7 ms·

Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. 'Tricks' and 'techniques' abound, and

Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. 'Tricks' and 'techniques' abound, and every other article is about 'teaching' your child to achieve/empathize/compete. You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they will learn. Your kids are way smarter than you think. They know what you're doing, they know you're trying to encourage certain behaviors, and they eventually know how to manipulate you much more effectively than you know how to manipulate them. Quit treating five-year-olds like they're some kind of resistant clay, and you have to cleverly shape them into the person they're going to be. That kid is already a person. Treating him like a puppy to be trained will certainly affect his personality and behavior, but the largest impact will not be the one you intended. You're teaching them how you want them to be, and you're also teaching them that the way to get what you want is to manipulate people into giving it to you.

kemayo 13y ago
Yes, that's a good trick to use. The article actually covers this, note. The entire last section is about how children watch adults and decide based on their actions how they should act, paying comparatively little attention to their words.
- nevinera 13y ago
  It's not a trick. Be a good person, and treat your children like people.
  - hamburglar 13y ago
    Sounds like a trick to me. What, I'm supposed to be a good person just for my kids' sake? Yeah, right, buddy! ;)
AJ007 13y ago
The best thing my parents did was be consistent. Early on I learned how to behave because I could predict my parent's reactions. How can a child learn to behave when all adult figures are erratic and irrational? Even the smallest things, like telling a kid Santa Claus is real can cause them to discount the value of truth. Reading behavioral psychology studies should require a skeptics hat. I'm not calling out these specific studies, but when it comes to miniscule sample sizes, unreproducible and sometimes out right made up results, this area is very suspect due to ease of fudging results. (Diederik Stapel comes to mind as an extreme case.)
- tonyarkles 13y ago
  For comparison's sake, it's neat to look at the psychological outcomes for children of alcoholics (where the element of consistency and predictability gets thrown right out the window). I realize that I'm a single anecdotal piece of data, but the good news is that therapy can help get over it :).
- gohrt 13y ago
  The famous "marshmallow experiment" is great evidence for this. When the original experiment was re-analyzed, researchers found that children from stable, consistent environments, with reliable trustworthy adults, were better able to withold temptation and show patience to win a "2 marshmallow" delayed reward in exchange for a sacrifice of "1 marshmallow" now.
  - not-gro-tsen 13y ago
    As soon as he was old enough to understand, I showed my kid the marshmallow experiment and taught him a few ways to mess with the experimenter, if someone were to try this on him. Bwahaha.
Taek 13y ago
I felt a lot of this when I was growing up. A lot of times I could feel my dad trying to mold me into the best type of person possible. Not that it was unwelcome or that he was doing the wrong thing, but in a lot of ways it felt weird and unnatural. Sometimes it felt like he was a lot more guarded around me, like he couldn't be who he really was because he was trying to set the best possible example and be the best possible parent. In hindsight, I think that left me unprepared for a lot of challenges I faced in college. A lot of times, I would ask him a question and get only half of a response, because answering truthfully would involve revealing less-than-ideal character. I wish that there had been more heart-to-heart and less 'raising your kid the right way'
- pekk 13y ago
  Maybe this isn't about morality but about wishing your Dad had been closer/more intimate rather than more distant
- notdonspaulding 13y ago
  Thanks for sharing. In the terms of the article, I wonder if the behavior your dad was displaying was more motivated by "shame" than "guilt". Shame-based responses to me seem to be much more concerned with how a social group will perceive your behavior, whereas guilt-based responses deal with the rightness or wrongness of the action itself. It almost strikes me as a choice between a moral absolute/relativist viewpoint.
- gohrt 13y ago
  Indeed, your father had trouble because we was trying to sculpt you without actually being a role model, and you noticed the different between his words and actions. The article discusses this phenomenon.
  - Taek 13y ago
    He was trying to be an actual role model. In many ways, he did a good job. In places where he wasn't perfect though, he hid that fact instead of being upfront. I don't know what would have been best, but especially as I got older I would have preferred complete transparency. He was a good man, but I wish I had known more about his flaws. It would have given me more insight into my own.
smrtinsert 13y ago
Please point to the studies that show it works extra extra well.
dubya 13y ago
The article actually goes further to suggest it's not how you treat your child, but also how they see you treat others. Being a decent person is a great first step, but even so your child will eventually (probably often) do something you consider bad behavior. Possible responses range from ignoring the behavior to trying to beat it out of them, and you'll find parents all along the spectrum. This is how psychologists have found is a good way to deal with those situations. It's not entirely common sense.
- nevinera 13y ago
  Did you include 'express disapproval, then talk rationally about why' in your range of responses? If you respect your kid as an autonomous individual, your disapproval will matter to them, and a rational explanation is the only way they can internalize a rule that will persist without the presence of an enforcing authority. It won't work out of the blue, of course. Children that have not been treated as rational entities won't respond as such, and children that are very young have a limited understanding of the world. But explaining things to them even before they understand the explanation has a lot of value - they may not understand your reasoning, but they will definitely understand that you're trying to explain, even before they can talk. Sometimes you may find that the 'bad behavior' you perceive isn't actually a problem at all. I instinctively tried to stop my child from stomping through puddles and getting her feet wet; in reality that's only important if she's about to walk a long way, or if she'll have no chance to change her shoes for hours.
not-gro-tsen 13y ago
I agree with that. Following Gandhi, I'll say: be the change you want to see in your family.
Loughla 13y ago
That's exactly right. All this parenting 'help' is just fueling our thoughts that kids aren't really people, and need to be bent to our will. That's not accurate. Kids are little people. Ignorant of many things, but they're little people. My wife reads these 'how to raise your kids' posts and books and crap, and all it does is make her feel as if she is a terrible parent because he wasn't signing at 10 months and isn't using full sentences at 12. She feels guilt that he may be behind other kids already, because he's not doing things that these posts and books suggest (and are mostly ridiculous). Let kids be kids, let them climb trees and ride bikes and be alone. But, spend a lot of time with them and have them watch how you treat people, what you say about people and how you interact with the world. Take him/her with you when you work on the yard, just have them help by carrying rocks around. Take him/her to the store to get the fuel filter you're fighting right now. Talk to them as if they're capable and they'll be capable. Have boundaries that are firm, but reasonable. And always, always remember that you can say whatever you want about their character being great, or their traits being great, but if you show malice and spite, they'll be malicious and spiteful as well.
- blacksmith_tb 13y ago
  Kids are "little people" only the in the sense that they are immature examples of H. sapiens. Letting them be kids is very good advice precisely because it doesn't suggest we should expect them to be like adults.
  - nevinera 13y ago
    You are both right and wrong. Children are not identical to adults, and treating them like they should be free to make all of their own decisions at 5 years of age would be negligent. But they are like adults in many ways that we tend to ignore - they may not have a great conception of which things can hurt them how badly, but they have a sense of dignity, and they have a sense of independence. They want to make decisions for themselves, and they need to interact with adults that treat them as a rational peer to whatever degree that is possible. Give them what freedoms you can, and respect them enough to explain the real reasons for the rules you impose. Sometimes you may find that they aren't very good ones at all, when you try to explain them - when that happens, admit that it wasn't a good rule, and work out a better one with them.
AndrewKemendo 13y ago
>Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold. Even your own example does this by assigning a direction to your actions based on how it will impact the child.
- bildung 13y ago
  > That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold. Try Emile from Rousseau. In general, what you are describing is the difference between the sciences of pedagogy an psychology. In one sentence, (since the enlightenment) pedagogy tries to find the optimal conditions for humans to develop their true self, while psychology usually observes a misguided development and tries to find a treatment. Psychology therefore has to have some model of what constitutes normality to compare against. These specific studies and treatments are easy to write about as a scientific journalist or parenting literature author. It's telling that practically none of the parenting books I've skimmed through are based on pedagogy. (that's no dismissal of psychology at all, but you have to use the right tool for the job).
  - AndrewKemendo 13y ago
    >pedagogy tries to find the optimal conditions for humans to develop their true self "True self" is not a real thing - it's mystical psychobabble. In reality you are a product of your genetics and experiences, the ratios of which are still contested, however as of now the latter is much easier to influence than the former and as a result is really the only medium we have to work with if we want to influence outcomes.
    - bildung 13y ago
snowwrestler 13y ago
This argument is not only wrong, it is actively harmful to people who seek to be better parents. Cognitively, little kids are not people, at least not the way we typically think of what a person is. The analogy of a delicate and hard to work piece of clay is not a bad analogy for the reality of the situation. What you dismiss as "tricks" is actually highly valuable technical knowledge. We would laugh at someone who said that all it takes to program a computer is to just "act smart." Well when you are raising a kid you are helping to program the most complex computer ever created.
- nevinera 13y ago
  Children are not mechanisms, and you cannot engineer them into shape with your 'highly valuable technical knowledge'. (implied insult redacted - sorry about that.)
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    All humans are mechanisms, and developing a better understanding of how the mechanism works does not harm parenting. You're trying really hard to claim some sort of moral high ground here, but there is nothing immoral or harmful about knowledge. You've set up a false dichotomy between parents who are "good people" and parents who are interested in scientific knowledge about how children develop. Any parent can be both. In fact I would argue that parents who seek to learn more about child development will arm themselves with better tools for being good parents. I don't know why you perceive scientific studies of child development as a threat, but you obviously do.
    - nevinera 13y ago
      I don't have any problem with studies of child development, and have found some of them quite interesting. The problem comes not from gaining knowledge, but from attempting to apply that knowledge inexpertly. Most humans are not equipped deceive at that level, and a child unconsciously can tell the difference between an authentic reaction and a deliberate one. All humans are mechanisms in the physical sense, certainly. But unlike most mechanisms you might be accustomed to dealing with, they have self-will and can perceive differences in stimuli beyond your ability to control. I have certainly set up no 'dichotomy' between goodness and knowledge - I have no issues with parents seeking to understand anything under the sun. (I do think that human nature causes parents to read correlative trends as consistent facts, which means that such studies are doomed to be misinterpreted by nearly all who read it). I also don't specifically conflate 'goodness' (in whatever definition you choose to accept it) with any particular set of actions. I (for example) have no reason to believe that you are a bad person, I just rationally consider the techniques you are defending to produce harmful effects on the individuals to whom they are applied. I have claimed no 'moral high ground', I am engaged in rational debate about the effects of certain types of behavior. Hop down off that very tall horse, Defender Of Science.
bildung 13y ago
> You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they will learn. Absolutely. And be consistent, that's the one main important result of developmental psychology for parents. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory and grep for Bowlby. > Your kids are way smarter than you think. They know what you're doing, they know you're trying to encourage certain behaviors, and they eventually know how to manipulate you much more effectively than you know how to manipulate them. They are smart as in emotionally smart. And that heavily depends on trust in the social environment they are able to build from experience. A child having made consistend experiences of trust will have it easier to develop a model of self-efficiacy, and that in turn is fundamental for learning other things about the world. The emotional experiences are fundamental - but harder to see than a kid talking early or similar.
- nevinera 13y ago
  Authentic actions by a stable individual are inherently consistent. Whereas forced behaviors that are intended to be consistent rarely are.
  - bildung 13y ago
    > Authentic actions by a stable individual are inherently consistent. Whereas forced behaviors that are intended to be consistent rarely are. I think we mean the same thing, but to be sure: I tried to exclude the following authenticity with my phrasing: If I am relaxed on a saturday afternoon and my child spills it's cornflakes over the print outs I left on the desk, it's no big deal. Me or both of us clean up the mess and I just print them out again. If the same thing happens on a stressfull thursday evening, I am angered and let that anger out. In that example I am authentic, but from the view of the child my response to the same action of the child is not consistent. The child has to have reached a certain age to grasp that my anger is mostly about my stress and not about the actions of the kid (specificially the ability to empathize has to be developed). tl;dr: What I meant with consistency is mostly the parents having a certain amount of affect control. That's probably what you meant with 'a stable individual'.
hrktb 13y ago
The first half is very common sense. An other common sense thing: you don't magically get the child at 5, there's this long long process from the baby that can't feed himself and is pretty close to resistive clay on the moral point of view, to the 2 years old that becomes pretty good at understanding what's going around, the 3 years old that can do and think so much more by himself, to the 5 years old who's quite socialized etc. There's many many stages, the kid has limited abilities, and and you actually have go teach a lot of things, not just sit you kid on some watch tower and wait for him to understand. For a long time he just won't get it if you don't make an effort to teach him. This is where you'll want advices on what ways you can teach him, what 'works' and what doesn't.
- nevinera 13y ago
  Of course you don't sit them on some kind of 'watchtower' and wait for him to understand. You interact with them. You play with them, you cook with them, you build with them, you talk with them, and you read to them. You never have to 'teach them things', they need to learn things from you. There's an enormous world of difference there. Of course you should help him accomplish his objectives, and you should certainly do so with an eye toward the techniques or approaches he'll need to use to accomplish them on his own. There's a lot he doesn't know yet. But teaching technique and suggesting approaches is fundamentally different from attempting to impart characteristics and habits.
roel_v 13y ago
I don't want my children to be like me, I want them to be better than me. I can try to be what I want them to be (said otherwise: I can try to be what I want myself to be, or what I should be), but acknowledging my fallibility and proactively anticipating flaws in execution in the 'lead be example' strategy seems to be more grounded in reality. (think of it this way: how many athletics coaches tell their athletes 'just run as fast as I do'?)
- prestadige 13y ago
  Trying to get somebody to live the sort of life you want for them is a potentially harmful mistake. Why not pay attention to one's performance as a parent, and learn from that?
  - roel_v 13y ago
    "Trying to get somebody to live the sort of life you want for them is a potentially harmful mistake." Well yeah obviously, I was talking about the second-order effect of the parenting. Like a control signal being modulated onto the main signal (with the main signal being a child's endogenous drives, interests and character), or one-dimensional Perlin noise, the parenting needs to follow the primary amplitude.
- nevinera 13y ago
  Your children are not going to copy your skills and abilities, they're going to imitate your decisions, conscious and unconscious. If you're an athletics coach that tells your athletes to run as fast as they can, and you personally half-ass it around the track and have a bit of a beer gut, then you're doing a bad job.

kemayo 13y ago

Yes, that's a good trick to use. The article actually covers this, note. The entire last section is about how children watch adults and decide based on their actions how they should act, paying comparatively little attention to their words.

nevinera 13y ago
It's not a trick. Be a good person, and treat your children like people.
- hamburglar 13y ago
  Sounds like a trick to me. What, I'm supposed to be a good person just for my kids' sake? Yeah, right, buddy! ;)

AJ007 13y ago

The best thing my parents did was be consistent. Early on I learned how to behave because I could predict my parent's reactions. How can a child learn to behave when all adult figures are erratic and irrational? Even the smallest things, like telling a kid Santa Claus is real can cause them to discount the value of truth. Reading behavioral psychology studies should require a skeptics hat. I'm not calling out these specific studies, but when it comes to miniscule sample sizes, unreproducible and sometimes out right made up results, this area is very suspect due to ease of fudging results. (Diederik Stapel comes to mind as an extreme case.)

tonyarkles 13y ago
For comparison's sake, it's neat to look at the psychological outcomes for children of alcoholics (where the element of consistency and predictability gets thrown right out the window). I realize that I'm a single anecdotal piece of data, but the good news is that therapy can help get over it :).
gohrt 13y ago
The famous "marshmallow experiment" is great evidence for this. When the original experiment was re-analyzed, researchers found that children from stable, consistent environments, with reliable trustworthy adults, were better able to withold temptation and show patience to win a "2 marshmallow" delayed reward in exchange for a sacrifice of "1 marshmallow" now.
- not-gro-tsen 13y ago
  As soon as he was old enough to understand, I showed my kid the marshmallow experiment and taught him a few ways to mess with the experimenter, if someone were to try this on him. Bwahaha.

Taek 13y ago

I felt a lot of this when I was growing up. A lot of times I could feel my dad trying to mold me into the best type of person possible. Not that it was unwelcome or that he was doing the wrong thing, but in a lot of ways it felt weird and unnatural. Sometimes it felt like he was a lot more guarded around me, like he couldn't be who he really was because he was trying to set the best possible example and be the best possible parent. In hindsight, I think that left me unprepared for a lot of challenges I faced in college. A lot of times, I would ask him a question and get only half of a response, because answering truthfully would involve revealing less-than-ideal character. I wish that there had been more heart-to-heart and less 'raising your kid the right way'

pekk 13y ago
Maybe this isn't about morality but about wishing your Dad had been closer/more intimate rather than more distant
notdonspaulding 13y ago
Thanks for sharing. In the terms of the article, I wonder if the behavior your dad was displaying was more motivated by "shame" than "guilt". Shame-based responses to me seem to be much more concerned with how a social group will perceive your behavior, whereas guilt-based responses deal with the rightness or wrongness of the action itself. It almost strikes me as a choice between a moral absolute/relativist viewpoint.
gohrt 13y ago
Indeed, your father had trouble because we was trying to sculpt you without actually being a role model, and you noticed the different between his words and actions. The article discusses this phenomenon.
- Taek 13y ago
  He was trying to be an actual role model. In many ways, he did a good job. In places where he wasn't perfect though, he hid that fact instead of being upfront. I don't know what would have been best, but especially as I got older I would have preferred complete transparency. He was a good man, but I wish I had known more about his flaws. It would have given me more insight into my own.

smrtinsert 13y ago

Please point to the studies that show it works extra extra well.

dubya 13y ago

The article actually goes further to suggest it's not how you treat your child, but also how they see you treat others. Being a decent person is a great first step, but even so your child will eventually (probably often) do something you consider bad behavior. Possible responses range from ignoring the behavior to trying to beat it out of them, and you'll find parents all along the spectrum. This is how psychologists have found is a good way to deal with those situations. It's not entirely common sense.

nevinera 13y ago
Did you include 'express disapproval, then talk rationally about why' in your range of responses? If you respect your kid as an autonomous individual, your disapproval will matter to them, and a rational explanation is the only way they can internalize a rule that will persist without the presence of an enforcing authority. It won't work out of the blue, of course. Children that have not been treated as rational entities won't respond as such, and children that are very young have a limited understanding of the world. But explaining things to them even before they understand the explanation has a lot of value - they may not understand your reasoning, but they will definitely understand that you're trying to explain, even before they can talk. Sometimes you may find that the 'bad behavior' you perceive isn't actually a problem at all. I instinctively tried to stop my child from stomping through puddles and getting her feet wet; in reality that's only important if she's about to walk a long way, or if she'll have no chance to change her shoes for hours.

not-gro-tsen 13y ago

I agree with that. Following Gandhi, I'll say: be the change you want to see in your family.

Loughla 13y ago

That's exactly right. All this parenting 'help' is just fueling our thoughts that kids aren't really people, and need to be bent to our will. That's not accurate. Kids are little people. Ignorant of many things, but they're little people. My wife reads these 'how to raise your kids' posts and books and crap, and all it does is make her feel as if she is a terrible parent because he wasn't signing at 10 months and isn't using full sentences at 12. She feels guilt that he may be behind other kids already, because he's not doing things that these posts and books suggest (and are mostly ridiculous). Let kids be kids, let them climb trees and ride bikes and be alone. But, spend a lot of time with them and have them watch how you treat people, what you say about people and how you interact with the world. Take him/her with you when you work on the yard, just have them help by carrying rocks around. Take him/her to the store to get the fuel filter you're fighting right now. Talk to them as if they're capable and they'll be capable. Have boundaries that are firm, but reasonable. And always, always remember that you can say whatever you want about their character being great, or their traits being great, but if you show malice and spite, they'll be malicious and spiteful as well.

blacksmith_tb 13y ago
Kids are "little people" only the in the sense that they are immature examples of H. sapiens. Letting them be kids is very good advice precisely because it doesn't suggest we should expect them to be like adults.
- nevinera 13y ago
  You are both right and wrong. Children are not identical to adults, and treating them like they should be free to make all of their own decisions at 5 years of age would be negligent. But they are like adults in many ways that we tend to ignore - they may not have a great conception of which things can hurt them how badly, but they have a sense of dignity, and they have a sense of independence. They want to make decisions for themselves, and they need to interact with adults that treat them as a rational peer to whatever degree that is possible. Give them what freedoms you can, and respect them enough to explain the real reasons for the rules you impose. Sometimes you may find that they aren't very good ones at all, when you try to explain them - when that happens, admit that it wasn't a good rule, and work out a better one with them.

AndrewKemendo 13y ago

>Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold. Even your own example does this by assigning a direction to your actions based on how it will impact the child.

bildung 13y ago
> That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold. Try Emile from Rousseau. In general, what you are describing is the difference between the sciences of pedagogy an psychology. In one sentence, (since the enlightenment) pedagogy tries to find the optimal conditions for humans to develop their true self, while psychology usually observes a misguided development and tries to find a treatment. Psychology therefore has to have some model of what constitutes normality to compare against. These specific studies and treatments are easy to write about as a scientific journalist or parenting literature author. It's telling that practically none of the parenting books I've skimmed through are based on pedagogy. (that's no dismissal of psychology at all, but you have to use the right tool for the job).
- AndrewKemendo 13y ago
  >pedagogy tries to find the optimal conditions for humans to develop their true self "True self" is not a real thing - it's mystical psychobabble. In reality you are a product of your genetics and experiences, the ratios of which are still contested, however as of now the latter is much easier to influence than the former and as a result is really the only medium we have to work with if we want to influence outcomes.
  - bildung 13y ago

snowwrestler 13y ago

This argument is not only wrong, it is actively harmful to people who seek to be better parents. Cognitively, little kids are not people, at least not the way we typically think of what a person is. The analogy of a delicate and hard to work piece of clay is not a bad analogy for the reality of the situation. What you dismiss as "tricks" is actually highly valuable technical knowledge. We would laugh at someone who said that all it takes to program a computer is to just "act smart." Well when you are raising a kid you are helping to program the most complex computer ever created.

nevinera 13y ago
Children are not mechanisms, and you cannot engineer them into shape with your 'highly valuable technical knowledge'. (implied insult redacted - sorry about that.)
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  All humans are mechanisms, and developing a better understanding of how the mechanism works does not harm parenting. You're trying really hard to claim some sort of moral high ground here, but there is nothing immoral or harmful about knowledge. You've set up a false dichotomy between parents who are "good people" and parents who are interested in scientific knowledge about how children develop. Any parent can be both. In fact I would argue that parents who seek to learn more about child development will arm themselves with better tools for being good parents. I don't know why you perceive scientific studies of child development as a threat, but you obviously do.
  - nevinera 13y ago
    I don't have any problem with studies of child development, and have found some of them quite interesting. The problem comes not from gaining knowledge, but from attempting to apply that knowledge inexpertly. Most humans are not equipped deceive at that level, and a child unconsciously can tell the difference between an authentic reaction and a deliberate one. All humans are mechanisms in the physical sense, certainly. But unlike most mechanisms you might be accustomed to dealing with, they have self-will and can perceive differences in stimuli beyond your ability to control. I have certainly set up no 'dichotomy' between goodness and knowledge - I have no issues with parents seeking to understand anything under the sun. (I do think that human nature causes parents to read correlative trends as consistent facts, which means that such studies are doomed to be misinterpreted by nearly all who read it). I also don't specifically conflate 'goodness' (in whatever definition you choose to accept it) with any particular set of actions. I (for example) have no reason to believe that you are a bad person, I just rationally consider the techniques you are defending to produce harmful effects on the individuals to whom they are applied. I have claimed no 'moral high ground', I am engaged in rational debate about the effects of certain types of behavior. Hop down off that very tall horse, Defender Of Science.

bildung 13y ago

> You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they will learn. Absolutely. And be consistent, that's the one main important result of developmental psychology for parents. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory and grep for Bowlby. > Your kids are way smarter than you think. They know what you're doing, they know you're trying to encourage certain behaviors, and they eventually know how to manipulate you much more effectively than you know how to manipulate them. They are smart as in emotionally smart. And that heavily depends on trust in the social environment they are able to build from experience. A child having made consistend experiences of trust will have it easier to develop a model of self-efficiacy, and that in turn is fundamental for learning other things about the world. The emotional experiences are fundamental - but harder to see than a kid talking early or similar.

nevinera 13y ago
Authentic actions by a stable individual are inherently consistent. Whereas forced behaviors that are intended to be consistent rarely are.
- bildung 13y ago
  > Authentic actions by a stable individual are inherently consistent. Whereas forced behaviors that are intended to be consistent rarely are. I think we mean the same thing, but to be sure: I tried to exclude the following authenticity with my phrasing: If I am relaxed on a saturday afternoon and my child spills it's cornflakes over the print outs I left on the desk, it's no big deal. Me or both of us clean up the mess and I just print them out again. If the same thing happens on a stressfull thursday evening, I am angered and let that anger out. In that example I am authentic, but from the view of the child my response to the same action of the child is not consistent. The child has to have reached a certain age to grasp that my anger is mostly about my stress and not about the actions of the kid (specificially the ability to empathize has to be developed). tl;dr: What I meant with consistency is mostly the parents having a certain amount of affect control. That's probably what you meant with 'a stable individual'.

hrktb 13y ago

The first half is very common sense. An other common sense thing: you don't magically get the child at 5, there's this long long process from the baby that can't feed himself and is pretty close to resistive clay on the moral point of view, to the 2 years old that becomes pretty good at understanding what's going around, the 3 years old that can do and think so much more by himself, to the 5 years old who's quite socialized etc. There's many many stages, the kid has limited abilities, and and you actually have go teach a lot of things, not just sit you kid on some watch tower and wait for him to understand. For a long time he just won't get it if you don't make an effort to teach him. This is where you'll want advices on what ways you can teach him, what 'works' and what doesn't.

nevinera 13y ago
Of course you don't sit them on some kind of 'watchtower' and wait for him to understand. You interact with them. You play with them, you cook with them, you build with them, you talk with them, and you read to them. You never have to 'teach them things', they need to learn things from you. There's an enormous world of difference there. Of course you should help him accomplish his objectives, and you should certainly do so with an eye toward the techniques or approaches he'll need to use to accomplish them on his own. There's a lot he doesn't know yet. But teaching technique and suggesting approaches is fundamentally different from attempting to impart characteristics and habits.

roel_v 13y ago

I don't want my children to be like me, I want them to be better than me. I can try to be what I want them to be (said otherwise: I can try to be what I want myself to be, or what I should be), but acknowledging my fallibility and proactively anticipating flaws in execution in the 'lead be example' strategy seems to be more grounded in reality. (think of it this way: how many athletics coaches tell their athletes 'just run as fast as I do'?)

prestadige 13y ago
Trying to get somebody to live the sort of life you want for them is a potentially harmful mistake. Why not pay attention to one's performance as a parent, and learn from that?
- roel_v 13y ago
  "Trying to get somebody to live the sort of life you want for them is a potentially harmful mistake." Well yeah obviously, I was talking about the second-order effect of the parenting. Like a control signal being modulated onto the main signal (with the main signal being a child's endogenous drives, interests and character), or one-dimensional Perlin noise, the parenting needs to follow the primary amplitude.
nevinera 13y ago
Your children are not going to copy your skills and abilities, they're going to imitate your decisions, conscious and unconscious. If you're an athletics coach that tells your athletes to run as fast as they can, and you personally half-ass it around the track and have a bit of a beer gut, then you're doing a bad job.