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I’m not sure lying to your kids about sea monsters to the point that your children are so petrified of the water they don’t go near it is quite as benign as the

• mantas 3y ago
  Looks like adults ain’t scared of the ocean too much to fish. Disciplining in harsh ways ain’t without downsides. Nor not disciplining at all. Pick your preferred poison?
  • op00to 3y ago
    I think the key to their parenting success is not "lie to your kids about the ocean" but "don't yell at your kids".
    • mantas 3y ago
      The question is can one work without the other? Cherry picking work only in GIT.
• gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Also, unaddressed: when they get old enough to realize the story is fake, are they more likely to do something stupid then, because they don’t understand the actual reasoning?
  • sublinear 3y ago
    Yeah that's exactly the problem with the boogeyman. They inevitably enter a rebellious phase that could be mostly avoided if you maintained trust and communication. Easier said than done, but you need to keep things simple and direct. To be blunt about it, most parents aren't mentally mature enough to have kids.
    • rayiner 3y ago
      > They inevitably enter a rebellious phase Adolescents have a biological inclination to distance themselves from their parents. But in cultures that properly isolate and ostracize non-conformists and trouble makers, you don’t necessarily have a “rebellious” phase. (Some undoubtedly do, most don’t.)
      • Tao3300 3y ago
        If a "rebellious phase" in an Inuit population would entail falling into frigid water and dying, one angry teen per generation that falls in is probably enough to keep the rest out, if it's not cleared from the gene pool altogether. The latter might be bad armchair evolutionary psychology, but we're talking about a small population that's been in an extreme environment for a pretty long time.
    • thaumasiotes 3y ago
      > They inevitably enter a rebellious phase This is not a feature of most cultures, or at least they don't remark on it. If I were to guess, it is caused by our practice of sending kids to school.
      • lupire 3y ago
        It's well documented across the order Mammalia, not just humans.
        • thaumasiotes 3y ago
          Considering that it isn't well documented in humans, why would that matter?
• serf 3y ago
  to be fair to the concept, it's a pretty benign sea monster (as far as sea monsters go..) >Jaw says Inuit parents take a pre-emptive approach and tell kids a special story about what's inside the water. "It's the sea monster," Jaw says, with a giant pouch on its back just for little kids. >"If a child walks too close to the water, the monster will put you in his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another family," Jaw says. i'd much rather encounter that monster than any of the sea-yokai.
  • throwaway421967 3y ago
    I wonder why across different cultures there seems to be a monster with a bag. Is there one proto-story being evolving through cultures or do people find it too gruesome to say that children are eaten so they create independently.
  • mistrial9 3y ago
    at what psychological development stage? (usually age)
  • xattt 3y ago
    The story of the monster is technically the truth. Being near the sea is dangerous and requires respect and understanding. There will be a transition period between realizing the story is fake, and the real reason why small people need to stay away from the water. However, this realization will be at a point when the kids are bigger and more co-ordinated to get away from a rogue wave/whatever danger. The other fact is that this legend is passed down from generation to generation, which is a sign that it’s effective.
    • FireBeyond 3y ago
      > Being near the sea is dangerous and requires respect and understanding. Very much so. In the Pacific North West, it's sneaker waves. I got caught by one of those with my 9 or 10 year old at the time step daughter. We were walking along a rocky outcrop several feet above the wave line, and then there's just this ... surge. I found the surest footing I could, she jumped up and clung on to me, and I put one arm around her, and the other locked on to a rock so hard it made my fingers bleed. The water kept coming up, and up, and up, eventually slowing at my belt line. That... was terrifying. And then you have the Artic Circle. Maybe no sneaker waves, but the water temperature is around 28-29F. Immerse in that, and you're dealing with hypothermia very quickly, especially as a toddler, young child.
• makeitshine 3y ago
  Do many people, when older, get upset about the lies their parents told them about Santa, The Easter Bunny and such? I'm skeptical these sorts of childhood lies cause any issues.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Obscurity4340 3y ago
    It certainly gives you more ammunition as a teen to distrust and venture the things your parents also taught you or implied were dangerous. It also teaches your children to believe foolish and questionable speech+conduct on the part of authority figures which has creates many other problems. Why is it necessary? Why do you need to lie to your children? Teaching them that lying is "fun" is absurd, so many problems are rooted in tradition and "because I said so" or belief in mythical good and bad guys and boogiemen.
    • Aurornis 3y ago
      > Why is it necessary? Why do you need to lie to your children? I prefer to be straight with my young kids when possible, but even I have to admit that mythical type stories carry a lot more staying power with young kids than a stern warning about real danger from their parents. The context we have as adults about the consequences of things like death are not fully developed in young children. However, they pick up on stories and remember details of stories very clearly. Moving important lessons into the context of stories makes them resonate more with young children. It’s as simple as that. You can also give them the real-world explanation at the same time, but the story version will almost always have better staying power in a child’s mind.
      • Obscurity4340 3y ago
        I think there's a difference also between telling a story with lessons embedded and straight-up lying and saying Santa/God is watching and you have him on speed-dial. That is absolutely pathetic and ridiculous and I'll admit it continues to influence my perception of this discussion
• rayiner 3y ago
  It’s almost as children are irrational creatures without fully developed brains and can’t handle the truth.
  • foofie 3y ago
    I wouldn't say irrational. They are inexperienced. They don't know the risks, and they don't know what they are risking with some kind of behavior. If you place someone who never set foot outside of a major urban center and place them in a forest, they will do a lot of stupid things that can get them killed. If you take someone who always lived in a temperate climate and place them in either subzero temperatures then they won't even know what to wear without risking at least frostbite. If you place them in a hot environment they won't even know they are risking their life with heatstroke or dehydration.
    • jancsika 3y ago
      This being HN, it's worth noting explicitly: All humans, including children, live with irrational tendencies which they never become fully aware of, much less fully control. Moreover, our hardware/software is probably many orders of magnitude better at identifying irrational patterns in others vs. ourselves. Moreover moreover, we've all seen how nearly anyone's attempt to change those patterns in themselves happens at a glacial pace measured in decades or-- if they're lucky-- years. So you'd better carry around a queue of recent cases where your own irrational tendencies caused you to make sizable errors in judgment. Or some kind of static analysis tools that can constantly remind you of this truism. Otherwise, this being HN, you're going to get roped in to a discussion where the implication is that adult humans can avoid irrational tendencies by spending a few minutes reasoning our way out of them from first principles. (Well, unless the implication in the comment you're responding to is that adults should also be told and accept lies as a means to some end.) Edit: clarification
    • rayiner 3y ago
      > I wouldn't say irrational. They are inexperienced. They don't know the risks, and they don't know what they are risking with some kind of behavior. “Inexperienced” is the wrong word. That suggests that what they lack is experiential knowledge. That’s incorrect. Instead, children and adolescents have lower capacity for acting rationally even based on the same knowledge, because the frontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=3051 https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con... Mixing up those two things leads you to the erroneous view that you can facilitate young people making good decisions by presenting them information to analyze and process rationally. They have lesser capacity to do that. That’s why every society has various approaches to regulating the behavior of young people, such as stories about sea monsters.
• kdmccormick 3y ago
  Your point was my initial reaction, too. But hey, these people have been raising kids to survive in the freezing cold for hundreds of years, who am I to say they're wrong? I bet there is a certain delicacy to telling the stories as allegories so that you can transition them from fantasy to rationality as the kid grows. For example, the "sea monster that swallows you and brings you to another family" sounds like an allegory for "the water will drown you and bring you to the afterlife / death". If you respect your kid's intellect, I bet that you can explain that connection to them once they're getting too old to believe myths, while still holding onto the emotional connection.
• foofie 3y ago
  The options on the table is a) be petrified of the water, or b) risk falling into ice cold water, and option a) is the one that actually keeps your children alive. I wonder if storytelling is effective due to an evolutionary pressure that leads kids who don't learn from storytelling to succumb to the dangers warned against by children's stories. I mean, there's a recurring theme in children's stories which is the character who didn't listened is also the character who falls victim and serves as a cautionary tale.
  • Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Why couldn't you just literally (in a controlled setting) introduce them directly to the danger by mediating and showing them thru direct experience? Take your kid to work and let them see what they're up against
    • iteria 3y ago
      I see you've never had a young child. What you're talking about is something that doesn't work with children under 3. And tbose children are very mobile, boundary test and don't really understand death. My 1 year butt checked a fireplace and got a 3rd degree burn. She understood what hot was. That heat could hurt her. Still burnt her butt when I wasn't looking and the worst part was the urgent care told me it was a common occurrence. I believe them because they guess exactly how it had happened. My 2 year old nearly drowned. It was only a fence that stopped her from jumping into a pool when I wasn't looking. I found her right outside it after desperately wondering where she had gone. She'd been in a pool plenty of times and even knew she could sink. Didn't matter. I can have frank discussions with my nearly 5 year old, but that was really recent. Even when she was just 4 just explaning and exposure wasn't alaays effective. It's easier to just lie for their safety. And hell it must work because I still remember the stories my dad told me about the monster called Undertow that would carry you out to sea. I of course know it's a real thing, but I think it's telling I think of the story before the factual information and I heard the story over 25 years ago.
      • op00to 3y ago
• lukeplato 3y ago
  The story distinctly says the sea monster uses a pouch for small kids, so they wouldn't have to fear it as they get older if that part is explained
  • thaumasiotes 3y ago
    There's a good children's book about Eskimo undersea child-snatching monsters: https://www.annickpress.com/Books/A/A-Promise-Is-a-Promise https://www.annickpress.com/Books/A/A-Promise-Is-a-Promise They don't use bags, though it's always possible that that's an adaptation of the original story. It seems more likely that there is cultural variation in traditional stories. There is no need to make it impossible for a monster to target adults. You can just say that they target children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qallupilluit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qallupilluit
• Avicebron 3y ago
  Depending on the age/location, this is most likely life or death (e.g. a toddler falling into freezing cold water), probably growing to an age where the fear can be understood more rationally is a better outcome than doing nothing losing a child.
• lupire 3y ago
  It worked for Christof (Truman Show), and for Morty Smith and his child.
• svat 3y ago
  From the article itself: > At first, these stories seemed to me a bit too scary for little children. And my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them. But my opinion flipped 180 degrees after I watched my own daughter's response to similar tales — and after I learned more about humanity's intricate relationship with storytelling. > Oral storytelling is what's known as a human universal. For tens of thousands of years, it has been a key way that parents teach children about values and how to behave. Also, the Inuit parents don't want their little children going near the water. That the ocean is dangerous and to be avoided is the truth. The story about the sea monster is a way of communicating this truth in terms that the little children can understand. (Calling this “lying” is like calling it lying to teach classical mechanics: to a first approximation Newton's laws of motion are true; they can be refined later. Similarly, though we can later refine the sea monster to say that it takes the form of waves and currents and depths and drowning and all that, IMO to a first approximation there is a sea monster, and in primal moments it can be useful to remember that.)
  • Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    Ha, I finally get to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children One of my favorite articles!
• Ekaros 3y ago
  So it is wrong to warn kids about strangers with vans offering candy or entertainment?