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Comment by marcell | Hacker News Reader

Quoting the article:

> "Sarah, put on the green coat or the red sweater. We're going to go out, okay?" Choice among humans increases the likelihood of compliance. And choice isn't important, it's the appearance of choice that's important.

I've gotten this exact advice from so many articles and pop psych pieces. Maybe they are written by non-parents or their children are much easier, but it never works for me. My 4 year will always ask for a 3rd option that isn't there, or just reject the framing entirely.

I suspect much of this advice depends on your child's temperament. Tips that work for one family will not work for another, and it will even vary between kids in the same family. For me personally, having kids has resolved the nature vs nurture debate squarely in the "nature" side.

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That's the problem with one-size-fits-all methods. Kids are just different and what worked for one child doesn't necessarily work for another child. Even if you do exactly the same thing.

My girlfriend used to train dogs for a living. She always said "it's the owner's fault, not the dog's". Now we have a Chihuahua who won't listen, doesn't respond to rewards, doesn't respond to punishment. She just does her own thing. My girlfriend is much more humble now. I wish a lot of these child psychologists would have to deal with a difficult child day in and day out, not just once a week. Maybe they would also lose some of the confidence in their advice.

I'm not sure why that would humble her. If she trained dogs, then she already knew 99% of the dogs out there with behavioral issues are a direct result of the owner. There are VERY rare circumstances where it's just a genetic defect (for lack of better term) in the dog, and it just has insurmountable issues. After fostering/owning roughly 75 dogs in my life, I can say 9 times out of 10 that consistency and discipline are lacking in households that have a "problem dog".

Ironically enough, the exact same consistency and discipline are pretty vital for a child as well. They need a little structure in their lives to feel secure. (No, I'm not talking helicopter parenting or scheduling every second of your child's day).

9 out of 10 or 99 out of 100?

99 % dogs, 9/10 children.

9/10 dermatologists

It humbled her because in the past she would have blamed the dog's behavior on the owner and she would have known exactly how to fix it. Now she has a dog that doesn't respond to her methods.

The more likely explanation is that she is not properly applying her own methods, because it's harder to evaluate something that one is personally experiencing, as opposed to something happening to another person. The article even talks about this.

This is not unique to kids and pets. It is why even experienced athletes have coaches, for example.

You are exhibiting the Just World fallacy. It makes you uncomfortable to believe that sometimes the universe is random and chaotic, and that sometimes there are dogs and children whose bad behavior really isn't the fault of their handlers, so you shield yourself with a dogmatic (no pun intended) belief that it's always someone's fault, even when the empirical evidence (like a crummy Chihuahua owned by a professional dog trainer) suggests the opposite.

Which is not to say that it's never the fault of the parents/owners. It probably is, the majority of the time. But to suggest that as a universal law, as you have done, is silly.

So you didn't bother to read my post? Because I never once said it never happens/is universal law. I said it is the majority of the time... you know, exactly what you just said.

You were not very precise with your numbers. You say "99%", "9 out of 10" and "very rare". To a lot of people these mean "negligibly small". With dog training, child rearing and most everything else in life you increase your chances for success by a lot if you follow certain rules. But let's not look down at the people who fail. It may be their fault or it may not be their fault.

How are 99 % or 9/10 not precise numbers?

And "very rare" was a comment on "99 %", not a quantity on its own.

HN is the one place where I expect readers to interpret numbers literally.

Are 9/10 and 99% the same number to you?

Would you describe a random number generator outputting 5 when picking between 1 and 10 as "very rare"?

1/10 != 1/100 != "very rare"

They are for separate things.

> You are exhibiting the Just World fallacy. It makes you uncomfortable to believe... so you shield yourself...

This is bulverism. You haven't presented evidence that tw04 is wrong. You've just assumed they're wrong, and presented a condescending explanation for why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

And as they said, you're not actually disagreeing with them.

I think the problem is with the entire field of psychology they don't take people's personality into account. And I think it takes lot and lots of practice to even start getting at that because you have one personality as a psychologist and your entire theory of mind is based on your own perceptions of what you would do were you in the other's person's shoes. It takes a lot of experience to get over that level of understand and start to take other people's temperament into account before even thinking about that. Not to mention even our models are not good because we don't really understand ourselves that well.

http://users.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/fish.html :

One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river. "Look at the fish swimming about," said Chuang Tzu, "They are really enjoying themselves."

"You are not a fish," replied the friend, "So you can't truly know that they are enjoying themselves."

"You are not me," said Chuang Tzu. "So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?"

---

Do you know that they don't because you know the training that psychologists get, or because _you_ don't and you haven't had that training?

Similarly, do you know that the models are bad because you've studied how they don't fit people, or do you think that those models don't fit you?

Psychologists do study personality. But despite that I still think as human beings our theories of mind are based on our own understanding of our mind. Those neurons that fire in our brain emulate the behavior in our brain. So the advice that any psychologist gives is based on that. But I am not a fish, so I don't know how it is like to be a fish, a psychologist in this case.

I have just received bad advice before from a psychologist and looking back on it was because they don't know me and could not have known me in the few hours I spent with them. In order to know me they would have to go through a lot of people, and very few people are like me in personality terms. So to know me they would have to go through many many people before they had enough experience with people with my sort of psychology or temperament... to give me any sort of advice that would work with my temperament and actually add value to my life.

> I have just received bad advice before from a psychologist

Exactly. It doesn't take much Zen magic to figure out when someone is useless to you. (OK, maybe sometimes it does, but nevertheless it doesn't.)

Plus it's doubly off-putting when they are being useless while feeling good about themselves because they think they are helping. I have a gut feeling that some psychologists are driven by their own insecurity about being useful.

I think it's also that a dog will also respond differently to a third party (the trainer) than how they respond to the owner with whom they already have a relationship. The owner could use the exact same techniques as the trainer, but the dog will respond differently.

Same thing as why organizational change can be more effective when lead by an external change agent than an internal one.

Exactly the same thing is true of a child with their parents compared to other caregivers.

I think that's what a ot of trainers and coaches don't understand. When people (or dogs) meet somebody new they listen much more to that new person. So the coach thinks his method is perfect.

But after a while people will regress to their old habits.

I saw this behavior in speech therapy with my second. He would refuse to vocalize to his mom because he knew she would eventually cave and give him what he wanted, but when the speech therapist withheld a toy until he vocalized, he responded very quickly - likely because he was unsure whether she would cave as mommy does.

This helped us realize that, in this case, we really were the problem. We needed to, in some cases, be more firm. At first this resulted in a lot of tantrums, but once the child's expectations changed then he behaved with us similarly to with his speech therapist.

I think it's a little of both. The thing with kids, and dogs, is that the training has to start from day 1. You let a little bit of laziness in, and they take advantage. It compounds (kind of like eating that extra slice of pizza over a few years).

I have had both kids and dogs, and trained both in pretty much the same way (don't tell their mom).

But again, that is my sample size of me.

I think some breeds are just kind of fundamentally flawed.

Were chihuahuas bred to be obedient or were they bred to be toys and possibly food?

No idea. They are very good lapdogs. Our dog is actually very nice and cute but she just doesn't learn anything. T

I have agree with you half don't, I train Australian Shepherds and I can say without a doubt that positive enforcement works better then positive punishment. I have worked with 2 Chihuahuas in my lifetime, but were little pieces of shit that don't respond to anything either way.

So I guess we should clicker train our black/brown haired fat kids and the blonde skinny ones are screwed.

Seriously though, your post makes me think about how dogs/child teaching is all in what you have and psychologist (maybe news) try to apply one method to all of them. It just doesn't work, some kids need one thing and others need something else. We live in such a crazy complex world.

Probably bred to be rodent dogs.

Chihuahua are an old breed and I don't think we know their true history. Old breeds tend to be healthier and more compatible with humans though, as we have worked all the bugs out.

I heard they were bred to be alarm dogs. Nothing was getting close to your camp if you had a chihuahua. That's why they never shut up, and they are so difficult to ignore. My friend from Mexico told me that - he's not a dog authority by any means, but it sounded legit to me.

"Here [at the Yale Parenting Center], we deal with two kinds of children. One is that they are very aggressive and have serious psychiatric problems. And the other one is that they come in for normal kinds of issues that parents just want some help on."

I don't think these people are just dispensing pop psych advice in magazines or once a week. It's a clinic.

Yeah, after having three kids with widely different temperaments, I can only offer two pieces of advice to other dads:

- You're going to have to change diapers anyway, so you might as well get good at it. I was a one-man Formula 1 pit crew of diaper changing. AMA.

- Invest in a vasectomy.

Wait. After three kids your advice only covers the first 2-3 years?!

Since I basically followed both of those pieces already, am I good?

> After three kids your advice only covers the first 2-3 years?!

Yep. Good luck.

AMA: what about the super runny pound of goop poo that leaks through both nappies.

They use sawdust to clean liquidy messes at the subway so...

Just deal with it. It's going to happen, just notice as quickly as possible and then go and clean the baby (washing, not wipes, just hold him in one arm, use the shower head and in a minute its all clean)

Buy a dog.

Cannot recommend this one enough, many household messes will be gone in no time with a dog that does his/her part

I think you're right about adjusting the method according to the child but Kazdin is a director of the Yale Parenting Center, and they seem quite experienced in dealing with "problematic" children. But also, giving an exhaustive method to complex social issues, e.g. parenting, isn't really possible because of all the edge cases you may have, which is why we have "free form" methods like therapy, I guess?

One of the biggest causes of poor dog behaviour is failure by the breeder to properly socialize the puppy. Puppies should be handled frequently, starting from newborn and preferably by as many people as possible. This imprints the dog with the concept that human=boss,parent,good person.

> Maybe they are written by non-parents or their children are much easier

To be frank, the article tips are pretty sound and well-accepted, including from specialists who deal with much more difficult children then you and me on a daily basis.

First point, there's a tendency to see one's kids as special, be it especially gifted, or difficult, or an astonishing critical thinker for their age. It's quite understandable, since we have an infinitely deeper relationship with them than with any other kid. Secondly, it's much more difficult to deal with relationship issues when you are involved in them; that explains why you can often clearly see what's wrong in others' relationships (parent/kids or S.O.), but yours always seem more complicated by several order of magnitude. And thirdly, we can also find it quite irritating to be given some basic tips when we are experiencing hell and we feel like we are so past that kind of "pop psych". It's like, "Do you think we've not tried that already?".

Of course, a few tips are no magic bullet (sorry for the cliché), and sometimes the problems are just too serious, but on the whole they just deliver, to the surprise of many parents when they see it used successfully by specialists. I'm not one of them but I know a few, and I personnally use the "give them a choice" tip and if done correctly, I have found it to work very, very well--for parenting and in life in general.

Sound and well-accepted are very different things - in the area of parenting, appealing to the authority of experts is really asking to be wrong. That said, I do have a bunch of kids, and in my personal limited experience, the particular advice in the article is sound, as far as it goes. If you have enough energy, there's almost always a way to defuse the situation. Real parents with a few kids and too little sleep do not always have enough energy or time to defuse the situation. Given what I see nursery school teachers do every day, I'd be pretty surprised if the experts can't get good results in a clinic, but that doesn't necessarily carry over to home.

Please humor me, and an honest question. And please be honest. Do you have kids? How many?

my dad has lots of advice for me and my wife about the correct parenting of our kids (his grandkids). he usually gives it to us over the hour dinner we eat with him once a week.

One kid, seven. Got three brothers (the eldest got four kids). Most of my friends got kids too, some of them "difficult". For what it's worth, I was a pretty difficult child too.

I have three boys, ages 10m, 2.5y, and 4.5y. I can confirm that in my case (at least for the two older boys), pretty much all the advice in the article is correct. As I read, I realized that I have been occasioning upon the recommended parenting strategies almost by happenstance.

It's neat to see those specific strategies called out though - I can immediately think back to times when I tried that and realize, "ohhh, so that's why it worked so well." Should help me focus more on those strategies.

I have three girls. I swear to God, the first two were fairly difficult with getting them to eat healthy, each in their own way - but hey, we are smart & informed, we handled them!

The third one broke us. We got to the point where both me & my wife were begging her, "come on, eat this, it has lots of chocolate!"

All these kind of advice works... until it doesn't. Yes, many parents don't know how to handle their kids. It's also often genuinely hard - I learned to not judge people for "not doing the right thing", without knowing the full story.

There was a TV programme in the UK called The 3 Day Nanny, about a super nanny who would come in and sort out problem children and parents in 3 days. It ran for a few seasons.

Fast forward till she had her own child, and I saw an interview with her. She was completely shattered. Like a wreck. She had her own difficult child, and coupled with little available help from others, she couldn't cope. She looked and sounded defeated and expressed that she felt guilty that, of all people, she was not coping.

There is a reason some parents "get it right" and, I'm sorry to say, but thats just as likely down to the kid.

Exactly this. People compare stories about what they did and try to figure out what was right or wrong, but in the end, so often it's just a matter of what the kid in question is like.

Something very similar happens in business, IMO. Managers talk about different styles or techniques but in the end, the success of their team is as much about the team members' skills and dynamics as it is about the manager.

I think it's also different for her because it's different when it's not your kid. Enforcing rules and boundaries is really easy on Monday when you're not going to be there on Thursday.

It's also easier to enforce rules on kids that you don't have a deep, visceral attachment to.

Is there a link for this? I would love to satiate my need for schadenfreude.

See my link posted to the parent [post].

I wonder if this has anything to do with kids learning how to work around their own parents' parenting style. They'll have had years to learn how to disobey their own parents by the time this woman comes into the picture. If her style is different enough, the kids won't know how not to behave.

Then when she has a kid, her kid learns exactly the mental tricks needed to be able to disobey her, by virtue of spending 24×7 with her.

Nature equips kids with instincts, one of which is to be selfish, the others of which can be exploited by parents to override that instinct. But nature also equips kids with a brain, and it is only natural that selfishness uses the brain to learn how not to be manipulated by those other instincts. But that takes time; hence the above results.

I firmly believe in nuture over nature, but...

Some kids have physical issues like bags of energy or stomach/sleep issues and some parents equally have physical or mental problems dealing with that. And everything goes out the window when you've had a month or four with no sleep. I think a lot of people discount that side of things - it's like in the fight world: everyone has a game plan until they get punched in the face.

I looked this up because the only nanny show I know of in the UK was SuperNanny with Jo whats-her-name[1], and I didn't think this was her. It's not:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/family/kathryn-mewes-the-su...

Totally unaware of this woman, and her show.

[1] Edit: It's Jo Frost.

The best show was "House of Tiny Tearaways", with Dr Tanya Byron. (She's a paediatric psychologist.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Tiny_Tearaways

For some reason kids tend to listen to other adults more then their parents.

Alternative interpretation:

All parents become a wreck with kids, and having a nanny come to help you focus on alternative parenting strategies is helpful.

Once you're down in the trenches, it's sometimes hard to rise above the tantrums and emotions and calmly reason about the latest psychological parenting research methods instead of just screaming, "GO TO YOUR ROOM!"

There are 3 additional ideas that are important, but I didn't see you mention in your comment.

1) You praise the heck out of the child when they do accept the choice. This is hard because you have to remember to notice NON-drama, which is typically not noteworthy to people. You over-remember when things went bad and under-remember when things went fine. I do too--everyone does. (Politicians exploit the heck out of this BTW.)

2) You don't defer your whole life to arguing with the child. If it's time to go, you go, sweater or not. The key thing is that it's not punishment. It's just Life... or The Schedule. Don't act mad, just calmly firm. If the kid won't wear a sweater, they get cold. Bring the one you prefer as a backup if you want.

3) (Hardest) You model the behavior you want. Play a pick a sweater game when it's NOT time to go and there is no pressure. If they do it right or sort of right, praise the part they did right and do it again.

None of this is easy. FWIW I have a young kid and would grade myself at around 50% or less on these. But it's a model to work toward.

Re #3: i think it's a very astute observation that parenting should be much more proactive than reactive. If you play the long game and model your kids' behavior in situations when they aren't struggling or you're having a fight, you both seem to learn much easier.

Heck, I would say that parenting ultimately starts when we're kids ourselves with the values and experiences we are taught. For instance, most of us don't care for kids until we're in our 30s, which makes parenting that much harder. Imagine how different it must have been historically when older kids care for the younger ones, giving everyone involved experience with parenting. On a personal level I'm fortunate to have three great nieces in various ages and try to learn what I can from them and of course parent them in myriads tiny ways (it's impossible to avoid, I've realized. You either make conscience efforts or not but you can't avoid parenting if you interact with kids).

> For me personally, having kids has resolved the nature vs nurture debate squarely in the "nature" side.

Amen to that. I have 3 boys. We put in the same ingredients and got wildly different results with all three. I'm convinced that parenting is more about working with what comes factory installed than it is about moulding some ideal human from a formless block of potential.

Incentives and punishments that work with one don't work with the others; we have to really become students of our children to understand what they do and don't respond to, and to parent them accordingly. If my sample size of 3 is any indication, trying to fit children through a one-size-fits-all mold is going to fail miserably.

Well, there's also the fact that unless you are homeschooling and preventing your children from experiencing human and media contact, your nurture input is only part of a whole. I learned a lot of what I did and did not want to be like from my parents growing up, but I also learned a lot from my siblings[1] and my friends, and my school experiences.

That is, you may provide the same ingredients, but ultimately the kid's the baker, and you're not even really in the kitchen to see what goes on. Who knows what makes it into the final product?

1: Aside from the normal older brother semi-worship for a while, I also witnessed what sounded like him coughing up a lung every morning for a winter or two with chronic bronchitis from smoking. Peer pressure to smoke (and there was quite a bit, most my friends did) isn't quite the hurdle you might think it to be when you have that in mind.

Except the differences start showing up long before school age.

Well sure. Notice I said homeschooling and preventing most contact (which actually makes homeschooling redundant).

Kids likely won't turn out the same even with the exact same environmental inputs, but I'm just pointing out that we often vastly over estimate our ability to control those environmental inputs in the first place, so the point is somewhat moot.

And upfront, they were all treated differently. Not by fault, mind you, but just by happenstance. You probably didn't fawn so much over the second, and even less on the third. Not because they are less special, but more because you had a sense of what you are doing. You came into the second and third child with a battery of things to try because you tried some on your first child.

You are probably less strict with the youngest child and worry a bit more over the oldest.

Plus you and your spouse (or whoever) have aged and matured with time, so each child gets to know a slightly different version of you, your spouse, your parents and family. The more spaced out your children are, the more this will become so.

I have 5 kids and I can also attest to this. Each one is different. In our case, the children are in two personality groups: the 1st and 3rd child have a similar personality type, and the 2nd and 4th have a similar personality type that vastly differs from the first type (the 5th is too young to really be expressive right now). Each child is unique in their own way, and they all respond to different risk-reward profiles.

Before I had kids, my grandmother, who had 11, tried to tell me that you just couldn't do much about your kids's personalities. I was naive and didn't believe her until I had 2 and saw the difference first hand.

I am NOT trying to downplay the importance of nurture, but parents have a larger challenge than many non-parents or single-parents expect. It's not just about formulating a good environment (in fact, formulating an environment that is too easy is probably a substantial developmental detriment). Your kids come out the way they are, and you have to really understand their personalities and challenges and then teach them ways to cope with the world while accepting that you can't change their core internal traits. It's an intellectually and emotionally intense labor of love that lasts for decades, and it shapes both parent and child.

I have four daughters. Can confirm.

Although to be fair, having older or younger siblings probably changes your boys a lot too.

haha exactly. I love when really smart people write articles about dealing with children and then you discover they are non-parents themselves. Or, they are work-a-aholics and never interact with their own kids 24/7 like full time parents do.

I get the impression most of the people on this site are workaholics.

sure, musk has 5 kids! how much time does he get with them vs. work I wonder.

When you have that kind of money you have 10 babysitters, nannies, assistants, cooks, cleaners, drivers etc. And you can get a day off almost whenever you want too.

I love it when they show on TV how brave some superstar is who manages to raise children while having a busy career. They never show the nannies, cooks and cleaning personnel.

Then we try to sell that story to single moms with low-paying jobs, and tell them to suck it up when they're breaking down due to the stress and unattainability of it.

And or get yelled at if you suggest that intentionally walking into single parenthood without excellent circumstances is not a great idea.

how about when said brave superstar LEANS IN and delivers a lecture to the planet via book (sheryl sandberg)?

yeah right. I'm sure musk thinks, hmmm today instead of working all day on a fun project I think I'll parent! You can't have it both ways. I'm sure musk sacrificed father/kid relationships for work success in a major way. It's not possible to have it all.

>yeah right. I'm sure musk thinks, hmmm today instead of working all day on a fun project I think I'll parent!

Many rich people do that all the time. If he doesn't think his kids is a "fun project" too, then that's his choice, not something born out of necessity.

>You can't have it both ways.

You can, if you have "fuck you money", which Musk has 10000 times over.

It's the poor people who work 2 shifts and barely have the money to provide for their family that can't have both time and money at the same time.

>I'm sure musk sacrificed father/kid relationships for work success in a major way. It's not possible to have it all.

First of all, nobody mandates that you SHOULD have it all. You can make your own balance and opt to sacrifice maximum work success. Musk is not a slave. If he is a "slave to work success" that's his personal choice.

There are rich people that have excellent in-person, relationships with their kids, and can shun work and meetings for their personal time, whether with kids, spouse, other interests, etc. Gates, for one, stepped down as CEO at 45 and went part-time with MS stuff at 50.

> You can, if you have "fuck you money", which Musk has 10000 times over.

You can have "fuck you money", but you can't have "fuck you time". Sure, the capitalist HN crowd will argue that money can buy you time (e.g. by having people do your chores for you, etc) but ultimately there is a finite amount of bedtime moments, meals, Sunday mornings, etc in your kid's lives. Try as you might, fuck you money won't change that.

>but ultimately there is a finite amount of bedtime moments, meals, Sunday mornings, etc in your kid's lives. Try as you might, fuck you money won't change that.

I think you've misunderstood the concept of fuck you money, at least as it relates to time.

They don't buy you more time -- they buy you the luxury to be you that decides what you do with your finite time. And bonding with your children is entirely up to you (or Musk's in this example) decision if you have those.

Besides, nobody argued that there's not a "finite amount of bedtime moments, meals, Sunday mornings, etc in your kid's life" -- just that when you are rich it's upon you (and not, e.g. your boss or financial necessities, or drudgery work like cooking, and cleaning and such) to spend more of your time with your kid during those moments.

> money buys you the luxury to be you that decides what you do with your finite time

This is an illusion. Ultimately, you have to choose what is a priority in your life. There will be moments, many of them, where you have to choose between a board meeting or making it to bedtime, or taking a business trip across the world or a weekend spent hiking with your kids.

If you choose too many of the latter, at some point your board will get sick of you, your executives will stop trusting you, etc.

If you're prioritizing the things that let you be the CEO of a company, you're necessarily deprioritizing the things that let you spend the most time with your kids.

The problem with "fuck you money" is that it also easily lets you fuck yourself.

The point of having "fuck you money" is that you have money enough that if your kids are more important to you than your company, you can tell your board to fuck off and hire someone else to run the company.

You don't have "fuck you money" if you are still dependent on being CEO to maintain the lifestyle you want. You have fuck you money when whether or not you work is down to what you want rather than what you need.

>>money buys you the luxury to be you that decides what you do with your finite time >This is an illusion. Ultimately, you have to choose what is a priority in your life.

Notice how you just confirm the same thing I said. So, hardly an illusion.

"Ultimately, you have to choose what is a priority in your life" == "it's you that decides what you do with your finite time"

>There will be moments, many of them, where you have to choose between a board meeting or making it to bedtime, or taking a business trip across the world or a weekend spent hiking with your kids.

That's exactly what I said. Musk gets to chose.

>If you choose too many of the latter, at some point your board will get sick of you, your executives will stop trusting you, etc.

So, at worse you'll be off the board, and still left with b/millions in the bank. And only if you do it all the time.

Still, not the same kind of problem as not being able to spend time with your kids because you work all the time or you'll fall behind on rent and be homeless, etc...

>If you're prioritizing the things that let you be the CEO of a company, you're necessarily deprioritizing the things that let you spend the most time with your kids.

The whole point is that you don't HAVE to "prioritize the things that let you be the CEO of a company".

And you'll still be rich, with a home, with money to educate and feed your children etc if you DON'T.

Kids don't want babysitters, nannies, daycares,money, toys, rewards. They just want time with their parents. The more time you can spend with your child, the better. Hard to do in this day and age.

Yeah, but rich people can (have the option, not that they necessarily do it) have both ( babysitters, nannies, daycares, money, toys, rewards AND time with their children).

For many poor working people time with their children is a luxury -- but they can't even give them all the other stuff, sometimes not even decent food and shelter, much less an education.

Turns out most of our concept of being "busy" or "a workaholic" is an illusion. If you sit down and track how you use your time, you'll probably find you don't work anywhere near as much as you think and you use a lot of spare time very inefficiently.

I have an infant. I spend a lot of time with him. During the week I probably take care of him more than my wife does, because she goes to work very early. I also work in a VR startup, scrambling to get projects done. Somehow, I still find time to cook dinner with my wife, watch the latest episode of whatever one TV show we are following, get a few house chores done, and waste time on HN and Twitter. The only times it feels like I'm too busy to get everything done is when I'm wasting too much time on HN and Twitter.

It sounds like you are, in fact, not very busy (except with family stuff). Which is a good thing!

I'm the engineering lead for all of our VR projects (both software and hardware), I organize two different meetups, one bi-weekly, the other monthly.

What I don't do is I don't watch very much television and I don't hang out in bars anymore. I'm married so I don't have to chase girls. I don't play video games anymore (hell, I don't even like non-VR games anymore, but we don't have room in our apartment for a Vive, which is the only VR system I would bother with for personal use). I don't go to the gym every day (only days I take the baby to swim class). I don't have any illusions that I'll be a rock-star, so I'm not in any bands.

Every person I know who thinks they are busy are actually just split and confused on their purpose in life. I have a friend who has a boat and a giant home theater system and he has to stay at work for so much overtime to cover the cost of it all he never gets to enjoy either. If he'd admit that he liked watching TV more than he liked fishing, or vice versa, he'd be a lot happier and actually do more. But he doesn't actually do anything extra in that time at work, because overtime is a fallacy and actually anti-productive. So he'd even be getting more done at work if he wasn't... at work all the time!

When you want to do a certain something, you necessarily have to choose to give up doing other things. I want to build a company and a happy family.

You are right, I'm "not very busy". Because being busy is an illusion. It doesn't matter to how much you get done if your TODO list is 10 items long or 100 items long if you can only get through 9 items in a week (and you will definitely find enough items to replace those 9 in that week). Those 90 extra items don't get done whether or not they are on your list. But if they are on your list, you convince yourself you're "busy". If anything, the anxiety of not being able to make even a 10% dent in a gigantic pile of tasks might even hurt your productivity.

Henry Thoreau talked about this in Walden [1]. He built and lived in a hut by Walden lake for 2 years around 1900. There was a Irish family or such like that lived near by. The man he spoke to served him coffee, a luxury of the day, but had to work all hours to afford it. Walden had none of the luxuries but lived a more stress free life.

  [1]: https://www.walden.org/Thoreau/

Well, his mother and his sister supported him quite a bit.

Or they are parents, but they're not me.

I've got two kids, both teenagers now. In my view it's not just that kids are different, but that parents are different too. My impression is that most parenting advice assumes that the parents themselves have unlimited self discipline, organization, and emotional stamina.

and unlimited time. So much advice of the form: "Really sit down with the child during a tantrum. Listen to their concerns, and make sure they feel heard. Only then engage with them in problem solving.". Uh. Sure. I'll just do that. I mean, dinner is going to burn, we'll be late for swimming, and I was on my way to wipe my other child's butt before helping my _other_ other child with their homework.

I can only assume that the people constructing the advice have a nanny and/or a housekeeper.

Yeah - this is often a problem for me. You've got a boundary of getting to work on time. Which means getting kiddo to school on time. You child doesn't want to eat breakfast, but you know that your child will be more difficult for the teacher at school if they haven't eaten. So the simple "just take them without food, 'they won't starve'" doesn't work because you know this is likely to cause problems in the day. You want the best solution. So all the child has to delay and play and it's fun for them to do this. Repeat this process every day for 18 years.

We have both a nanny and housekeeper (not live-in, part-time), and I would never think to construct this ludicrous advice.

It's hard enough even with that help. Kids have their own minds and personalities and methods of coping with a vast world they just don't understand and can be overwhelming. One-size-fits-all suggestions such as "never punish" just trivialize how complicated little human beings really are.

I became a better manager after having kids. Not because I'm managing people like they're kids, but just because of dealing with those kinds of impossibly, comically insane situations.

Children are great instructors on what's going through everyone else's head. I really don't think people's natural impulses ever stop being childlike, they just learn how to control, cope with, or hide them (to an extent anyway).

That makes children hugely instructive for how to deal with your colleagues. Understand that underneath the facade, everyone has that native wiring that kids lay bear. What kind of things do children respond well to? What do they pull away from? How do you bring the child back to your good side when they're upset?

While the incentives may become more complex with adults, the fundamentals and principles are the same, and children are a powerful lens into the human psyche.

I don't have a nanny or a housekeeper. My solution to that have been: Sometimes let dinner get ruined, and include a discussion of consequences. Sometimes allow yourself to be late, and do the same. Sometimes tell them they have to wait and ignore them - yes I know its hard - while helping your other kids.

A ruined dinner or getting late to swimming are one time events. Teaching your kids that tantrums will "work" in all the wrong ways will affect your life for a long time.

As much as I hate parenting advice, this. Trying to hold everything together and simultaneously shape the habits of humans with free will and their own ideas without resorting to violence doth a crazy person make.

So sometimes we eat burned dinner cuz someone was acting like an asshole. Sometimes play dates "fall through" because someone thought they'd obligate a parent to do something they hadn't even discussed. Good God nothing teaches like bad experiences, and my wife and I can maintain some shred of sanity. Actually that's not fair, our children are a joy ( and exhausting).

It's one thing for your teenager to sob because she didn't have any spending money for the surprise trip somewhere with great shopping because she blew all her money instead of saving it for a great opportunity. It's a completely other thing to have to learn that lesson as an adult.

My kid has rejected false choices from almost as soon as we began offering it to her. Would you like the toy or the book for the car? (Screaming) I don't want car, I want home and show! Makes me giggle how often it fails with her.

That said, I've noticed well set patterns work very well with her even if she doesn't like certain aspects of them. She even gets cranky when I forget to do a certain part of the pattern even if she hates what the event is. (Daddy you didn't close the gate!)

Every kid is different, totally agree.

This is not a real choice but a simple manipulation aiming to provide the illusion of choice.

The purpose of parenting is not to control the children but to support them in learning themselves and the world.

Human beings are intelligent and wired for success. It doesn't take long before we start realizing the difference between choices that don't matter to us and ones that do.

If you're looking for parenting practices that support self knowledge in a collaborative and respectful environment, I recommend "Raising Our chikdren, Raising Ourselves" by Naomi Alford.

Offering fake choices does not respect the intelligence nor dignity of human beings.

And, we need to acknowledge that manipulation is probably a better approach than psychological abuse (time outs) and threats to a child's physical safety (spanking).

Yes. Natural consequences and contrived consequences are two very different things.

Exactly. A good example of natural consequences:

You forgot your jacket. It rains. You get wet.

A good example of manipulation/constructed "consequences":

You didn't write your homework. You don't get to play video games.

And, by the way, if you want your kid to hate a specific video game, turn it into (home)work. This is the approach schools take to killing our children's creativity and natural curiosity.

Any question ending with '..., okay' is asking for permission.

I (as a parent of 2 very easy kids) always avoid those type of permission-asking questions when presenting choice. Instead I offer, not ask: "You can wear the green or the red. What do you choose?"

Choice among humans increases the likelihood of compliance. And choice isn't important, it's the appearance of choice that's important.

This sounds astoundingly similar to what software developers are doing when they remove features and customisability and then retort "but you can still choose between X and Y"l nevermind the fact that X and Y are still a horrible substitute for the A-to-Z that they replaced --- and more unsettlingly, it seems like it does work on much of the user population.

The best advice I've seen is to give them limited responsibility, and then let them deal with the limited consequences. Your job as a parent is to short term care for your children, but long term make them independent and functional in society.

If you never let them wear their shorts and tshirt in the snow when they really want to, they will never respect the cold or your advice.

> My 4 year will always ask for a 3rd option that isn't there, or just reject the framing entirely.

Because children of that age (and younger) have two traits that will always trump logic:

1. Defiance (better described as a need to understand independence)

and

2. A lack of long-term thinking

When a child - who wishes to experience control - wants a cookie, a choice between a banana and an apple is untenable.

Be wary of interpretations that give you broad-reaching advice on how to essentially manipulate children. This - child psychology and help - is a huge industry; interpreting studies to fit a narrative is simple and rarely meets argument.

More than one four year old of my acquaintance know a bullshit false dichotomy when they see one.

What's more likely--that you understand children better than people who spend their entire lives working on that, or that you have misunderstood the advice the article gave?

The point of the article is not that offering a binary choice is a panacea. The point is that you have to model the behavior you want, and reinforce it with praise. Just saying "no cookie" does not give the kid a positive action they can take. Offering a choice of what they can have gives them something to do. And the few times they do it, you have to be ready to make a big deal about how great that was.

Of course a kid who wants a cookie is going to be diappointed if you offer a banana or an apple. No one can change that. What you can train the kid to do is better manage disappointment. As they learn to do that--through positive reinforcement--the drama goes down. That's what the article is about.

Your baseless presumption aside, my response was more general than related specifically to this article.

People don't acknowledge this enough, one size doesn't fit all.

It bothers me most when people discuss diet and obesity. "Just don't eat so much!" is often given as slightly condescending advice. Such advice reflects a personal experience where your body isn't screaming in hunger 24 hours a day. Different people have different metabolisms too, turning food into energy to be spent, or locking it away instantly as fat -- makes a huge difference. Calories-In-Calories-Out is a rather limited view of the situation.

Our internal experiences differ, it affects who we are and how we behave. We all have to be responsible and deal with our personal realities in an adult manner. But it's rather lame to assume that anyone who is challenged by things you find simple is either stupid or lacking in willpower.

Different people have different metabolisms too, turning food into energy to be spent, or locking it away instantly as fat -- makes a huge difference

This is not true - at least the "huge" part.

https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metabolism-vary-between-t...

"Metabolic rate does vary, and technically there could be large variance. However, statistically speaking it is unlikely the variance would apply to you. The majority of the population exists in a range of 200-300kcal from each other and do not possess hugely different metabolic rates."

Calories-In-Calories-Out is a rather limited view of the situation.

https://examine.com/nutrition/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-l...

"In conclusion, losing weight requires a negative energy balance, which can be obtained by eating less, as we have seen, but also by exercising more."

It's like saying, driving a car requires a neutral energy balance, you need to put in just as much gas as you burn.

While 100% true. It's not helpful information. It doesn't mention the fact that different cars burn fuel at a different rate. That some drivers can afford a higher octane fuel. And that a poorly tuned vehicle with incorrect tire pressure will require more fuel.

The point is, that there are many factors that go into weight gain and loss. And while in terms of basic physics it does indeed boil down to energy balance, that ignores a great many factors that affect both ones internal demand for more energy and ones ability to make use of ingested energy rather than turning it into fat.

And yet for each of us, where we're at right now, we lose weight by eating less and exercising more that we are right now. Its a wonderfully self-calibrating system.

Nobody likes that answer. Personal accountability sucks.

It doesn't matter what people like, what matters are the facts of the situation. I'm arguing that answers like yours are self serving reinforcement of your own ideas about morality which blind you to the possibility that you're just wrong in thinking that everyone is on the same playing field.

That does NOT mean we aren't all personally responsible. It means that you should consider having compassion and less contempt for people who fail where you succeed.

Are there cases of pure gluttony and laziness leading to obesity? Damn straight there are, and I'm not arguing otherwise. But whether you believe me or not there are real challenges that _some_ fat people face that you (presumably) and I just don't have to deal with.

Think of it this way, if someone is born with only one leg. They still have all the same personal responsibility you and I have to live their life as an adult. But both of us will understand if they struggle with certain things we're able to accomplish with ease. You wouldn't dream of saying that person lacks personal accountability because he struggles with walking.

So why do you presume to know FOR SURE that everyone who is fat got that way because of a failing of personal accountability? Perhaps they were just born without a leg... so to speak...

I hope you'll reconsider your position. At least to admit there is a possibility that other people have unseen handicaps that you just don't have to deal with.

Sure there are corner cases. But almost everybody can lose weight almost always by simply eating less and exercising more. The rest of the billion-dollar industry preys upon our low self-control by promising some magic cure. That requires no effort.

> So why do you presume to know FOR SURE that everyone who is fat got that way because of a failing of personal accountability?

Nope. I think we both agree there are edge cases for every situation. Where I find fault with your premise is that it is presumed everyone with a "problem" (weight, anxiety, depression, etc.) all fall into the "edge-case" category, where in fact 99% of them do not. Despite that, I get annoyed when we as a people assume that the the majority of people fall into the minority group.

Being very over-weight is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. I posit that the same argument can be made about anxiety, or depression, et al.

> I hope you'll reconsider your position. At least to admit there is a possibility that other people have unseen handicaps that you just don't have to deal with.

Sure thing, absolutely. I'l even go as far as to say I don't need to reconsider this. I agree with your point. Where I take umbrage is with the fact that people are allowed to shirk personal responsibility, hiding under the guise of "this problem is bigger than me", when in fact is isn't. The majority take advantage of the sincere problems (missing a leg) of the minority, which to me is slap in the face of people who need the real help and attention.

Of course. As I said above, we all have to live with our personal realities and behave as adults. But I can't help feel that your answer is exactly what I'm arguing against. It feels right, but it lacks compassion or insight into other aspects that are just as valid and germane.

With my kid I adopted the "Parenting with Love and Logic" approach which suggests that we (parents) pick too many battles with our kids and should instead let them learn first hand the consequences of their choices. So in the case of the coat, if the child refuses to wear one then they get to experience what cold feels like.

Time outs have worked very well for me too. Some behavior is simply unacceptable and ignoring it only teaches them they can repeat it.

Lastly, I think there's a tendency to forget that, with kids, they're basically completely different people every few days/weeks. We've gone through a lot of phases with our son and sometimes the best solution is to simply wait it out. More often than not the behavior changes as his brain changes.

Having worked in education with a wide range of kids (age, temperament, etc.), my view is that these articles are a good read. However, they are written for the masses. To get views. They distill (I hope) tons of research and case studies into a catchy, generalized piece of advice. It sounds good and is definitely worth trying, but under no means should anyone point to such an article as an end all be all solution to raising children. Your example is exactly why. Matters in life are rarely so simple as to be explained away in a single article. There's always going to be a part of the bell curve that gets left out when writing articles like this. Just something for everyone to keep in mind.

I can second this. And if I give a 3rd choice, he wants a 4th. I've tried many of the 'common' advices but they don't really seem to work that well with mine. With mine seems a bit of 'indifference' works wonders.

'We are going out now', 'no, I don't want to, scream, etc, etc', 'Ok, stay there, when you are ready to talk to me and go out, I'll start talking to you again, until then, I'll be in the kitchen/bedroom/whatever'. This usually gives him 5 minutes to think a bit, then comes back, apoligises and we go on our way. I've tried pretty much everything before this, and seems it was the only thing that works with mine.

This trick popped up as the top post on r/lifeprotips a few days ago. The top comment was someone whose kid figured it out.

"Would you like to buy me one set of nunchucks or 2 sets?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/5g9pai/lpt_mot...

My personal experience from two young children is that it works, most of the time. Obviously there are still issues - maybe the young one wants to bring some toy to school on a non-toy day - in this case getting to choose the color of sweater isn't going to help.

But mostly this approach seems to work. Now we as parents still need to remember to use this approach, which we unfortunately often forget in the morning rush.

My wife is a teacher, she always says poblems need to be fixed where it's easiest to fix them. So if a kid brings a toy to school on a non toy day, she will confiscate it (and give it back at the end of the day). She only needs to set one example for an entire year.

> My 4 year will always ask for a 3rd option that isn't there, or just reject the framing entirely.

Exactly my situation. My 2 year old just keep on it until she feels otherwise. Though one thing I have seen to work is to employ her into something adult like allow her to stir the liquid while making scrambled eggs :)

If you allow your kid to get away with the 3rd option, then your kid now knows that your choices aren't genuine. None of these kind of methods work if you let them know that when you say there are two alternatives there really are three.

And I've seen this work often enough when we've had friends of my son come over that we often see act up around their parents, but that will try that shit once with us and then follow our sons cue once they see that all they achieve is getting ignored, that I tend to think that whether this works or not is more often down to follow-through.

That doesn't mean it's a one size fits all solution. You do need to adapt what kind of options you present, and how you respond if they try to push the boundaries - kids are not stupid; if you keep offering "options" when they know there are other alternatives that are on the table if they say the right things, then they'll try to challenge you for it.

To me a person who stubbornly presents two choices when there is in fact a reasonable third is an asshole.

Maybe don't create contrived situations where a toddler can crush your logic and it becomes a battle of wills.

My oldest son quite often comes up with a third, better alternative. The fact that I consider and sometimes accept them might make some other situations harder, because obviously he often cannot understand more complex situations and then there is a conflict. Saying no to a perfectly reasonable suggestion (because it wasn't mine) might teach him to never argue, but I wouldn't want that.

I've read that when you're instructing a child to do something, whether you're a parent or a teacher, you should never end the instruction with "Okay?".

In our house the question is used to ascertain whether the child heard his parent and if so, the probability of compliance with the request/observation/dire threat to the well-being of a favored toy. At no time has it been construed by any of the parties as the parent (noun) requesting permission to parent (verb).

If some tips work and some tips don't, then nurture matters, but it is correlated to nature.

If nurture didn't matter, tips would be totally irrelevant.

same - my 3yo will ALWAYS respond to false choice with "NEITHER!"

> And choice isn't important, it's the appearance of choice that's important

i dont understand how this isnt immediately a red flag for dystopian orwellian oppression. I guess u can do it to kids, they cant defend themselves.

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