Why isn't my child as clever as me? (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't my child as clever as me? (2013)

theguardian.com

33 pointsSandman16 comments

This author ironically comes across as really quite obtuse. I'm willing to bet her daughter would outdo her or her "higher stream" peers in many measures of success one day if she were free from her no-doubt oppressive home and educational environments. The way the post concluded I'm not confident, so I feel bad for the little girl. She's likely never gonna get a chance.

I think this may be correct. What kind of mother pens an article to the Guardian about how her daughter is dumb, blames it on her husband, and holds nightly reading lessons that make her child cry? Certainly an overbearing one. It sounds like she's doing more harm than good at this point.

Are you trying to say that the mother is the dumb one here?

"Intelligence" and not doing dumb things are related in the same way that money is the difference between a Chevy Aveo and an S-Class. Input and output are obviously related but it's nowhere a X:1 relationship (for small values of X). Just being "twice as intelligent" might make you more likely to be a successful parent but not twice as likely in the same way that spending 4x as much on some product doesn't get you something that's 4x better than the entry level item.

There's a correlation between rich/poor/smart/dumb and parenting effectiveness but there's so much noise that nobody's surprised when a rich smart couple has a deadbeat kid or vise versa.

Just being smart won't save her if she's a crap parent but people are resilient enough that unless she's really good or really bad it probably won't make a huge difference a decade down the road.

Very obviously, yes. Just try reading the article. I couldn't go more than 20 seconds at a time without thinking about how stereotypically psuedo-intellectual the mother sounded. You know the type, who think they're super smart but who behave like they have half a brain.

It sounds possible. If you have two parents who look down on unintelligent people, then your first order of business as a child is to make sure you seem intelligent to your parents. Actually developing general intelligence would be much lower on the priority list.

Intelligence is forged in the fires of necessity. When a child must struggle against reality to feel safe, they must learn how to predict the future accurately, which will create the learning context for developing intelligence.

A child who has plenty of family support to get things done, succeed in school, etc, but who is surrounded by social pressures to appear to be a certain kind of person will instead get good at appearing to be a certain kind of person.

No, I am saying she comes across as overbearing and this may not be the best way to help her child learn.

This statement is suggestive: "the teacher encouraged me to practise reading and writing every night with her, but every letter was a struggle and every session ended in tears, tantrums and dejection. "

The kid is not in control, the mother is. It is a job of the person in control, to adapt and change the behavior, in order to change outcome "every session ended in tears and dejection".

you haven't tried raising a kid, I assume...

Don't be hard on the mother. In this era where unskilled jobs are being automated and other skilled jobs are being outsourced what do you expect from a protective mother ? The mother obviously wants the kid to survive and she is very much upset about the thought of being not fit in the society. Well all this will disappear if basic income becomes reality and robots does all our jobs and humans are free of wage slavery. And that is where engineer(especially software) takes the role of god .

I wonder if the author is discussing the culture of intellectualism rather than being "bright" per se.

Not that this point contradicts anything in the article. You can still wish your children had inherited your cultural posture.

I feel that she’s conflating specific (though rather arbitrary) intellectual milestones with being “bright.”

I believe she's got a broader view.

"All the other milestones found her trailing behind her peers: potty-training, dressing herself, identifying colors."

These seem less like specific intellectual milestones than general developmental ones.

I think it's the integrated picture her daughter presents that she finds challenging, not solely her intellectual milestone schedule.

The author doesn't seem very bright herself. I wonder if her parents thought the same way about her that she thinks about her daughter.

Horrifying. Who cares if she's book smart?

There are many kinds of intelligence!

Well for one thing it's a huge disadvantage in life.

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