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The problem I have with a lot of parenting advice is it's always written by someone with fewer than 30 kids. Now I'm not saying you don't have a right to say a

The problem I have with a lot of parenting advice is it's always written by someone with fewer than 30 kids. Now I'm not saying you don't have a right to say anything until you have enough kids to fill a bus, far from it. But the advice you get is always variations of the same. Try to be patient, try to be reasonable. If you need to make threats, have it escalate slowly. Follow through on consequences. This works for most people, because if you have under 30 kids, you have a good chance of never getting a kid who is on the 1% level of difficulty (Rule of 1/3n). In fact my first kid was normal in that sense. Ask him to do something, he does it eventually. Not too many issues. Patience and reason prevailed, I didn't even have to make a lot of threats before he just got it. At that point perhaps I should have written a book about parenting, because it was working great. Second kid, no. It's not that the kid doesn't understand the trade: clean up first, then get read to. It's that the kid objects to the very idea that there's a deal. I'm being unreasonable in presenting this Faustian trade, no kid should be held prisoner until they unwillingly clean up after themselves! Consequences? Sure, try to hold to the things you said. No dinner, take away toys, stern voice, shouting. Nothing helps. I can't be the only parent who has tried all the variations of "be reasonable". But that's also where the advice ends. I guess in programming we have the same problem: you've seemingly looked everywhere for the error, now you have no ideas left, but the problem is still there.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
endymi0n 3y ago
My experience has been that it still has paid off to stay consistent. My youngest one is also extremely stubborn with a rage issue (I wouldn‘t dare to say 1% but at least 5%), and I can‘t count the time outs I‘ve had to distribute. All of them as a consequence with advance warning. Partially it was borderline violent, but I‘ve always did my very best to only use as much force to not hurt her, but just keep her from hurting herself and others as well as escaping the isolation from stimuli (I‘ve always stayed with her the entire time). One time I carried her screaming and shouting through a whole restaurant of people and stayed a whopping 20 minutes in front of the door until she was calm and my food was cold. At the time, it looked like no progress at all, but fast forward 4 years and she‘s 7 now, well behaved, thoughtful, but still confident and strong willed: the upside of stubbornness. I feel like we did a decent job there.
pineaux 3y ago
[flagged]
- uoaei 3y ago
  The first paragraph is a great way to guarantee your child with anarchist tendencies (read: recognizing power structures for the inherently exploitative systems that they are) definitely becomes an anarchist in the philisophically rigorous sense, if they're not already too traumatized by their experiences by the time they learn to reason about these things well. The second part is teaching the child to externalize value systems so that they never develop healthy ones for themselves. I hope you are just speculating and don't really have kids.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    Maybe to clarify a positive point rather than leaving only negative ones behind... The thing about children is: they are already people when they exit the womb (i.e. agents, at least in the ways we talk about LLMs today if not more than that), then they become adults with more or less consistent modes of being and acting, and then they get to exert their own influences on the world (read: other people). The duty of a parent is not to make their own lives easier or to assuage themselves that they "did everything right", but to create net-good lasting change through their parental legacy, whatever the cost to themselves. The choice to have a child has already been made -- the rest is owning up to that choice. Of course, what's "good" is a personal matter, but suffice it to say that we can all agree that the good that is created by parenting exists far past immediate vectors of control and into the psyche of the child. So to treat children as anything less than agents in and of themselves is to instill in them a dangerously false ideology from the very beginning that morphs into antisocial pathologies as their belief systems and worldviews ossify in age. This lesson can be impressed on them in myriad subtle and apparently "correct" ways of parenting, in ways that the parent believes are backed by only the best intentions, but that ultimately harm the child and perpetuate their capacity for harming others.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  You would really beat your kid over something as small as not cleaning up after themselves? Maybe they would start listening to you, but only because they fear you. Personally, when I have kids I want them to respect me, not fear me.
martindbp 3y ago
> I can't be the only parent who has tried all the variations of "be reasonable". You're not. It helps to get an assessment from experienced preschool teachers, in our case, I asked out of the current 100+ kids if there was anyone more stubborn/difficult and there wasn't. The problem is most parents think their kid is "difficult", so there is little understanding from them, and definitely no understanding from 20-somethings who think it's just bad parenting... One example is the concept of "timeout", you mean that kids simply accept this without escalating? When applied on my son that would just lead to a series of escalations until he throws up from crying too hard. Or he tries to leave the house and run away leading to having to be physically constrained for his own safety, leading to screaming until throwing up and loss of voice for a few days. Thankfully he's since matured and is quite well adapted, but ages 1-5 were rough.
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
LOL I feel like me and my siblings were all the second kid. We're all very stubborn. Dealing with an unreasonable child is very difficult because the consequences mean nothing. You take away all their stuff and it's just fuel to continue stubbornly disobeying, if you say "no dinner" they will just not eat, etc. My unsubstantiated opinion is that you probably have to wait them out and not give them too much attention. Taking away more things doesn't really work.
camgunz 3y ago
My partner read Hunt, Gather, Parent which is more or less about getting kids to do chores and not yell all the time. It's not not in the category of "miracle cure books", but the general thesis of, "do chores together and don't paint them as chores but things the family does together, try not to get angry" seems relatively sane. Our kid is ~6 mos. so it's not applicable now, and thus can't give you practical experience. But yeah, 100% sympathy here. Wading through parenting advice is just like, epistemologically annihilating. Hang in there :)
uoaei 3y ago
I've had parents, and enough therapy to know how they fucked me up. I have friends who are in similar situations and who are comfortable discussing such topics. Arguably this is a much more productive way to develop a better perspective on how to raise children than any given parent, whom we cannot guarantee have the same kinds of insights. I think it's a right view that parents don't trust the advice of other parents proferred willy-nilly, but then apparently desperate and exasperated parents see no other options and so keep reaching for the same failing systems and directives that float around in the zeitgeist. I suggest to look within, and act through empathy.
- orblivion 3y ago
  I'm not going to respond to every comment by others here that upset me but I wanted you to know that I appreciate what you've spoken up about in this thread. I'm largely of the same spirit though some details may be different.
throw0101a 3y ago
> The problem I have with a lot of parenting advice is it's always written by someone with fewer than 30 kids. William Sears, who has written numerous books, has eight kids of his own, and is/was a practicing paediatrician: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sears_(physician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sears_(physician) > But the advice you get is always variations of the same. Try to be patient, try to be reasonable. If you need to make threats, have it escalate slowly. Follow through on consequences. You may wish to look at the books/advice that a larger pool of parents have found to be useful: * https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/wiki/recommended_reading https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/wiki/recommended_reading
iteria 3y ago
I think I have a high difficulty child. My kid has ASD and whew meltdowns and all that label entails. I don't think that I had change my parent much, although the results I got at first would be considered less than ideal. I agree that consistency is key. My kid wails, screams, and more, but eventually she does come to understand that her actions have zero impact on the rules. The rules are what they are. I also don't have a lot of rules I'll be honest. I really only have 3 core rules and all the rules she gets are all enforcement of those rules. The rules are 1) don't impede my ability to keep you healthy and safe 2) you must be able to operate and be productive within your slice of society 3) you are not allowed to be a direct or indirect physical, mental, or emotional danger to yourself or others. That's it. They seems vague and they're probably abusable, but it gives me a compassion go operate from. It allows me to let things go. There are many things I wish my kid would do, but ultimately when I check The Rules, I find she's not really in violation of breaking anything but my dreams for her or my preference for how I personally want her to live. I think this ideal makes me both a strict and lax parent, but I like the results I'm seeing now. It was a long hard battle at the toddler years, but she's mostly accepted how it goes I think because she can know how it will go. I'm come to believe that having core values and being consistent about their enforcement is the way to deal with kids. As long as you aren't too oppressive and they have some space to act as they please, I think you can eventually get to a good state. I guess we'll see how right I am in a decade lol
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
Dealing with kids with special needs can be a challenge. And is definitely a 1 out of 30 difficulty you are describing. I’ve had “regular” kids, and special needs kids I took care off, the difference of emotional energy needed to take care of them is incomparable. Normal kids, feel as almost no work to me to be honest. They can have emotional moods of a 2-3 years old up till teenage years. The biggest thing to live a happy life, even just for yourself is to not get emotional, best is to not even raise your voice. Anger, even mild, is extremely draining to yourself. And makes the kids feels terrible, even if they look blank to it, creating a vicious cycle. Leave expectations out of the door. Don't expect reciprocity. Be extremely consistent, make sure you’re schedule is easygoing. Steps of dealing with an emotional escapades: 1. Get them out of the situation. Best is physically, but don't do it agressively if possible. They get a chance to reset. Do not ever correct kids in front of other kids. 2. Acknowledge their feeling. Start with understanding. 3. Explain why and how it’s no acceptable. But don't tell them they are wrong, focus on their behaviour; and give them an acceptable way out. 4. Only allow them to return to their wanted activity if they act appropriately again. That can be in their room, timeout, at times you have to get creative. And also very important: get them out of stimulating situations (such as parties or busy playgrounds) half an hour before they normally would be overstimulated. When overstimulated, these kids normally need 1 hour, till sleep time to fully get back to normal.
public_defender 3y ago
> fewer than 30 kids. I agree. And I'll go you one further. I have kids. I also used to work in a psychiatric hospital for kids, so I frequently had 30 and most of them were in the bottom quartile on common "easy to parent" metrics. On my first day a kid had found a lightbulb and broken it. She was threatening to eat it. I was shadowing someone and they sort of nudged me forward to see what I would do. I said, "you'd better not eat that" in a pretty authoritative tone. The kid responded, "or what?" This was sort of a lightbulb moment for me. It's your first hour on the job, and you've been presented with an "imposing of consequences" dilemma. Your dilemma partner has threatened to eat some broken glass. What result? Anyway, I obviously didn't escalate with threats of consequences, right? Or my username would be prosecutor. The action:reaction, misbehavior:punishment model operates as violence for some kids. Parenting has to be adaptive and parents have to sort of ride the bronco and parent the kid who shows up that day. Unfortunately for you, nobody would probably publish a book titled "sometimes you just have to clean the kid's room and still read to them and there are different rules for the older brother but that's all fine and good," but anecdotally that's the truth. Anyway your parenting experience sounds normal (in the sense that it's normal for a parent to have an uncommonly oppositional kid), so don't feel like you're doing anything wrong. Good luck.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  Your story is really interesting because it highlights how ineffective consequences can be if someone refuses to cooperate. I'm curious what you would consider the "correct" approach in that kind of situation is?
  - public_defender 3y ago
    I'm not an academic, but I don't really think there is a correct choice. I think there are strategies that work in the moment to de-escalate. From among those, we often have a choice of damnations regarding long-term goals (e.g. "what will she learn from this if I..."). I think we are often poor estimators of long-term impact, though.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
jefftk 3y ago
> always written by someone with fewer than 30 kids And even if you got a book written by someone who'd had 30 kids, their experience is (if they have their own kids with the same partner) 30 draws from the same genetic distribution and still won't transfer all that well to randomly selected children.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  Not to mention, the people who need the advice are not going to be selected from the general population.
  - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
    Also, if they really had a 1% kid then they probably married someone with a personality disorder or they have one themself.
The_Colonel 3y ago
It seems quite reasonable to write advice for handling 97% of kids. If your kid belongs to those other 3%, you likely need a more specialized book.
callalex 3y ago
You have been withholding meals from your child as punishment? No wonder they have decided to write off any and all life advice you give them. You have already proved to your child beyond any doubt that you are incapable of being “reasonable” in your words. Why should a child have any respect for someone who abuses them?
clove 3y ago
>This works for most people, because if you have under 30 kids, you have a good chance of never getting a kid who is on the 1% level of difficulty (Rule of 1/3n). What is the "Rule of 1/3n?"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

endymi0n 3y ago

My experience has been that it still has paid off to stay consistent. My youngest one is also extremely stubborn with a rage issue (I wouldn‘t dare to say 1% but at least 5%), and I can‘t count the time outs I‘ve had to distribute. All of them as a consequence with advance warning. Partially it was borderline violent, but I‘ve always did my very best to only use as much force to not hurt her, but just keep her from hurting herself and others as well as escaping the isolation from stimuli (I‘ve always stayed with her the entire time). One time I carried her screaming and shouting through a whole restaurant of people and stayed a whopping 20 minutes in front of the door until she was calm and my food was cold. At the time, it looked like no progress at all, but fast forward 4 years and she‘s 7 now, well behaved, thoughtful, but still confident and strong willed: the upside of stubbornness. I feel like we did a decent job there.

pineaux 3y ago

[flagged]

uoaei 3y ago
The first paragraph is a great way to guarantee your child with anarchist tendencies (read: recognizing power structures for the inherently exploitative systems that they are) definitely becomes an anarchist in the philisophically rigorous sense, if they're not already too traumatized by their experiences by the time they learn to reason about these things well. The second part is teaching the child to externalize value systems so that they never develop healthy ones for themselves. I hope you are just speculating and don't really have kids.
- uoaei 3y ago
  Maybe to clarify a positive point rather than leaving only negative ones behind... The thing about children is: they are already people when they exit the womb (i.e. agents, at least in the ways we talk about LLMs today if not more than that), then they become adults with more or less consistent modes of being and acting, and then they get to exert their own influences on the world (read: other people). The duty of a parent is not to make their own lives easier or to assuage themselves that they "did everything right", but to create net-good lasting change through their parental legacy, whatever the cost to themselves. The choice to have a child has already been made -- the rest is owning up to that choice. Of course, what's "good" is a personal matter, but suffice it to say that we can all agree that the good that is created by parenting exists far past immediate vectors of control and into the psyche of the child. So to treat children as anything less than agents in and of themselves is to instill in them a dangerously false ideology from the very beginning that morphs into antisocial pathologies as their belief systems and worldviews ossify in age. This lesson can be impressed on them in myriad subtle and apparently "correct" ways of parenting, in ways that the parent believes are backed by only the best intentions, but that ultimately harm the child and perpetuate their capacity for harming others.
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
You would really beat your kid over something as small as not cleaning up after themselves? Maybe they would start listening to you, but only because they fear you. Personally, when I have kids I want them to respect me, not fear me.

martindbp 3y ago

> I can't be the only parent who has tried all the variations of "be reasonable". You're not. It helps to get an assessment from experienced preschool teachers, in our case, I asked out of the current 100+ kids if there was anyone more stubborn/difficult and there wasn't. The problem is most parents think their kid is "difficult", so there is little understanding from them, and definitely no understanding from 20-somethings who think it's just bad parenting... One example is the concept of "timeout", you mean that kids simply accept this without escalating? When applied on my son that would just lead to a series of escalations until he throws up from crying too hard. Or he tries to leave the house and run away leading to having to be physically constrained for his own safety, leading to screaming until throwing up and loss of voice for a few days. Thankfully he's since matured and is quite well adapted, but ages 1-5 were rough.

ZephyrBlu 3y ago

LOL I feel like me and my siblings were all the second kid. We're all very stubborn. Dealing with an unreasonable child is very difficult because the consequences mean nothing. You take away all their stuff and it's just fuel to continue stubbornly disobeying, if you say "no dinner" they will just not eat, etc. My unsubstantiated opinion is that you probably have to wait them out and not give them too much attention. Taking away more things doesn't really work.

camgunz 3y ago

My partner read Hunt, Gather, Parent which is more or less about getting kids to do chores and not yell all the time. It's not not in the category of "miracle cure books", but the general thesis of, "do chores together and don't paint them as chores but things the family does together, try not to get angry" seems relatively sane. Our kid is ~6 mos. so it's not applicable now, and thus can't give you practical experience. But yeah, 100% sympathy here. Wading through parenting advice is just like, epistemologically annihilating. Hang in there :)

uoaei 3y ago

I've had parents, and enough therapy to know how they fucked me up. I have friends who are in similar situations and who are comfortable discussing such topics. Arguably this is a much more productive way to develop a better perspective on how to raise children than any given parent, whom we cannot guarantee have the same kinds of insights. I think it's a right view that parents don't trust the advice of other parents proferred willy-nilly, but then apparently desperate and exasperated parents see no other options and so keep reaching for the same failing systems and directives that float around in the zeitgeist. I suggest to look within, and act through empathy.

orblivion 3y ago
I'm not going to respond to every comment by others here that upset me but I wanted you to know that I appreciate what you've spoken up about in this thread. I'm largely of the same spirit though some details may be different.

throw0101a 3y ago

> The problem I have with a lot of parenting advice is it's always written by someone with fewer than 30 kids. William Sears, who has written numerous books, has eight kids of his own, and is/was a practicing paediatrician: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sears_(physician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sears_(physician) > But the advice you get is always variations of the same. Try to be patient, try to be reasonable. If you need to make threats, have it escalate slowly. Follow through on consequences. You may wish to look at the books/advice that a larger pool of parents have found to be useful: * https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/wiki/recommended_reading https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/wiki/recommended_reading

iteria 3y ago

I think I have a high difficulty child. My kid has ASD and whew meltdowns and all that label entails. I don't think that I had change my parent much, although the results I got at first would be considered less than ideal. I agree that consistency is key. My kid wails, screams, and more, but eventually she does come to understand that her actions have zero impact on the rules. The rules are what they are. I also don't have a lot of rules I'll be honest. I really only have 3 core rules and all the rules she gets are all enforcement of those rules. The rules are 1) don't impede my ability to keep you healthy and safe 2) you must be able to operate and be productive within your slice of society 3) you are not allowed to be a direct or indirect physical, mental, or emotional danger to yourself or others. That's it. They seems vague and they're probably abusable, but it gives me a compassion go operate from. It allows me to let things go. There are many things I wish my kid would do, but ultimately when I check The Rules, I find she's not really in violation of breaking anything but my dreams for her or my preference for how I personally want her to live. I think this ideal makes me both a strict and lax parent, but I like the results I'm seeing now. It was a long hard battle at the toddler years, but she's mostly accepted how it goes I think because she can know how it will go. I'm come to believe that having core values and being consistent about their enforcement is the way to deal with kids. As long as you aren't too oppressive and they have some space to act as they please, I think you can eventually get to a good state. I guess we'll see how right I am in a decade lol

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

Dealing with kids with special needs can be a challenge. And is definitely a 1 out of 30 difficulty you are describing. I’ve had “regular” kids, and special needs kids I took care off, the difference of emotional energy needed to take care of them is incomparable. Normal kids, feel as almost no work to me to be honest. They can have emotional moods of a 2-3 years old up till teenage years. The biggest thing to live a happy life, even just for yourself is to not get emotional, best is to not even raise your voice. Anger, even mild, is extremely draining to yourself. And makes the kids feels terrible, even if they look blank to it, creating a vicious cycle. Leave expectations out of the door. Don't expect reciprocity. Be extremely consistent, make sure you’re schedule is easygoing. Steps of dealing with an emotional escapades: 1. Get them out of the situation. Best is physically, but don't do it agressively if possible. They get a chance to reset. Do not ever correct kids in front of other kids. 2. Acknowledge their feeling. Start with understanding. 3. Explain why and how it’s no acceptable. But don't tell them they are wrong, focus on their behaviour; and give them an acceptable way out. 4. Only allow them to return to their wanted activity if they act appropriately again. That can be in their room, timeout, at times you have to get creative. And also very important: get them out of stimulating situations (such as parties or busy playgrounds) half an hour before they normally would be overstimulated. When overstimulated, these kids normally need 1 hour, till sleep time to fully get back to normal.

public_defender 3y ago

> fewer than 30 kids. I agree. And I'll go you one further. I have kids. I also used to work in a psychiatric hospital for kids, so I frequently had 30 and most of them were in the bottom quartile on common "easy to parent" metrics. On my first day a kid had found a lightbulb and broken it. She was threatening to eat it. I was shadowing someone and they sort of nudged me forward to see what I would do. I said, "you'd better not eat that" in a pretty authoritative tone. The kid responded, "or what?" This was sort of a lightbulb moment for me. It's your first hour on the job, and you've been presented with an "imposing of consequences" dilemma. Your dilemma partner has threatened to eat some broken glass. What result? Anyway, I obviously didn't escalate with threats of consequences, right? Or my username would be prosecutor. The action:reaction, misbehavior:punishment model operates as violence for some kids. Parenting has to be adaptive and parents have to sort of ride the bronco and parent the kid who shows up that day. Unfortunately for you, nobody would probably publish a book titled "sometimes you just have to clean the kid's room and still read to them and there are different rules for the older brother but that's all fine and good," but anecdotally that's the truth. Anyway your parenting experience sounds normal (in the sense that it's normal for a parent to have an uncommonly oppositional kid), so don't feel like you're doing anything wrong. Good luck.

ZephyrBlu 3y ago
Your story is really interesting because it highlights how ineffective consequences can be if someone refuses to cooperate. I'm curious what you would consider the "correct" approach in that kind of situation is?
- public_defender 3y ago
  I'm not an academic, but I don't really think there is a correct choice. I think there are strategies that work in the moment to de-escalate. From among those, we often have a choice of damnations regarding long-term goals (e.g. "what will she learn from this if I..."). I think we are often poor estimators of long-term impact, though.
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

jefftk 3y ago

> always written by someone with fewer than 30 kids And even if you got a book written by someone who'd had 30 kids, their experience is (if they have their own kids with the same partner) 30 draws from the same genetic distribution and still won't transfer all that well to randomly selected children.

lordnacho 3y ago
Not to mention, the people who need the advice are not going to be selected from the general population.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  Also, if they really had a 1% kid then they probably married someone with a personality disorder or they have one themself.

The_Colonel 3y ago

It seems quite reasonable to write advice for handling 97% of kids. If your kid belongs to those other 3%, you likely need a more specialized book.

callalex 3y ago

You have been withholding meals from your child as punishment? No wonder they have decided to write off any and all life advice you give them. You have already proved to your child beyond any doubt that you are incapable of being “reasonable” in your words. Why should a child have any respect for someone who abuses them?

clove 3y ago

>This works for most people, because if you have under 30 kids, you have a good chance of never getting a kid who is on the 1% level of difficulty (Rule of 1/3n). What is the "Rule of 1/3n?"