Let your kids lose: Success inhibits preschoolers’ selective trust | Hacker News Reader

Let your kids lose: Success inhibits preschoolers’ selective trust

sciencedaily.com

276 pointschriskanan111 comments

One solution strategy that works very well from my experience is to ask them upfront whether they want to play "for real" or to play to learn. [edit: A third mode is "for (silly) fun" where everything is allowed.]

This works for all ages... and for boardgames and physical games. It's their choice which mode they want to play in, and they trust and respect you more when given the choice. You treat them as a peer. You can beat them mercilessly, or you can join their side and practice the game together. And the thrill and confidence they get when they beat you playing 'for real' is just priceless.

I am curious. Can you give a concrete example or two? Also, if not about a board game, where else would this apply?

Physical contests (sports, racing, wrestling), knowledge contests ("Do you know x?"), practice based games (as you mentioned, some board, chess, etc).

Essentially anything where "I've consumed more calories that you have" or "I've had more years to think that you have" are an unfair advantage for purposes of fun.

The comment you're replying to described it as three choices, but you can also consider it a spectrum.

pure instruction -> teaching through playing -> friendly match -> competitive match

Let's use a card game as an example.

Pure instruction: Both players play with their cards visible to each other, and the teacher coaches rules and strategy as they play.

Teaching through playing: The hands are now private, but the teacher will tell the student if they're making bad moves and allow do-overs. The teacher may also set up situations for the student to take advantage of.

Friendly match: The teacher is playing against the student. No coaching is given. But, nit-picky procedural rules are not always followed. (You've set that card down and your hand left it, you can't pick it up again).

Competitive match: Rules are followed to the letter.

Thanks. Wouldn't there also be the "I am wiser than you, and can either play 'easy' or play my best" even when playing competitively? "Competitive match" as you define it is more about following the rules, not the effort put in to actually try to win and outmaneuver the other player.

Think of a chess game, for example. We can play by the rules to the letter, but if I decide to systematically take your pieces one-by-one or "forget" some of my own experience to perhaps make it more fun, are elements I assumed are in the original comment above.

How did you get your kids started with board-game type games? I have a 3yro and we just have "silly fun" with dice but I'm trying to figure out how to show him the "move N places forward" mechanic where N is the number on the die.

Try teaching them to count with dice. Roll the dice, choose/count N objects, and try to have them do the same.

Isn't 3yo a bit too early? I mean, at three years old a child is legally smart enough not to swallow the dice... but I thought knowing how to interpret numbers and apply them is a bit more advanced than knowing not to eat the numbery thing. ;)

Yeah fair enough, I was just wondering about the future. How did you build up to a full board game with your kid? What were the phases? 1. Succeed in not eating the dice 2. ??? 3. Play a game of Sorry! within the rules.

It won't be very long and your child will be teaching YOU games that she/he learned from friends. :)

The intermediate step here is what Candyland does.

3 years old is definitely not too early to start playing structured games.

At first, early on, games should be very simple. The idea is to focus solely on the basic structure of games:

     --game start 
     --keep attention on game
     --turn taking/following in correct sequence
     --problem solving around a very simple goal
     --game end
     --with finally very clear assessment of player ranking (i.e. You won, I/we lost or I won, You lost)

Underlying all this should be a heavy focus on the maintenance of appropriate emotional responses and behavior modeling (e.g., no gloating, no sore losers, no emotional aggression or defensiveness).

Again, this is all ground-floor stuff, so kids can start learning it as early as 2-ish. Learning to take turns is a huge emotional advantage. As is learning how to both succeed and fail in games and life with grace.

A very good game that has a degree of complexity appropriate to kids that young is "Animal Upon Animal" by HABA.[0]

It's a simple stacking game: On your turn, stack this animal on that animal; if the stack of animals falls over, that's the fail state. (There is a 6-sided dice with pictures on 4 of its faces, and 1 and 2 pips on the the remaining, but it can easily be removed from the game until the child in question is ready for it.)

[0]http://a.co/bJ8syTL

Not at all. Candyland is recommended for children ages 3-6 and Chutes and Ladders 3-7. Both are good intros to the concept of board games.

I try to avoid telling a 3 year old what they are incapable of doing.

The 3 year old will tell you what they want to do.

At 3, my little guy's favorite toy was rated for 8+ years old, and his favorite game was chess.

He never cared if he won or lost at chess, his primary purpose was to push his pawns, castle, and then get in at least one en passant.

> I'm trying to figure out how to show him the "move N places forward" mechanic where N is the number on the die.

Maybe start with hopscotch (the regular kind with where you toss an object into a square, but with clearly numbered squares), telling them each time the number of the square they're on, the number of the square they're heading to, and the number of hops they'll do, before they do them. After a while, they'll get an understanding of how the numbers on the squares relate to what you're saying, and maybe even a vague intuition for subtraction.

Eventually, you can replace the thrown object with a rolled die (I suggest a big soccer-ball-sized die they can see from far away, with numbered faces instead of pips)—whose roll indicates how many spaces they should move rather than the space they should move to—and keep playing the same game.

Once they get that, then they're ready to play board games.

Try "Animal Upon Animal" by HABA.[0] It's an excellent game for kids exactly that young. Very simple stacking game. I highly recommend it. It'll teach turn taking and goal oriented thinking.

http://a.co/bJ8syTL[0]

My 2.5 year old did my dice rolling in Trivial Pursuit last night (1970s retro Australian edition). I just made a big thing of showing her the number on the die, reading it aloud, then moving the piece that many spaces while counting up. She is interested because she seems to see the social significance of the dice throw within the game environment, but not fully aware of the movement options/significance. That's OK. Using numbers at all is good at this age. I wonder at what cognitive level children interpret randomness, such as dice throws.

We bought Orchard by Haba for our 2yo and she absolutely loved it, still plays it sometimes 2yrs later, and it motivated her interest in board games in general.

Thank you, I've never heard of this game but the Amazon reviews look great. Do you have any other board games recommendations for 3-5 year olds?

Matching memory games are something my daughter got into shortly before turning 4. We acquired a copy of Trouble from somebody and she likes that too.

While not a dice game, my daughter really loved Sequence for Kids when she was 3. She was able to follow the rules and learn to play.

https://smile.amazon.com/Jax-8001-Sequence-for-Kids/dp/B0000...

Tie the level of dessert to the rarity of the dice roll. :-) (oh, and don't explain the game).

I play Snail's Pace Race with my three year old. The rules are simple and it's not competitive.

There are games that are simpler and better for kids than trying to get them to slog through Monopoly or whatever.

My First Carcassonne and Sushi Go! are two we like and they're playable for adults too. (A lot of kids games are terrible, ones based on licenses like Disney or Paw Patrol for example.)

Also check out Peaceable Kingdom they make cooperative games for kids (Hoot Owl Hoot, Race to The Treasure, etc.) I haven't played them personally but based on reviews some families really enjoy them a lot.

FYI: http://www.peaceablekingdom.com/ may be hacked or was sometime in the past. The site wasn't loading so I tried archive.is and the cooperative games link on the home page loaded a porn site

Spiel Des Jahres has a children's category. The 2016 winner was Stone Age Junior and the 2015 one was Spinderella.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiel_des_Jahres

There's a big difference between a three year old who has just turned three and one who is nearly four. We've got a three and a half year old (as well as a six year old who loves board games with a passion). He has just got the hang of moving pieces forward based on the roll of a dice.

He has played Uno (without the scoring and with face up hands of cards) for a while now. The other game he has been able to play and that I recommend as not being as painful for adults as some, is an Orchard Toys game called 'Where's my cupcake?', but he's only just at the snakes and ladders type stage. We played a lot of Sorry too with my six year old when he was about 4-4.5. The other thing we have done is having the three year old 'on a team' with an adult, but that obviously works better with multiple kids.

One they hit 4.5/5, there are tons of games you can play with them. That's when things start get to fun! Basically, I wouldn't worry yet - they just have to get to the right stage developmentally which they will do.

An other option is to play cooperative rather than competitive games.

A common idea in Go is that a stronger player will play a "teaching game" with a weaker one. The game is sufficiently abstract and complex that the weaker player may not even notice the actions of the stronger player who endeavors to play poorly so that they are only slightly better than their opponent and have the opportunity to share new ideas and tricks at a level appropriate to their student.

Obviously, these have to be done intentionally. A weaker player who nearly wins only to discover their opponent was "teaching" is probably a bit offended: their accomplishment stolen from beneath them.

What aids all of this is that Go has a handicapping system that can be very well tuned so that for people who would score within 40-60 points of one another you can probably tune the game down to even odds.

> The game is sufficiently () complex that the weaker player may not even notice the actions of the stronger player

I recommend to people learning to look at the activities of someone "good" at the field but not a star for this reason, I don't know if it applies to all fields but for ex I got the same feeling learning chess by following GM's games (I was lost) and a book like "Master vs Amateur" opened my eyes to typical errors made by intermediate players that won't show up in chess books (another example is "The Amateur Mind"). I tell soccer players than besides enjoying watching the games of the big teams and star players to watch "journeymen" games from a 2nd division to learn the basics.

Also the reason why we frequently learn more from a student mate explaining something that from a veteran teacher or professor, who forgot the struggles of the beginners.

Which is why Napoleon favored generals who had the reputation of being consistently "lucky" - i.e., those whose excellence wasn't easily understood.

Could you maybe clarify the connection? Is the idea that "lucky" generals were actually experts beyond the comprehension of their peers?

Napoleon didn't clarify, I don't believe. The quote was "I would rather have a general who was lucky than one who was good." Certainly, "Beyond possible comprehension by others" isn't what I mean or a likely interpretation. "Succeeded for reasons beneath others notice" would be more the idea. As an example, Grant's tendency to thoroughly disambiguate his orders and always put them in writing (after a Shiloh order debacle) helped his luck a great deal. But it isn't something others would necessarily notice or be in a position to notice. Sheridan had some astonishing luck, but it was possible because he insisted his subordinates (each taking separate routes) be highly disciplined and courageous and get to each point exactly on time, no matter what. (Later, one of those subordinates, Custer, would be cut down because his peers didn't fulfill their orders and arrive on time to join him in battle despite all - and because he did push on as he'd been taught. Coordination only works if everybody's doing it.)

Another option is to take on additional objectives, which serve to handicap you.

For instance, when competing to win, there's little room to be exploratory, playful, envelope pushing, maximizing learning. First tries at anything mostly fail. So I'll say "I'm going to focus on learning new things, not just on winning". And verbalize the exploration like "hmm, I wonder if...", attempt, and post mortem review ("I just tried X... and Y happened"). Or offer that as an option - "I'd like to try throwing (at target) under my leg... or would you rather I throw regular?"

Play to teach can be mixed in as a part-time objective. "Fake-oops, I dropped my card face up. What was it? What's something you might do differently knowing I have that?"

One can also optimizing for game interesting / fun. "Well I could use this card to wipe you out there, instead of discarding it, but this is so much fun, I want to fight it out".

So never "illusionary success", always transparent honesty. But being explicit that there can be more than one "game" at play. But also have to watch that this all doesn't become an "it's unpleasant to lose" avoidance strategy - if playing "for real", maybe that's to the bitter end.

Ok, I must have read something wrong, but what they are saying is that children put more trust in people giving them useful clues than people giving them not useful clues. Something that seems quite reasonable.

Which makes me confused by this quote: "... it suggests that children may not be as savvy as previous research has suggested."

Obviously a "helpful" clue that doesn't improve your chance of success (they always succeed) isn't really helpful. Isn't it quite savvy to recognise that?

If someone has gotten a better understanding of what they are actually trying to say I'd like to hear it.

There might be an interesting result in it somewhere, as it could be interpreted to imply that only slightly challenging kids in an educational context could lead them to believe that their learning efforts has no use if the challenges are adjusted to never let them fail. But I don't see how the results could be interpreted to mean what the title says.

I completely agree. They are taking a limited experiment and extrapolating to parenting in general.

One experimenter gave accurate clues; the other gave inaccurate ones.... But for half of the children the game was rigged so that ultimately they would find the hidden objects.

So one adult was always giving bad advice and one was always giving good advice. But in half the games it was rigged so the child always found the toy even if they looked in the wrong places. The advice from the adults was still always bad and good advice for the rigged games.

Afterwards they asked the kids who they thought were more helpful. Even though one adult was giving bad advice always and one adult was giving good advice always the 4-5 years olds only discerned this if they actually lost the game when they didn't follow the good advice, even though the adult giving bad advice was always still giving bad advice.

I think the key is they must have rigged the game to ensure the bad advice adult was always still giving bad advice. If the bad advice turned into good advice in the rigged version then it wouldn't work, just like you said.

But how can advice for winning a game be either bad or good if you will win whatever you do? That's the part I don't understand.

I think the point they were trying to make was that even though the kids had benefitted in earlier games from helpful advice and received no benefit when given unhelpful advice that by being allowed to then succeed in the rigged game the kids failed to acknowledge the value of the earlier advice. This shown by the kids not having a preference for the more helpful person. Though I think the conclusion they are drawing would really depend on the sample size of games a kid was given in order for the kid to be able to distinguish good & bad advice from the game simply being pure chance all along.

I still don't see it. How on earth would a kid recognize unhelpful advice if it still resulted in finding the object? The kid does not know the game is rigged. I think it is more likely the article has not fully explained the experiment. It would make me sad to think this was actually published.

Say the advice is "look behind the couch in the living room" and the object is later found on the kitchen counter. And the rigging consists of the experimenter asking the kid to get something unrelated from the kitchen, for example.

But yes, it's hard to determine whether this is how the experiment worked from the article. Unfortunately the actual paper at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096516... is paywalled in the usual way.

> Unfortunately the actual paper at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096516.... is paywalled in the usual way.

Searching for

    "title of article" PDF

is usually pretty effective (and is in this case ;-) ). In CS you'll find a PDF hosted on the author's home page like 99% percent of the time. Other fields are more spotty, but this approach is still pretty effective.

I used my student super powers on that and now have the answer!

There was actually 4 similar studies described in the article. But the first one is the most important.

The setup was that the kid would watch a video where a toy was hidden in one of two cups. The helpful person would point out to the kid in which cup the toy was hidden. The unhelpful person would not give any hints at all but rather just explain which toy was hidden. The kid would of course follow the helpful persons advice, but would have to guess in void of any advice.

The kid would then get to guess in which cup the toy was hidden, whereafter the answer was revealed in the video. However, in the successful condition, the answer was modified so the kid would guess right no matter what.

This was repeated eight times, after which the kid got to choose which person would give them advice for four more trials.

It was in this situation it showed that the kids who had always been successful did not seem to value the better advice they would expect to get from the helpful person while the kids who had failed due to lack of advice chose the helpful person.

In the article they discuss this being due to the kid trusting their own ability to guess, not needing any help.

I'd say that the results are academically interesting as they increase our understanding of children's decision making. But I don't think they should be taken out of context and be applied as a some kind of answer on how to do parenting and teaching.

I'm with you. I think the whole "good" advice and "bad" advice is relative. It could be misconstrued and applied to the real world. Someone could say that "good" advice is stealing, ripping off people's accounts because if you do it right, you get to reap the rewards earlier than hard work and you don't have to suffer the consequences. In this case, it sounds to me like the researchers are painting "good" and "bad" by their own subjective opinion, and they end up getting the obvious "I didn't agree with your conclusion" result, but from children. When those children grow up and start calculating the extra time it takes based on poor advice, they will probably learn and come to different conclusions like we all have. But as it is, children are naturally trusting and don't expect some jerk is going to lie to them. Too bad the world is harsh.

Perhaps, in the "win whatever you do" case, the item is originally placed somewhere, and the good advice really does relate to that place—so there's a way to win "authentically." And then, if the child never searches that place, then the item is moved—to a place unrelated to the clues—so that they will find it.

The advice was "good advice" in the sense of "if you had followed the advice, you would have found the item before the taking-pity-on-you time limit." But it's not "good advice" in the sense of it having any relation to where the item was ultimately found—and therefore it can't be inferred to have been good advice just from the evidence the child has at that point.

On the other hand, if the game is played iteratively (like an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma), it would eventually become clear (presuming the child managed to find the item by themselves some of the time) that there is this "taking-pity-on-you time limit", and that some of the advice has a correlation to where the item is before that time limit. The child would likely intuit the "taking-pity-on-you" moment as the true loss condition of the game, and become upset when it happened, just as if they had been told they lost.

This something I've realized about my own impostor syndrome: the people who are most likely to knock me down a peg when I'm being overconfident are the only ones I trust when they compliment me. If you only ever hear positive things from someone, you can't trust that what they say is true.

> If you only ever hear positive things from someone

That rule seems overly strict perhaps? Like if someone only says positive things, but only occasionally, then there is still a signal there.

This. What happened to if you have nothing positive to say then keep shut?

Positive praise, if rare, with neutral (or no) feedback otherwise, can have a similar effect.

Elon Musk is known for soliciting negative feedback, from friends.

It's harder to improve something when you never get negative feedback. I'd rather hear a negative opinion than nothing (when looking for feedback, that is).

I was taught chess at age 6 by a national level player. While I have no doubt he never had to try hard to beat me, he never let me win. I was a far better player as a result.

While I never won, I was never discouraged, because he would always point out where I had made good plays and where I could have done better, in a very interactive manner.

This has got to be one of the best ways to learn.

My dad, while never a national level player, taught me chess, and likewise never let me win. The day that I beat him for the first time was an enormous triumph for me, and I'm happily imparting that to my own kids now. My 8 year old hadn't beat me yet, but his game has developed rapidly and that first win isn't very far off now. I'll offer him advice and help him understand why a given move was good or bad, but his moves are his and his alone.

When he wins, it'll be because he earned it, and I know from experience what a triumph that win will be.

I'm similar in chess, but I'm afraid the day of reckoning for Pops may be sooner than I had planned for!

My father stopped playing chess with me once I began consistently beating him

In the chess arena - if heard a couple of good reviews of this game lately. Chess with random pieces but you get worse prices the better you play. Off for a game now. Really Bad Chess by Zach Gage https://appsto.re/nz/XHxjcb.i

I do not understand how can he beat you if you started playing as a kid. Granted, I don't know what I'm talking about but unless you are going senile I don't see how he can beat you while he's still a kid.

Lack of practice because of other commitments perhaps?

Winning one game against someone is different than being able to beat someone consistently.

The article doesn't explain the experiment very well, which has caused confusion for myself and other commenters here. Having read the actual research paper, I'll try to outline how the experiment works, as I understand it:

Children were shown a video on a laptop featuring two containers. There would either be a helpful person or an unhelpful person who secretly puts a toy in one of the containers. The helpful person would then indicate which container they had put the toy into (either by pointing to the container or by lifting the containers to reveal the toy). Contrary to what the article says, the unhelpful person simply did not offer any sort of hint. The child would then be asked to select the container the toy was in.

I hope that clears things up.

Confessing I didn't read the article, but from my parenting experience - Beating your kids at games teaches them one very important thing about real life: to learn a skill you have to practice repeatedly. This inevitably involves frustration and persistence which any human being should be prepared to deal with in life.

The earlier this lesson is learned, the better the life lived.

RELATED: School with "No Rules" Playground https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Y0cuufVGI

Without knowing about the "game" from the study and the "rigging" process in greater detail than the article provides it's hard to see how (or whether) the outcome is meaningful.

Very interesting research. Unfortunately we all should have learned by now that it pays to be skeptical of all provocative social science findings until replicated...

I suspect "children" here may be a distraction: under the same artificial constraints, adult players might show the exact same behavior.

From the article (and abstract), it's hard to imagine a game where the 'bad' advice is really 'bad' if (1) the player always trusts it; and (2) they then always succeed. In such a case, the forced-success may retroactively make the bad-advice 'good'. (At best, maybe the bad advice forced a slower completion? But that requires assuming some more complicated game.)

From playing the game of interpreting this article, I have concluded that neither the article author nor the researchers (via their original abstract) can be trusted to summarize such research in sufficient detail for unambiguous interpretation.

Solution: play something that has essentially zero strategy, where who wins is close to random. Like Ludo or Yahtzee.

My daughter often wins at Ludo, but it's not because I let her. She also often loses.

If you can do it convincingly, you can probably play games involving some skill if you adopt a consistent and beatable strategy. Like Uno by playing the oldest legal card in your hand and choosing a color you hold randomly for wilds, or Guess Who by always choosing an attribute that about 1/4 of remaining characters share.

That's a partial solution. It doesn't help them with developing winning strategies if the outcome is random. Nor does it help them develop determination; nor, I wager, resilience to losing.

I want my kids to beat me, not just win by chance.

Its not a solution, I believe. Random success is not based on decision making skills. Random success will teach child to make random decisions.

Just not be afraid to really lose to your child in game which at start equally unknown for both you and your child. Let your child to learn how to win and learn how to learn to win.

As an example of such a learning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11653538

If you or your child do not like chess, you can choose any other game, which allows your child to use his fluent mind strengths to win you. Just stop thinking that child is small, stupid and unable to win a fair game. He really can win, but not the games where your crystallized mind has its advantages.

I'm guessing that you meant to type "learn how to win and learn how to lose", which is a great point. Understanding how to move forward happily after failure is a huge asset.

That is another good point but I think they meant to type what they typed.

Yes, you are right, game maybe used to teach child to lose. And of course should be used in such manner.

But I meant something different. Learning how to play particular game is a small step to aquiring general learning skills. How to learn is a great problem, and many do not know efficient ways to learn something. But its very important not only to move forward after a failure, but to become smarter and increase chances of making successful decisions on the next occasion to win.

Another one: handicapping. Chess with rook odds, or Go with a few handicap stones.

Recently I got into this relatively new iOS app called Really Bad Chess that is a lot of fun along these lines. My partner was never taught Chess but wanted to learn, and this made it entertaining to get started for both of us.

http://reallybadchess.com

Ludo's fundamental, underlying lesson is that your actions don't matter at all. (The player has literally no agency in the game, it could be equivalently played by a RNG.) That doesn't seem like a good parenting lesson. A board game should be an opportunity to develop strategic thinking skills, rather than teaching the child that they're irrelevant.

The player has literally no agency in the game

A bit of a sidetrack, but Ludo does have decisions: which disc to move and how many spaces. Chasing vs rushing to complete. Whether to move a disc when a 6 is diced or to bring a new disc into play.

Chutes/snakes and Ladders is pure luck.

> That doesn't seem like a good parenting lesson

Lots of things in life (good and bad) are pure luck. Handling things you "do/don't deserve" with appropriate emotional responses is a valuable life skill.

To be clear: the bad parenting lesson is that the child learns that their actions don't matter. Rolling the dice gives the illusion of agency, but of course the child does not actually get to make any decisions. Their actions do not map to any recognizable outcomes; they may as well act completely randomly. This strikes me as a bad thing to learn.

> Lots of things in life (good and bad) are pure luck. Handling things you "do/don't deserve" with appropriate emotional responses is a valuable life skill.

That is also true.

Yahtzee has some strategy.

Option 3: play games with substantial elements of chance and strategy.

Card games are particularly good in this respect, but there are a wide variety of games where a completely unskilled player can occasionally win against a much more skilled opponent.

Another option is a game where you're both playing against "something" but not really against one another. For instance in Scrabble, your opponent is really the language and your knowledge of it, rather than the other person. Plus luck, of course.

Likewise the violin. There are "levels" to reach, and competitions, but ultimately it's down to you and the music and the instrument. The point where my daughter surpassed me on violin came remarkably quickly. Granted, I was trying to play along on the double bass.

The musical part of your reply is interesting.

As I read it, the idea occurred to me to learn a new instrument along with your child. My experience is that kids learn to play an instrument faster than an adult; even given that, they'll only progress along with you by practising, and it's a pretty cool way to spend time with your kid.

Thanks for the inspiration.

This is exactly the problem the researchers are trying to avoid.

I have no idea how this made front-page.

The title is inconsistent with the article title, and even the article title seems inflated to what it describes.

As I understand it, the experimental group played a game they couldn't lose (rigged) and adults gave them "hints." The kids [correctly] identified that they weren't dependent on the adults' help in that group.

However, there doesn't even seem to be a link to the actual study anywhere, so I can't even check what this research actually is.

Study link is at the bottom of the article; it just manages to look like an ad a bit, so easy to miss. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096516...

If you or anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral title), we can change it. The HN guidelines call for changing titles when they are either linkbait or misleading (and that's not an xor).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Both the subtitle of the linked article and the published journal article's main title are: "Success inhibits preschoolers’ ability to establish selective trust".

The "establish selective trust" phrase is much more accurate than just "trust" -- in fact, the current title on HN in strictly incorrect. The preschoolers don't have problems trusting. Rather, you could argue that they're more trustworthy when they never lose. It's the "selective" part that's important. (That said, this feels a bit pedantic to me, and it seems as if no one is confused by the difference in wording.)

The "Let your kids lose:" prefix on the SD headline (and not in the peer reviewed publication) could cut either way -- it might be link bait, but it's also not inconsistent with the researchers' advice.

Ok, we put 'selective' in the title. Thanks!

There is a DOI at the bottom of the page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13147440

In summary the takeaway would be "you only understand the importance of something when you lose it" thus those kids who won the game despite receiving good advice thought that it was normal somehow to the point of not acknowledging the help they've got as they succeed anyways, but those who lost recognize that good advice would have helped them. I hope I understood it correctly.

Call me crazy but why should the kids that got good results from both adults differentiate between either adult. Obviously the kids that received information that did not pan out from one adult would prefer the adult that gave them information that did. The results seem perfectly obvious to me. The kids are not stupid or am I missing something here?

i feel like it's important to win a couple of times while learning to give the human brain some short term reward to keep going. I'd surely try this first on something low stakes if a kid gives up. You don't want to give a kid a mindblock from something `important`

What if your child loses more often than anticipated and learns hopelessness?

I think that's called learning 'life'.

One of my favorite approaches in chess: play straight up, but allow your opponent to switch sides with you once (e.g., let them play the endgame from a winning position).

Blocked by security rules? https://i.imgur.com/l2sOlRw.png

That's the local proxy you're accessing through. Talk to IT.

Imgur allowed but Science Daily is blocked. I'd like to know the rationale behind that one =)

  rule: .*daily.* deny -- to stop people wasting time...
  rule: imgur.com/.* allow -- kitten pictures allowed
                           -- (we don't want to have a revolution at our hands)

It turned out to be due to Incapsula web accelerator/protector [0]. > Incapsula is a service that secures and accelerates the website you were trying to reach.

It works fine in Firefox/Chrome, I was trying to open it using qutebrowser so maybe it's a problem with QtWebKit? Anyways, my fault for jumping to conclusions (thinking the site was hugged to death).

[0] https://www.incapsula.com/why-am-i-seeing-this-page.html

Idk seems like common sense.

whoa, downboats!

I meant, why does it require a scientific study to understand that lying to small children deforms their worldview?

Common sense is decidedly uncommon. Sometimes science affirms a widely held belief, sometimes it refutes common knowledge and sometimes it leads to a paradigm shift. All these discoveries are equally valuable.

Exactly!

Every time there is a scientific study, someone responds saying it has confirmed their worldview, and is therefore pointless, betraying a deep misunderstanding of the purpose of scientific studies.

amusing, I'm a scientist and a parent and yet I don't get it?

- Its important to validate the obvious, because sometimes its not so obvious.

- Having a flippant, dismissive, repetitive comment provides no value to the conversation and wastes the time of anyone reading.

Encourage kids to celebrate their failures

You mean the Superman suit I got from Amazon isn't working. Grow, Grow oh ohhh :-)

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