting. You definitely want to protect your kids from mistakes that can end with them in jail or dead, but letting them skin their knees or suffer the consequences of being rude to peers allows them to feel the weight of their autonomy.
- e40 9y agoI was self-driven by the book's description, enabled by unobtrusive parenting and a stable home life. But I also turned out really well by several objective metrics, and many of my peers in similar circumstances didn't. In the 60's and 70's when I grew up, free-range kids were the norm. I turned out good, but some of my peers did not. I've felt for some time that for those that do well with free-range parenting, they turn out real well, but for those that don't they turn out really bad. The swings from good to bad with that method are really big. With the current style of helicopter/over-scheduling parents, I feel the range of good-bad is much smaller. That is, the bad parts are more hidden and maybe even pushed off until sometime in adulthood; the good parts aren't very good, but because the bad parts seem minimized, it seen as an overall win. As for the bad parts I'm talking about from my childhood, they included death much more frequently from random things. I knew kids that died from accidents ranging from getting hit by cars, to drowning at the reservoir that no one was supposed to swim at, etc. My son is 17 now, and I have never heard of anyone from his school dying. As for other bad parts, I didn't even mention some darker stuff, having to do with sex and drugs. Most of what I experienced, I should really say survived, just doesn't happen anymore. And I'm not talking about kids getting drunk or high at parties. Yes, that still happens in high schools in the US.
- whataretensors 9y agoLook at reward signals. Elementary through high school is a little sliver of what a collapsed marxist society looks like - no positive rewards signals just negative arbitrary ones. I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" I had to do all this other stuff that non-coders deemed important. Meanwhile there was no "safe base" for me or anyone else who grew up poor. But at least now I can also now see scams a mile away. For instance, every company doesn't know the exact amount of money they will make this year, but every employee has a good idea. It's the same system only a little better implementation. Forcing all the kids into assembly lines and scalping their autonomy is breaking people. It's taking away their ability to think. Which is nice for politics and propaganda, but it's bad if we want a free market with innovation.
- EliRivers 9y agoI was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" I had to do all this other stuff I think restricting education from the age of 8 onwards based on what a given 8-year-old likes at that point is just asking for trouble.
- adamnemecek 9y agoNot what OP said. You can totally give them freedom while providing some guidance. Instead of siting in class, let them read things they are interested in.
- barsonme 9y agoWhen I was 8 I'd have only read books on dinosaurs, baseball, and the Legend of Zelda. It took me until halfway or more through college to realize I really liked programming, way more than I did my other majors I'd invested considerable time and money in (medicine, politics). Kids, especially 8-year-olds, need a lot of guidance and need to learn the fundamentals. I'm very glad my parents and teachers worked hard to make me learn things I had no intention of learning, like math.
- 9y ago
- kelukelugames 9y agoHow do I make a 12 weeks old the next chloe kim/barack obama?
- akhilcacharya 9y agoSpend a lot of time identifying early talents, do high school competitions related to those talents, get them into a top school and then just see what happens after that. The "top school" thing seems pretty key to me, tbh.
- tischler 9y ago.
- robbiemitchell 9y ago> I think what you'd basically find in a survey This is a flimsy setup for your conclusions, which you seem confident about. Do you have data from an actual survey?
- tischler 9y ago.
- AQuantized 9y agoYour survey doesn't make sense. The answer for "More" freedom apparently involves more constraints?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- make3 9y agoself reported opinions polls are the very definition of an unrepresentative poll http://methods.sagepub.com/reference/encyclopedia-of-survey-research-methods/n524.xml http://methods.sagepub.com/reference/encyclopedia-of-survey-...
- Rescis 9y agoJust as an FYI, that seems to be behind a paywall.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago> the 1960s (as mentioned in the article), the point in time at which civilization made personal freedoms a top priority Lots of things happened in the 60s. One of them was the first generation being raised by parents who may have spent a significant portion of their childhood living under the Cold War threat of an imminent nuclear holocaust, who then went on to raise their own children.
- amelius 9y agoUpon first reading the title, I thought this was about putting unattended children in self-driving cars :)
- andy_ppp 9y agoAutonomy is the best motivator, not just for children.
- guy98238710 9y agoIronically, the book, including the cheesy title, fits in a range of parenting books telling parents how to arrange their children's lives, making children an object rather than the subject once again. Psychologists (and related specialists) could use more humbleness given the sad state of the science of psychology. Parenting advice, especially one argued in such biased way, is inevitably crude. Parenting is more nuanced, kind of like a conversation, always taking different path, shaped by family circumstances and objectives of everyone involved and frequently taking unexpected turns.
- PeterisP 9y agoAs the first line says, it's about giving children more sense of control over their lives. Not more control, but more sense of control - it's not about reality but about their perception of it.
- guy98238710 9y agoThat's one of the many nuances here. You have to think about other things. When is illusion of control going to be harmful? When is the illusion going to crack? When is the illusion going to stick and become reality? When is increased control equivalent to removal of boundaries? When does it turn into abdication of parental responsibility? When does it reach levels of neglect? When is withdrawal from child's life going to make the child feel deserted? There is no way to resolve these ambiguities upfront. You have to listen and observe. That's why parenting resembles conversation that is unique for every parent-child relationship and that evolves over time. Following advice in this book or any of the many similar books is going to result in crude, clumsy parenting. Particularly so when authors argue for a side in order to stand out or to keep the book focused. That's why these books feel so artificial and kind of extremist.
- mildweed 9y agosee _Parenting with Love and Logic_ by Jim Fay. Relevant bit here: give kids choices, yes, but you (the parent) limit the selection set to things you can live with them choosing.
- 9y ago
- akhilcacharya 9y agoI feel like I had a lot of control in my childhood, because I actively resisted structure. With that said, even that structure wouldn't have helped much - I'm still a failure compared to most of the HN crowd (no Harker/Exeter/Andover, no Stanford/Harvard/MIT/Cal, no Google/FB/Pinterest).
- pdelbarba 9y agoVery few people here have any of those qualifications. Most of them just pretend to know what they're talking about (not that you need those qualifications for that). If you have any expertise in some small topic that comes up frequently, you'll start to see the cracks. People bullshit A LOT.
- tclancy 9y agoI think you've got a pretty high opinion of the HN crowd. What you described probably applies to <10%.
- akhilcacharya 9y agoI probably do, but there's at least 1 Googler per thread it seems or 1 top school (at worst public ivy grad) talking about their tough coursework.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y agoMy computer logs out after 15 minutes, and I really like it. It makes me plan more. I've been thinking of getting a cel phone battery that only lasts for 15 minutes too. By "me" I really mean "kids".
- twouhm 9y agoAlso known as the Locus of Control[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
- rbongers 9y agoSelf-driven children are the next logical step after self-driving cars.
- adyavanapalli 9y agoHaha, such is life XD.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jcsergent20 9y agoAs a 18 year old starting my first year of college, this article has essentially pointed out every single fear and worry I have had in the last 5 months and given the direct cause of these thoughts. I had a hunch that the mindset of raising kids in the last decades where the cause of this, but it is quite releaving to see some facts behind it. I hope the upcoming generation of parents adapt these recommended parenting strategies, but I fear that the state of parenting is heading to more of an extreme in the opposite direction.
- analog31 9y agoRecent HN thread on a similar topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16359049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16359049
- guy98238710 9y agoThere's another irony in this. The authors say that children are stressed out, but most of this stress comes from anxiety exuded by people around them. And then they give us more things to be anxious about: screen time, lack of control, lack of independence.
- spyckie2 9y agoIn my experience, the topic of parenting always elicits the worst case of "everyone in the room is immediately an expert". People are incredibly opinionated and judgmental about the subject, and often take a dismissive attitude rather than a learning attitude about it. Part of the reason is as a population, we talk about parenting advice in a universal, context-independent way but the sheer amount of distinct situations in parenting makes it easy to poke holes in universal advice. Another reason is that we each have our own experience of being parented (often not positive), and may subconsciously judge advice based on its potential to lead to a child experiencing the same bad experiences we had, rather than the overall objective merits of said parenting direction. A third reason is that we underestimate the amount of negotiating, manipulating, and psychological back and forth that managing kids adds to parenting decisions. Even if the parenting direction is good, executing it properly is an entirely different matter. Having said that - I agree with most of this article. Control or the illusion of it is a very strong ingredient for mental stability and confidence, especially in undesirable environments. Lack of control in a undesirable situation leads to a feeling of helplessness, which can have cascading effects on mental health. That said, like most parenting advice, I don't think this qualifies as universal advice. It fits a large body of contexts, but there are several parenting situations I can imagine this having largely little to no effect in.