13 ms·

Oddly, I thought this discussion would be about actual toddlers. There is a way to win an argument with a toddler. You find out what's bothering them, usually

by ccleve 1y ago

Oddly, I thought this discussion would be about actual toddlers. There is a way to win an argument with a toddler. You find out what's bothering them, usually something emotional, and you validate it. "Yes! It's fun to stay up late! Yes! You don't want to eat your vegetables!" Once they feel heard, you've got a shot at getting them to do what you want. That's a good way to win an argument with a non-toddler as well. Acknowledge that what they want is legitimate (if it is). Concede points of agreement. Talk about shared goals. Only then talk about a different path to the solution.

kristianc 1y ago
It's what Chris Voss calls tactical empathy.
tombert 1y ago
My parents did that; they managed to win the "go to bed at a reasonable time" argument, but never were terribly successful with the "eating vegetables" one. It didn't help that my dad almost never ate vegetables and even fairly young I was able to point out the hypocrisy. I still don't eat a lot of vegetables; my health vitals are generally fine when I do bloodwork, as is my heart health when I get that checked so hopefully I don't end up in an early grave.
- jjulius 1y ago
  It's a different approach for us (am parent of a 5 and 3 year-old). Every type of food is equal, nothing gets put on a pedestal. Candies, snacks, ice creams, vegetables, fruits, legumes, meats, seafood - it's just "food". We highlight that you shouldn't eat too much of one thing all the time because your body likes a good variety, but that's about all the pressure we put on them. They're learning about sugar, for instance, in their preschool and we've talked about it in that context. If they don't like something, fine. Totally cool, we don't care. The second you pressure a kid to eat a vegetable or a fruit, it becomes a fight and they will dig their heels in. Just keep serving whatever you cook, and either they'll come around or they won't. After all, they're human just like we are - we all have foods we like and dislike, and that's OK. No point in striking a deal, just keep exposing them to a wide variety of stuff and eventually they'll try it all - if they like it, great, if they don't, oh well, at least they like other stuff. I can't speak for any other parents but myself, but this approach has worked wonders for us. Our kids definitely do shun certain foods or look away, but they eat a very wide variety of food. We don't have to bring a PBJ with us to a restaurant, or chicken nuggets to a friend's house, because they'll usually eat most of what is served. We've had grandparents bring "treats" over - we'll put them on their dinner plate with the rest of their food and, hand to god, last night my 5yo ate half her candy bar and left it there while asking for multiple helpings of peas and devouring her entire turkey burger. Only thing left on the plate was the candy. Everyone's mileage may vary, obviously. /shrug
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > we all have foods we like and dislike For dislike you mean like rotten or spoiled food? I'm not sure I've met food in proper edible condition that I didn't like.
    - jjulius 1y ago
      I think a person who has liked every single piece of food (in edible condition, to use your phrase) they've ever put into their mouths is a pretty rare specimen.
      - loxs 1y ago
        Not really, I am one. I have tried all kinds of "exotic" foods like Swedish Surstromming etc. I can definitely relate to how people eat them and can find some way (of eating it) that it's delicious, like in sandwiches etc. This is a skill (I think) and many people just don't have it. If someone eats it, and especially if they have eaten it for centuries, you can just win by trying to figure out how to eat it. There is no downside. That being said, I won't eat food that is obviously (and provably) dangerous like Korean live octopus, Casu martzu (cheese with maggots) etc.
        jjulius 1y ago
        Ah, this is where nuance comes in. For instance, I do not like carrots - it's a taste thing, I don't enjoy the flavor a bit. I've kept trying them for years and if something is carrot-forward, I don't enjoy it. I tried some miso-glazed carrots that I'd whipped up for my family just this past weekend and they just weren't for me (I appreciated how tender they were, and enjoyed the miso glaze on it, but the carrot taste put me off). Now, if you shred them up, or dice 'em, and toss 'em into a salad, a sandwich, or in some slaw and I can't taste them at all? Sure, I'll devour them along with the rest of the meal. But they're hiding in there, you can't tell they're there. I still don't "like" carrots, but I don't mind eating them if I don't taste them. There's a difference between the two, I think. That said, to your point, I was super picky as a kid, and that approach (trying food I didn't like in a dish that I did like) helped me quickly not be picky when I was a younger adult. My palette is tremendously wide now and there's only a relative handful of things I don't "like". I'm also now always down for an adventure and experiencing something new, so I'm happy to try weird shit, whereas I never used to be.
tmountain 1y ago
We have been redirecting our toddler pretty successfully in most “conflict” situations. Instead of telling him what he can’t do, give him a few options of things he can do. It’s not appropriate for all situations but a great strategy for drawing focus away from whatever is causing contention.
- chambers 1y ago
  ^ This is the real advice. Approach a conflict as a choice the child needs to make, and the options the parents need to give. Be flexible but hard where it counts. Children need grounding. "I need to win arguments with my own kids" is a vanity, that gives up a lot of the ground kids need for growing up.
  - bornfreddy 1y ago
    Actually, children don't need grounding, they need to be taken seriously instead. Their emotions are no less valid than the ones of the grown up people, they just lack experience to recognize them and to handle them appropriately. If you take the time to explain the situation to the child you often don't need to convince them anymore. And if you can't explain - should you really have your way?
    - danaris 1y ago
      ...but if you haven't been doing this with your child up to now, and you suddenly start, it probably won't work right away. A foundation of trust has to be built up, and that can take years, in some cases, especially if your child feels that you have a long pattern of not taking them seriously or caring about what they think or feel.
    - kortilla 1y ago
      >If you take the time to explain the situation to the child you often don't need to convince them anymore. This is not true. It doesn’t work for meltdowns caused by not buying them a toy, not giving them ice cream at bed time, etc.
card_zero 1y ago
Mutual preferences, very Dale Carnegie.
jvanderbot 1y ago
I'm lucky that my kiddos accept deals. "Yeah, vegetables are kinda yucky, how about just the corn, then we can go play after" I also feel like "deals" are basically how the world works. Positive and negative deals clearly stated.
- sitkack 1y ago
  I made too many deals and am now weaning us off (greatly reduced) of deals, the danger is everything becomes transactional. It is also important to set norms around expectations that don't have a tangible reward.
  - layer8 1y ago
    It’s better to think of it as compromise rather than a deal. Of course, it needs to be a reasonable compromise.
    - sitkack 1y ago
      That is a good point, but the fact that it is a compromise should be communicated with the child, so it doesn't feel like an exchange.
      - layer8 1y ago
        A compromise is an exchange IMO, it’s just that it’s a give and a take for both sides, and there should be a sense of fairness to it.
Tade0 1y ago
My experience as a parent so far is that treating everyone beyond a whitelist of certified adults like toddlers works tremendously well. Also there's the realisation that I've been effectively treated like one much more often than I would like to admit.
- dr_dshiv 1y ago
  We might be saying the same thing, but one reason toddlers act so ridiculously is because they are emotionally responding just as an adult might, if they were treated like a toddler. Ie, “because I don’t think you have a valid internal POV, I’m going to just decide for you with no explanation” This perspective comes from the book “how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk,” which is one of my favorite parenting books of all time.
  - dsego 1y ago
    I loved that book and tried to apply as much as possible to my own kid when she was little, now she's 5 and just lost her first baby tooth, I should probably read that book once again. One good thing about kids is that even if you make mistakes, you get plenty of opportunities to try different approaches and fix things.
Xcelerate 1y ago
> find out what's bothering them, usually something emotional, and you validate it This is a common refrain of counselors and the field of psychology in general, and yet I can't help but think there's some selection bias at play with regard to the type of personality that is likely to recommend this approach as advice and how well the advice actually works. Personally speaking, I've never cared whether someone "validates" my emotions (and I often view such attempts as a bit patronizing or insincere). There's a problem to be solved, so let's attempt to solve it or at least compromise in good faith. The resolution to the problem is the most likely way to elicit positive emotions from me anyway. (I do understand however that some people prefer this validation, and if that's what they want, then sure, I'll attempt to do that.)
- ziddoap 1y ago
  >There's a problem to be solved, so let's attempt to solve it or at least compromise in good faith Of course saying "I validate that you are feeling upset" is going to come across as patronizing and insincere. But I don't think that's because they validated your feelings. It's because of the way the validation is said. Part of what makes a conversation good faith is hearing out what the other person is saying and agreeing where there is common ground to build from. That necessarily includes confirming the pain points each person is feeling.
  - efsavage 1y ago
    Basically the difference between sympathy and empathy. You can validate someone's feelings by simply acknowledging them (sympathy, "I'm sorry you feel upset about that, how can I help?"), or you can participate in that emotion (empathy, "Yeah, that pisses me off too! Let's fix it."). Neither is definitively better or worse, sincerity is paramount, and it's all contextual, including the personality of the person involved. I think aligning on what mix to use is possibly the most important thing in a relationship, especially a professional one.
- spencerflem 1y ago
  In some sense though- every 'problem' is emotional. As in, if your problem is someone not doing the dishes your problem is that you feel like you deserve a clean kitchen and what your roommate is doing isn't fair. There's logical steps inbetween but the start of it is a feeling of being hurt and bothered. Same with any other problem, if you are dispasionate enough things cease to be problems and just are. So to me, I see validating emotions as another way of saying: 'we share the same goals, there is a problem and we agree on what it is, so we can work towards a solution together'
ninetyninenine 1y ago
[flagged]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
helle253 1y ago
this reminds me of something that happened to me just yesterday: i was at the playground, trying to convince my daughter to go down the slide on her own. She kept saying it was too scary, so I went down first to show her it wasnt scary. Then, still not convinced, she said there were monsters in the slide! I, of course, told her I got rid of them on the way down. She pondered for a moment, then decided it wasn't so scary anymore. Shortly thereafter she went down the slide herself! It was a funny, insightful moment, negotiating her fears without invalidating them.
tdb7893 1y ago
Even in engineering it's important for people to understand what people want and to make sure people feel heard and validated. I've found that especially when dealing with people up the management chain understanding what they want and even using the techniques you describe is very effective. My experience is that pretty much everyone, but especially people in engineering fields and data driven science fields (me included), vastly overestimates how "logical" they are. At the end of the day we are all just a species of ape
karaterobot 1y ago
What's a different path to the solution of getting a kid to eat vegetables and go to bed? I'd say if you can get them to freely choose to do those, then you've won the argument. If it comes down to the equivalent of telling them "because I say so" in such a positive and constructive way that they don't freak out, you haven't won an argument. You have gotten what you wanted, but not by winning an argument, because the kid's opinion didn't change, just their response. Now, what you're talking about is an extremely valuable skill—much more valuable than trying to argue with toddlers—but it's not the same thing in my opinion.
scott_w 1y ago
This is only useful if the person is arguing in good faith, something a quick listen to Nick Ferrari, Nigel Farage, Ben Shapiro or any other shock jock will quickly disabuse you of.
- dfltr 1y ago
  I think there's an additional step of "Find out what they want" that was left out of the original comment because the desires of actual toddlers are (usually) not fundamentally evil. Do they want to exterminate your loved ones? Do they want to ship dissenters off to concentration camps? Do they want to simply profit off of the people in power who are doing those things? If so, the whole process has an early return case that's more along the lines of "Antifa rally at Omaha Beach."
  - scott_w 1y ago
    Your problem is you can’t really pull this out of evil people so easily. They’ll happily lie to your face, despite evidence you present to the contrary. The truth is a flexible concept to them.
melenaboija 1y ago
> if it is This is the crux to me. And more than that is how much of my truth (not absolute truth, if such thing exists, but my point of view) I want to give up to enter a common territory to discuss.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
budmichstelk 1y ago
[dead]
subpixel 1y ago
My wife has found this is also quite effective with me.
BrandoElFollito 1y ago
I usually talked with my toddlers asking them "why"? Why do you want to stay late? why don't you want to eat carrots? They were usually thinking about trading and I was patiently waiting. They do not like carrots (me neither btw), ok, so you get to pick a vegetable. They want to play longer, ok, you play in your bed. Etc. Of course this did not work all the time, especially when I was tired and maybe not that patient so more traditional ways of persuasion were used (no, nothing violent, just "do it because I said so")
MadcapJake 1y ago
As a parent, I often found that if I actually explained why instead of the usual "Because I told you so", then I got a lot further in making them rationally arrive at the right behavior themselves (as toddlers are wont to do). I suspect that the "I told you so", not only does it completely nullify their desire but it also forces them to accept not learning and hurts their pride (which is where the tantrum comes from). These are undesirable outcomes and since parents use this trick all the time, it leads to learned behavior. Disclaimer: This is just my own analysis and I know there are times when it's too challenging to do this but it's a principle you have to focus on.
zeroc8 1y ago
I thought it would be about Trump ;)
elif 1y ago
I'm lucky enough that I get to take my tyke to the zoo 5 days a week and while I agree with your take, I also have seen enough of the parents making the mistake outlined in the original post to know that it was actually talking about toddlers. You would be shocked to see how many supposed adults engage in one sided arguments with crying children, usually centered on the parents feelings.
mik09 1y ago
multi-layer perceptrons are more complex than that lol
bloomingeek 1y ago
I agree, however that will never work with a person like MTG. (Yes, I know she only wants to fight. Who voted for her again?)
aredox 1y ago
That "good way" is tolerable because you knwo your toddler (you have an emotional attachment towards, too) will grow out of it. Now imagine your toddler never grows, and you are stuck with it. You many years will you resist before you strangle it?
brainzap 1y ago
funny, this is core of “non violent communication”
nswest23 1y ago
I think you missed the point of this post. Wildly.

by ccleve 1y ago

kristianc 1y ago

It's what Chris Voss calls tactical empathy.

tombert 1y ago

My parents did that; they managed to win the "go to bed at a reasonable time" argument, but never were terribly successful with the "eating vegetables" one. It didn't help that my dad almost never ate vegetables and even fairly young I was able to point out the hypocrisy. I still don't eat a lot of vegetables; my health vitals are generally fine when I do bloodwork, as is my heart health when I get that checked so hopefully I don't end up in an early grave.

jjulius 1y ago
It's a different approach for us (am parent of a 5 and 3 year-old). Every type of food is equal, nothing gets put on a pedestal. Candies, snacks, ice creams, vegetables, fruits, legumes, meats, seafood - it's just "food". We highlight that you shouldn't eat too much of one thing all the time because your body likes a good variety, but that's about all the pressure we put on them. They're learning about sugar, for instance, in their preschool and we've talked about it in that context. If they don't like something, fine. Totally cool, we don't care. The second you pressure a kid to eat a vegetable or a fruit, it becomes a fight and they will dig their heels in. Just keep serving whatever you cook, and either they'll come around or they won't. After all, they're human just like we are - we all have foods we like and dislike, and that's OK. No point in striking a deal, just keep exposing them to a wide variety of stuff and eventually they'll try it all - if they like it, great, if they don't, oh well, at least they like other stuff. I can't speak for any other parents but myself, but this approach has worked wonders for us. Our kids definitely do shun certain foods or look away, but they eat a very wide variety of food. We don't have to bring a PBJ with us to a restaurant, or chicken nuggets to a friend's house, because they'll usually eat most of what is served. We've had grandparents bring "treats" over - we'll put them on their dinner plate with the rest of their food and, hand to god, last night my 5yo ate half her candy bar and left it there while asking for multiple helpings of peas and devouring her entire turkey burger. Only thing left on the plate was the candy. Everyone's mileage may vary, obviously. /shrug
- 9rx 1y ago
  > we all have foods we like and dislike For dislike you mean like rotten or spoiled food? I'm not sure I've met food in proper edible condition that I didn't like.
  - jjulius 1y ago
    I think a person who has liked every single piece of food (in edible condition, to use your phrase) they've ever put into their mouths is a pretty rare specimen.
    - loxs 1y ago
      Not really, I am one. I have tried all kinds of "exotic" foods like Swedish Surstromming etc. I can definitely relate to how people eat them and can find some way (of eating it) that it's delicious, like in sandwiches etc. This is a skill (I think) and many people just don't have it. If someone eats it, and especially if they have eaten it for centuries, you can just win by trying to figure out how to eat it. There is no downside. That being said, I won't eat food that is obviously (and provably) dangerous like Korean live octopus, Casu martzu (cheese with maggots) etc.
      - jjulius 1y ago
        Ah, this is where nuance comes in. For instance, I do not like carrots - it's a taste thing, I don't enjoy the flavor a bit. I've kept trying them for years and if something is carrot-forward, I don't enjoy it. I tried some miso-glazed carrots that I'd whipped up for my family just this past weekend and they just weren't for me (I appreciated how tender they were, and enjoyed the miso glaze on it, but the carrot taste put me off). Now, if you shred them up, or dice 'em, and toss 'em into a salad, a sandwich, or in some slaw and I can't taste them at all? Sure, I'll devour them along with the rest of the meal. But they're hiding in there, you can't tell they're there. I still don't "like" carrots, but I don't mind eating them if I don't taste them. There's a difference between the two, I think. That said, to your point, I was super picky as a kid, and that approach (trying food I didn't like in a dish that I did like) helped me quickly not be picky when I was a younger adult. My palette is tremendously wide now and there's only a relative handful of things I don't "like". I'm also now always down for an adventure and experiencing something new, so I'm happy to try weird shit, whereas I never used to be.

tmountain 1y ago

We have been redirecting our toddler pretty successfully in most “conflict” situations. Instead of telling him what he can’t do, give him a few options of things he can do. It’s not appropriate for all situations but a great strategy for drawing focus away from whatever is causing contention.

chambers 1y ago
^ This is the real advice. Approach a conflict as a choice the child needs to make, and the options the parents need to give. Be flexible but hard where it counts. Children need grounding. "I need to win arguments with my own kids" is a vanity, that gives up a lot of the ground kids need for growing up.
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  Actually, children don't need grounding, they need to be taken seriously instead. Their emotions are no less valid than the ones of the grown up people, they just lack experience to recognize them and to handle them appropriately. If you take the time to explain the situation to the child you often don't need to convince them anymore. And if you can't explain - should you really have your way?
  - danaris 1y ago
    ...but if you haven't been doing this with your child up to now, and you suddenly start, it probably won't work right away. A foundation of trust has to be built up, and that can take years, in some cases, especially if your child feels that you have a long pattern of not taking them seriously or caring about what they think or feel.
  - kortilla 1y ago
    >If you take the time to explain the situation to the child you often don't need to convince them anymore. This is not true. It doesn’t work for meltdowns caused by not buying them a toy, not giving them ice cream at bed time, etc.

card_zero 1y ago

Mutual preferences, very Dale Carnegie.

jvanderbot 1y ago

I'm lucky that my kiddos accept deals. "Yeah, vegetables are kinda yucky, how about just the corn, then we can go play after" I also feel like "deals" are basically how the world works. Positive and negative deals clearly stated.

sitkack 1y ago
I made too many deals and am now weaning us off (greatly reduced) of deals, the danger is everything becomes transactional. It is also important to set norms around expectations that don't have a tangible reward.
- layer8 1y ago
  It’s better to think of it as compromise rather than a deal. Of course, it needs to be a reasonable compromise.
  - sitkack 1y ago
    That is a good point, but the fact that it is a compromise should be communicated with the child, so it doesn't feel like an exchange.
    - layer8 1y ago
      A compromise is an exchange IMO, it’s just that it’s a give and a take for both sides, and there should be a sense of fairness to it.

Tade0 1y ago

My experience as a parent so far is that treating everyone beyond a whitelist of certified adults like toddlers works tremendously well. Also there's the realisation that I've been effectively treated like one much more often than I would like to admit.

dr_dshiv 1y ago
We might be saying the same thing, but one reason toddlers act so ridiculously is because they are emotionally responding just as an adult might, if they were treated like a toddler. Ie, “because I don’t think you have a valid internal POV, I’m going to just decide for you with no explanation” This perspective comes from the book “how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk,” which is one of my favorite parenting books of all time.
- dsego 1y ago
  I loved that book and tried to apply as much as possible to my own kid when she was little, now she's 5 and just lost her first baby tooth, I should probably read that book once again. One good thing about kids is that even if you make mistakes, you get plenty of opportunities to try different approaches and fix things.

Xcelerate 1y ago

> find out what's bothering them, usually something emotional, and you validate it This is a common refrain of counselors and the field of psychology in general, and yet I can't help but think there's some selection bias at play with regard to the type of personality that is likely to recommend this approach as advice and how well the advice actually works. Personally speaking, I've never cared whether someone "validates" my emotions (and I often view such attempts as a bit patronizing or insincere). There's a problem to be solved, so let's attempt to solve it or at least compromise in good faith. The resolution to the problem is the most likely way to elicit positive emotions from me anyway. (I do understand however that some people prefer this validation, and if that's what they want, then sure, I'll attempt to do that.)

ziddoap 1y ago
>There's a problem to be solved, so let's attempt to solve it or at least compromise in good faith Of course saying "I validate that you are feeling upset" is going to come across as patronizing and insincere. But I don't think that's because they validated your feelings. It's because of the way the validation is said. Part of what makes a conversation good faith is hearing out what the other person is saying and agreeing where there is common ground to build from. That necessarily includes confirming the pain points each person is feeling.
- efsavage 1y ago
  Basically the difference between sympathy and empathy. You can validate someone's feelings by simply acknowledging them (sympathy, "I'm sorry you feel upset about that, how can I help?"), or you can participate in that emotion (empathy, "Yeah, that pisses me off too! Let's fix it."). Neither is definitively better or worse, sincerity is paramount, and it's all contextual, including the personality of the person involved. I think aligning on what mix to use is possibly the most important thing in a relationship, especially a professional one.
spencerflem 1y ago
In some sense though- every 'problem' is emotional. As in, if your problem is someone not doing the dishes your problem is that you feel like you deserve a clean kitchen and what your roommate is doing isn't fair. There's logical steps inbetween but the start of it is a feeling of being hurt and bothered. Same with any other problem, if you are dispasionate enough things cease to be problems and just are. So to me, I see validating emotions as another way of saying: 'we share the same goals, there is a problem and we agree on what it is, so we can work towards a solution together'

ninetyninenine 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

helle253 1y ago

this reminds me of something that happened to me just yesterday: i was at the playground, trying to convince my daughter to go down the slide on her own. She kept saying it was too scary, so I went down first to show her it wasnt scary. Then, still not convinced, she said there were monsters in the slide! I, of course, told her I got rid of them on the way down. She pondered for a moment, then decided it wasn't so scary anymore. Shortly thereafter she went down the slide herself! It was a funny, insightful moment, negotiating her fears without invalidating them.

tdb7893 1y ago

Even in engineering it's important for people to understand what people want and to make sure people feel heard and validated. I've found that especially when dealing with people up the management chain understanding what they want and even using the techniques you describe is very effective. My experience is that pretty much everyone, but especially people in engineering fields and data driven science fields (me included), vastly overestimates how "logical" they are. At the end of the day we are all just a species of ape

karaterobot 1y ago

What's a different path to the solution of getting a kid to eat vegetables and go to bed? I'd say if you can get them to freely choose to do those, then you've won the argument. If it comes down to the equivalent of telling them "because I say so" in such a positive and constructive way that they don't freak out, you haven't won an argument. You have gotten what you wanted, but not by winning an argument, because the kid's opinion didn't change, just their response. Now, what you're talking about is an extremely valuable skill—much more valuable than trying to argue with toddlers—but it's not the same thing in my opinion.

scott_w 1y ago

This is only useful if the person is arguing in good faith, something a quick listen to Nick Ferrari, Nigel Farage, Ben Shapiro or any other shock jock will quickly disabuse you of.

dfltr 1y ago
I think there's an additional step of "Find out what they want" that was left out of the original comment because the desires of actual toddlers are (usually) not fundamentally evil. Do they want to exterminate your loved ones? Do they want to ship dissenters off to concentration camps? Do they want to simply profit off of the people in power who are doing those things? If so, the whole process has an early return case that's more along the lines of "Antifa rally at Omaha Beach."
- scott_w 1y ago
  Your problem is you can’t really pull this out of evil people so easily. They’ll happily lie to your face, despite evidence you present to the contrary. The truth is a flexible concept to them.

melenaboija 1y ago

> if it is This is the crux to me. And more than that is how much of my truth (not absolute truth, if such thing exists, but my point of view) I want to give up to enter a common territory to discuss.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

budmichstelk 1y ago

[dead]

subpixel 1y ago

My wife has found this is also quite effective with me.

BrandoElFollito 1y ago

I usually talked with my toddlers asking them "why"? Why do you want to stay late? why don't you want to eat carrots? They were usually thinking about trading and I was patiently waiting. They do not like carrots (me neither btw), ok, so you get to pick a vegetable. They want to play longer, ok, you play in your bed. Etc. Of course this did not work all the time, especially when I was tired and maybe not that patient so more traditional ways of persuasion were used (no, nothing violent, just "do it because I said so")

MadcapJake 1y ago

As a parent, I often found that if I actually explained why instead of the usual "Because I told you so", then I got a lot further in making them rationally arrive at the right behavior themselves (as toddlers are wont to do). I suspect that the "I told you so", not only does it completely nullify their desire but it also forces them to accept not learning and hurts their pride (which is where the tantrum comes from). These are undesirable outcomes and since parents use this trick all the time, it leads to learned behavior. Disclaimer: This is just my own analysis and I know there are times when it's too challenging to do this but it's a principle you have to focus on.

zeroc8 1y ago

I thought it would be about Trump ;)

elif 1y ago

I'm lucky enough that I get to take my tyke to the zoo 5 days a week and while I agree with your take, I also have seen enough of the parents making the mistake outlined in the original post to know that it was actually talking about toddlers. You would be shocked to see how many supposed adults engage in one sided arguments with crying children, usually centered on the parents feelings.

mik09 1y ago

multi-layer perceptrons are more complex than that lol

bloomingeek 1y ago

I agree, however that will never work with a person like MTG. (Yes, I know she only wants to fight. Who voted for her again?)

aredox 1y ago

That "good way" is tolerable because you knwo your toddler (you have an emotional attachment towards, too) will grow out of it. Now imagine your toddler never grows, and you are stuck with it. You many years will you resist before you strangle it?

brainzap 1y ago

funny, this is core of “non violent communication”

nswest23 1y ago

I think you missed the point of this post. Wildly.