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Toddlers regulate behavior to avoid making adults angry
- afarrell 12y agoI'd love to see a study testing the hypothesis that exposure to lots of anger in early childhood leads a person to poor impulse control or greater susceptibility to addiction. Im not sure how you actually would test this hypothesis without actually measuring something else like the correlation with certain state child welfare laws.
- danieltillett 12y agoI agree that this would be very difficult to test in children, but it should be possible to test in animals.
- tedks 12y agoYou would collect a cross-sample of infants from a wide variety of backgrounds and arrange for cameras to be put in their homes. This isn't unethical given certain constraints, and people have agreed to it before. Interactions with the child in the frame are coded by blinded coders as to whether it's an "angry" interaction or not. Every two to five years, you check in with the children and test them on impulse control and addictive behavior. If you have assloads of funding, follow them until they're 50 or 70 or however old you can afford. Of course, nobody has assloads of funding like this, because science has basically reduced itself to clickbait.
- grayclhn 12y agoNo, even that wouldn't work. "Angry parenting" is going to be massively correlated with many other factors that will affect how parents raise children and with the children's impulse control in general. That's likely to be true even after trying to get a wide variety of backgrounds, etc.
- tedks 12y agoGenerally you can control for this statistically; the study yields information of the sort you need, but you're correct that it's not totally causal. But there aren't experiments for most things we'd like to know anyway. Experiments are a nice thing to have, but they're not necessary to gather information and update your beliefs rationally.
- grayclhn 12y agoI would say sometimes you can control for this statistically. When the selection problem is exactly along the dimension you want to measure, (i.e., measure the impulse-control of children of parents with poor impulse-control, but only the part caused by angry yelling) statistical correction is less plausible.
- snowwrestler 12y agoHave you tried Googling various combinations of these phrases? How early childhood stress affects later development has been a hot area of research for at least a decade now. One quick example I found: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/9955892/Arguing-parents-could-damage-their-baby-for-life-study-claims.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/9955892/A...
- jacknews 12y agoReally? It seems just the opposite with mine :)
- kolev 12y agoSame observation here (3 kids).
- danieltillett 12y agoMy own children are a very clever at this. My kids make me angry quite often (it is so much fun to wind dad up), but they are pretty good at not crossing the line that will make me totally furious (like poking objects into power points).
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- Terr_ 12y agoReminds me of a fictional conversation involving a kid who has locked himself in a bathroom: > "Mm, but kids only dare defy those whom they really trust. The fact that I'm still mostly a stranger to him gives me an advantage, which I invite you to use."
- judk 12y agoNot really. The headline is a poor summary.
- pmalynin 12y agoI find these type of studies so fascinating! By studying infants and toddlers we can truly get a sense of how truly "social" we are as animals and how we adapted to that fact by developing these subtle learning mechanism.
- peteretep 12y agoI dunno. It's not surprising to me that any form of animal tries to restrict anger in animals 4 or 5 times larger than it :-P
- ZenoArrow 12y ago"“Ultimately, we want kids who are well regulated, who can use multiple cues from others to help decide what they should and shouldn’t do,” Repacholi said." Is that what we really want? Ultimately I´d hope that we raise kids that can listen to themselves as much as others, so they have some hope of guarding themselves from whatever neuroses the adults around them have picked up.
- toast0 12y agoBeing able to observe behavior and predict results is clearly good. At a young age, avoiding angering strangers is probably good too. At any age, it's probably best to know in advance when you are likely to anger strangers, even if you choose to anger them.
- ZenoArrow 12y agoWhat you're talking about is emotional intelligence, what I'm talking about is self-reliance. There's some overlap, but they aren't the same thing.
- jeffdavis 12y agoSelf-reliance of toddlers? I guess you mean that they learn self-reliance faster by being less obedient? Not sure I follow the reasoning.
- yebyen 12y agoI think he's talking about the premise of the original post, that children must depend on adults to get angry at them (and ostensibly, parents that don't get angry enough will have obnoxious children who don't know right from wrong.) Self-reliance, they can judge whether their actions are good or not without trying every bad action once and needing some adult to get angry at them in order to know which ones are bad. (you know, like our government. rimshot)
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- judk 12y agoAd is standard, the headline grossly misrepresents the story. What The research actually observed is that in the presence of an observing angry/disapproving person, the kids were cowed, hestitant to play. Kids not stated down by the angry person played more freely. That suggests that kids are scared of angry people, not that kids tried to avoid making the person angry. Ad is common for psych studies, they read far too much into one behavior delta, and don't try multiole configurations to tease apart the many possible interpretations.
- chatwinra 12y agoIf you look at the study (which is hidden behind a paywall :/) only 150 infants were studied. That's quite a small number to make any definitive claim, given there are probably hundreds of millions of toddlers on the planet. The researchers probably mention it in the article, but the press release doesn't.
- jules 12y agoThe number of toddlers on the planet is completely irrelevant for whether 150 is a large enough sample size.
- chatwinra 12y agoI see where you're coming from, and they distinct, but I would not say 'completely irrelevant'. The number of toddlers on the planet relates to possible variations (in environment and genetics) and therefore possible discrepancies to the behaviour studied.
- jules 12y agoYes, what matters is indeed those variations, not the amount of toddlers. If you randomly removed 99% of the toddler population the variations wouldn't be significantly reduced. Hence the sample size you'd need in that situation would still be roughly the same as now. Yes sure, if you removed 99.999999% of the toddler population it would get so small that you'd have appreciably fewer variations in the remaining population, so the population size is not completely irrelevant, but it's still overwhelmingly irrelevant in practice. You do need a representative sample obviously, but that's a different issue.