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Comment by lagadu | Hacker News Reader

You're implying that having a child magically imbues you with parenting knowledge.

It doesn't imbue with parenting knowledge, but it does imbue you with parenting experience, which is certainly more than non-parents have.

Are you implying that a childless teacher, that has been in the profession for 25 years, has less experience raising children than the parents of a single toddler?

It's apples and oranges. A teacher is not "raising" children; they are teaching them in a controlled environment with certain expectations and structures. Also, a teacher is likely to focus on a certain age group and become expert in working with children in a relatively limited age range. A parent must work with their children over the entire span of their life.

The teacher is not up in the middle of the night with the child when they have strep throat. The teacher is not up in the middle of the night when their child has a nightmare. These are the sorts of things that only happen when you are a parent.

Also, a teacher is likely to focus on a certain age group and become expert in working with children in a relatively limited age range. A parent must work with their children over the entire span of their life.

I understand your what you're saying, but this argument works against the argument that parents are automatically qualified by virtue of experience: a mother of a 2-year-old has no experience raising a 3-year-old either.

Dude, my childless step-mother in-law is this!

A childless teacher is a pseudo-parent 8-3:30, 5 days a week, 9 months a year. They honestly havent got a clue. They can head home and chill. While parenting is an endless grind.

Kids will wedge into every spare moment and literally consume all the space, physical and mental energy.

Try spending all night up with 3 kids with the stomach flu then having your boss push you to meet a deadline the next day.

These teachers, including my mother in-law can keep their `advice`.

No but it should imbue you with a sense of perspective about how much control you really have over kids, and how kids are all different requiring different ways of handling, and to not leap to judge other parents because you've been through enough shit yourself as well.

No, but as with everything else in life, experience counts.

In this case it's difficult to say. Experience counts, but experience also distorts perception, especially when we're talking about parental hormones.

> No, but as with everything else in life, experience counts.

Experience did not make me a better programmer or mathematician. Diving deep into the details to get a much better knowledge did.

but... but that's what experience is.

Experience is not something you get until just after you need it.

Actually, as with everything else in life, experience doesn't count at all. More accurately, not all experience counts equally. We know for a fact that the ten thousand hours of practice myth is just a myth. It takes targeted training to get better at something. I'd wager that most parents are just going through the motions because let's be honest — we have no clue what we're doing.

Update typo

Indeed, I'm as likely to ignore the advice of other parents as I am to ignore non-parents. A lot of parenting advice from parents is survivor bias or outright bragging.

In fact, I'm actually skeptical about the effect of parenting in general, versus the influence of genetics.

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