Hacker News Reader

Comment by abledon | Hacker News Reader

Also reminds me of parents who are hurried, and say, 'Ok I'll just throw my kid in the stroller for today, even though they are old enough to stand/walk around today... Its just that I'm in a rush and I cant move as slow as them, i need to speeeeed down the streets to do all my errands.' So the kids are already sitting down when they are 4/5 years of age and the body is really , really trying to develop and get a sense of bone/structure/alignment but is already being corrupted by having been locked into a stroller every day mom/dad goes out for errands with them. Sheesh!

View on HN

It's crazy! We have a two year old and go to the zoo fairly often. Almost every other family has kids twice her age sitting in strollers. She can walk around for 4 hour stretches no problem. We were playing Pokémon Go when it was all the rage and she'd just walk along with us for miles at 18 months old. It makes sense that once kids get too big to hold for long periods of time they'd be able to follow along with a roaming band thousands of years ago (not rushing everywhere, but walking at a decent pace). Kids have the capacity to do a lot more than we give them credit for, and not allowing your kid the opportunity to walk for long stretches does them a disservice in the long term.

So do you even take a stroller to the zoo?

Not OP and not a parent. HOWEVER, I find it logical that if a brief rest break (maybe a snack and a nice sit down somewhere?) doesn't get things back on track it's probably time to go anyway.

My four year old likes to be lazy when walking, but she'll run at the playground for hours on end. I used to bring along a strap when we'd take her tricycle to the store half a mile away so I could drag her home since she would whine about being "tired" (read: too lazy to put in the effort since I know daddy will pull me home).

For the past few months whenever I take her out of the home she now has no choice, I'm not going to bend over to pull the thing as the strap gets left at home - she's stopped being such a pill about it as time has gone on. I'm glad I did this, we're going on a trip to Boston at the start of May and she's going to have to suck it up and walk around with mom.

> such a pill

That sounds quaint (ergo, British!) and I'd love to know where it's from.

My family has a northern European background (Sweden/Denmark) and my grandma used it a lot.

Do you know families that really do this every day? Because honestly, I'm dubious that many parents would be so out of touch that consistently. I can imagine some folks resorting to this sort of thing periodically, no question: I think that every family with kids makes some compromises that they'd prefer not to. But by the same token, every family with kids also has some positive things that they're unwilling to compromise on at all.

Maybe that parent you saw putting a big kid in a stroller is in a rush because they're committed to getting errands done in time to be home for the daily family dinner together that they hold sacred. Maybe they just stayed a little too long at a nature center standing back and letting their kid take risks and learn independence. Or yeah, maybe their errands are often hurried like that because they're a single dad or mom working long hours and there just aren't enough hours in the day to keep the household running. (And maybe some of the parents you see being beautifully patient and encouraging with their kids while running errands are burned out by the time they get home and just plop the kid down in front of a TV with dinner on a tray until bedtime... and hey, sometimes that's the sort of thing you need to do.)

Point is: Parents put up with constant judgemental attitudes from people around them, no matter what choices they make. So if you see someone with a kid who's not doing things the way you would have, try to make your default assumption "I'll bet there's a decent reason they made that choice" rather than "What an awful person." [Caveat: I'm less willing to extend that tolerance to people actively hurting their kids, physically or emotionally. But those situations are very, very rare, thank goodness.]

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

* Edit

Why the downvotes?

> Maybe that parent you saw putting a big kid in a stroller is in a rush

Failing to recognize special circumstances , such as parent is in a rush (and other examples OP mentioned), and over-generalizing to form a character judgement is textbook Fundamental attribution error.

Yeah, my 'Sheesh' is more for what today's modern market forces make us do to survive as families. I'm not saying those parents are 'awful', actions like that among many others aren't their 'fault', more just a cause-effect effect of the fast paced city reality.

I find this sort of attitude to be fairly insidious, you're suggesting that kids should become the entire focus of a parent's life, which is actually just as harmful.

On the other hand, there's an obesity epidemic occurring.

Should they not be?

No. Hovering parents are the worst.

IMO, no.

We care (well, IMO) for our kids, but my wife and I continue to have our own individual interests and we do family or couple things that the kids would prefer we didn't.

Just because we could lavish our children with 16 hours of undivided attention per day (entire focus), doesn't mean that's healthy for the kids or the adults. The kids need to learn that they live in a collective world that does not revolve around them, and the adults need to have time and space to live their adult lives as well.

I don't know how or why people do this. My parents made us ride in the car with them on weekends as they spent hours driving around looking at real estate to invest in. We hated it but did it. It was quite beneficial (I just wish they bought some)

That is how you get helicopter parents.

I don't think helicopter parents and devoted parents are the same thing by a long way. I can spend my whole day (12-13 hours) devoting my attention to my kids without at any point hovering over, or mollycoddling them.

Sure, but most parents aren't capable of doing that well. And even then it is a bit of a stretch. Kids are programmed to learn and don't really need adult interaction that much. They need independent time. Time to explore and make mistakes without an adult helping them. So you can say that is being nearby and being devoted while giving them a semi structured environment. Anyway, we won't solve parenting philosophy here, but the general sense (I know.. normative words) is that a parent that just spends their whole day with their kid is probably helicoptering.

>Kids are programmed to learn and don't really need adult interaction that much. //

I don't think I agree with that premise at all. Even as an autodidact, I'd say that guided exploration/learning/endeavour can be far superior in almost every way.

I'd teach a 5yo archery but I'd never give them a bow-and-arrows and leave them to learn it without adult interaction.

A parent who spends there whole day with there kids has probably taken them out to experience environments away from home?

Do you really drop your 6/7yo off at the woods miles from anywhere with a handaxe and a box-of-matches and leave them to it for the day? Or give them a raspberry pi and a box of components with a soldering iron and go out to the shops? (Or how about a band-saw and some wood!). Or give them a recipe book and an oven-lighter and hope they manage to cook a cake rather than gas themselves and blow up the street?

They can mostly make a camp fire, but please instruct first on using the axe and knife, and check the fire isn't going to start a forest-fire before they light it. Sure, after a few times they know how to chop and cut, how to clear around the fire; but do they know about peat-fires, and think to check for over-hanging branches? They need gentle direction and oversight. But they can't even get to the forest without someone taking them, which needs a devotion of time.

Children - especially children under 10 - should absolutely be the primary focus of parents' lives.

I completely disagree. Child-centered parenting is how you create spoiled, self-centered children that become teens that expect the world to revolve around them and adults that throw temper tantrums in traffic.

Children should be nurtured and cared for but they also need to learn how to fit into the family, which existed before they came along and will exist after they've left the house. They need to learn to be others-focused. This produces responsible, empathetic children and leads to productive and caring adults.

I work on this a lot - I have 7 kids.

I'm not interesting in discussing anything with someone that deliberately misinterprets what I say in order to fix a strawman that they then set alight.

I never said any of what you're implying I said.

I don't think it's suggesting that at all.

Even if you yourself (and your spouse) come first, you can treat your kids nicely or poorly. And often it's because we don't think about the impact that we treat our kids poorly. And often when we take the time to think through our interactions, we find them more fulfilling.

And really, we should have kids as a higher priority - probably higher than errands.

For many parents, those "errands" are often focused on providing shelter and sustenance for the kids. Get the kids to daycare or school, get to first job, pick up the kids, get to the grocery, cook food, put the kids to bed, maybe work a second or side job.

Sure, some errands are optional, but many are directly related to the daily grind of keeping the roof, food, and heat provided for.

"Make your lazy-ass kids walk when they're capable, even if it's temporarily less convenient to you" isn't saying that kids should be the entire focus of parents' lives. It's advice that will make parenting easier for them in the future, and is better for their kids.

Same for lots of stuff—the easy way out is usually harder in the long run. See also: shutting your kid up with food in public. Congratulations, now you have to carry snack crackers everywhere you go for the next several years, and you kid doesn't learn how to behave without shoving crap in their mouth. They'll probably eat worse at meal times too. Totally worth avoiding a handful of tantrums when they were 1-2yrs old though.

I don't know about you, but I find it easier to be pleasant when I've just eaten a banana or two.

"the entire focus"

No, just a bigger priority than the least important item on whatever busy schedule you have. If you can't fit your kids into the schedule, and your solution is to half-ass your kids instead of half-assing or downsizing your schedule, then your priorities are wrong.

A young child should be the most important thing in your life. If you don't want to commit to that, you shouldn't have kids.

Seems to be making the more modest a reasonable claim that children should be a central concern in parents actions directed at or involving the children.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com