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Comment by powvans | Hacker News Reader

I cannot take my 5 year old son into a supermarket. Entering and exiting requires passing by so much candy and other garbage that it's just not worth it. He will invariably pitch a fit when I say no and we will invariably have a tear filled exit from the store. The store is effectively weaponizing my child against me to extract money from my pocket.

This is similar. My kids don't play video games, but I have friends who will hear no end of whining and crying when their kid needs more Minecraft $$$. Of course they can refuse to participate, but as a parent it's frustrating.

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I'm a parent, so I don't say this lightly. It's not the store. It's you. Get used to the fact that your kid will see stuff everywhere they aren't supposed to have. Not taking your kid into situations like this will pay terrible dividends in future years. Deal with this now.

This is true. Sorry GP, but if your kids are of the fairly typical variety then parent is right. I remember when our son was younger and we would chat with other parents. Our son was always in bed by 7:15pm and getting up at a reasonable morning hour. Other parents became amazed as bed time was always a fight for them. How do you do it, they would ask, as if we possessed some secret knowledge of child taming. My wife would then explain the routine and consistency required to achieve this magical feat. You could see their faces fall as the process was described. No magic this "consistency and routine" thing could never work for them and their house. Precious Jimmy or Sue are just different....

So many times this. We thought maybe our kids really were abberant. But then we met other parents with this secret knowledge as our son aged and we had a daughter.

I accept my children's disappointment. May they learn it young. I am here to guide them to the most productive life possible. Productive in the fulfillment sense, not the material sense. This will always require weathering the storm of their sometimes outbursting disappointment. Funny thing, though, after a while they learn that no actually means no and they don't lose their cool so much over it these days.

Edit: just want to say it actually is hard. It requires a lot of the parents to be consistent and show up regularly. It is so hard in fact that it is a sort of secret. But within the confines of this sacrifice and constraint there is a sort of calm and freedom that makes day to day life flow better. It isn't for everyone, but modifying a young child's behavior in most cases is anything but mysterious.

Don't they wake up extremely early if they go to bed at 7:15pm? My son already wakes up at 6:30am when bed time is 8:00pm.

I am not looking forward to waking up at 5:45am instead!

They mostly follow the sun these days. Now that they are both older (5+) we tend to flex the schedule +/- 1 hour or so. Read them a story for a few minutes and they have all the skills to put themselves to sleep easily now.

The specific time does not matter so much as the routine and consistency. The trickiest thing to work around is the Sun. My kids tend to do best when the Sun is mostly set. Some of the time they do pop up earlier. But like all things it changes. At my kids age my role in the morning is quite different from what it used to be :)

Mine is just a year old so yeah, it's a different situation. But also in Berlin during summer day time is ~4:30am to 9:30pm and in winter it's extreme in the other direction, so having them follow the sun doesn't work quite as well as it would be in regions closer to the equator!

Ahh, yeah. I live in the south east United States. We change our clocks by an hour in spring and fall. It is the trickiest when the Sun sets later because they tend to want to be up a little later in the day (800-830) now before the Sun doesn't make the house so bright, but it is still fine. We just used heavier drapes when they were younger to trick their mental clocks a little.

Easy to forget the planet isn't the same for everyone else :)

If I had to have exactly same routine every evening, I would personally hated it and go crazy. Occasional difficulty to wake up is low price for not having to structure all family life and my life around 7:15 sleeping time. I really like to be able to stay on playground longer when whether is right or be with my adult friends a bit longer or, well, anything like that.

If the kid would be autistic I would do it, but otherwise nope.

Yeah, I hope this advice didn't seem too totalitarian. We did that all the time and still do. I think it is more of a "most of the time be consistent". And bed time is only one component. The routine is also super important, possibly more important than a specific time, but the timing certainly helps. The routine before bed is like programming to their brain that helps them hit their off switch easily. After a few years they can do it with very little help from an adult. So it is also all about the age where they are going to most easily learn these skills. To me it is worth doing it when they are younger because it is just another invisible life skill that really helps them be happy and whole.

The point is to have a normal routine that you can break. Rules are meant to be broken.

It turns out that you will always have a routine whether you are aware of it or not.

Everyone enjoys the rush of freedom that comes from breaking the rules. Remember they are only rules, not laws. Rules and routine aren't simply restrictive, they can give a backdrop to all the other moments.

Yup. Our kids are normally in bed by 7:15, and they're in the older 7-9 bracket. (Up at 6am, but so are we.)

Their delight when you do something special like going out for dinner or a "late" night walk is wonderful. Can be as often as 1-2x a week or even more during school holidays.

They are doing their child a HUGE disservice!

Kids need to learn they don't get everything they want. I needed to leave behind a shopping cart more than once to carry my child out of the store. But he learned, and is now a beacon of delayed gratification.

the fact that the world is set up this way doesn't stop me from not liking it (not OP, also parent). shops and goods are designed to take advantage of both children and parents, sometimes it simply feels wrong.

True, but my parents taught me very early on that this is the case. Same with ads on childrens' TV channels. Did I go through a phase, like most kids, of wanting and begging for stuff at the store? Of course, but they never caved. Depending on the time of year, it was "put on your Christmas/birthday list".

The kid might have some mental problem the parent has no control over. Being unable to pass through supermarket at age of 5 is highly out of norm even if the kid is spoiled.

I can't help but see this as an opportunity. In a way, the store is providing for you an environment to reliably reproduce bad behavior in your child.

You could establish some reward (choosing a movie to watch, game to play, a sweet snack, etc). You could then teach a lesson in temperance or read an appropriate child's book. After, you can test the lesson by bringing your child to the store. If he behaves well, then you've succeeded. If not, you remove the previously established reward for a day or two, and then try a different teaching method.

You can also go to the gym three times a week, give 10% of your income to charity, call your mom every weekend, never raise your voice in anger, and never have more than two beers.

On the other hand, to those of us not 24/7 paragons, the goddamn store being deliberately set up to stimulate three year olds to beg for sugar is a pain in the ass.

I think you read too much into that commenter's expectations. Parenting is forgiving enough where only a few minutes of hard, engaging teaching is sufficient to help improve behavior.

Your examples are way harder. Never raise your voice in anger? That's unachievable and absurd for most people. Take ten minutes per week to work with a child to improve unacceptable behavior? It sucks but is pretty realistic.

Ah, I was mostly attempting humour and mildly teasing the parent for advocating such wholesome behaviour. It's pretty obvious to any parent but very hard to do 100% of the time.

Sometimes you have no choice but to drag an already tired kid into the store, in a hurry, with seven things on your mind and after a long day, and the teachable moment may be out of reach. And then the kid-eye-level candy bars are very annoying.

While I take your comment with the levity with which it was intended, and I agree with you that the advice is wholesome or idealistic, I disagree with the implication that my advice was anything very hard to do.

You write "It's pretty obvious to any parent but very hard to do 100% of the time" but I don't think my method requires that. It could be more like - "I have some free time today, I'll take my kid to the store to help teach him self-control". That is, you can still be upset with store designers that they arranged their items to cause your kids to frustrate you, and you can still usually leave your kid at home while you go to the store, but you can also sometimes take advantage of the environment that the store has created for you.

Similarly, I was listening to a podcast recently about the moral virtue of becoming a vegetarian due to the various evils caused by factory farming. It's one thing that I've always struggled with, because while I see the moral case, I really like the taste of meat. One point that was made on this podcast was: Eating 10% less meat is about 10% as good as being a vegetarian. And, if you can't force yourself to become a vegetarian, it is better to be 10% of a vegetarian than 0%. Likewise, applying rigorous parenting techniques may be too challenging to do consistently, but applying them 10% of the time may be 10% as good - but better than nothing!

Your original comment seemed to me to leave no room for the non-ideal case, where you have no choice but to take the kid to the store and no one is in shape for a teachable moment. That's hardly the 'opportunity' you invoked. It's more of a pain in the ass.

Of course, reality is more like your most recent paragraph, where we do what we can and every little counts. We don't disagree.

Thanks for the clarification; it went over my head. I definitely run into the same issue; different vices but same response.

Here's a trick - just say nyet.

After a few times of that, the kid will come to the conclusion that (s)he won't get it and just forget it. It's the same way you train your body in response to certain desires.

I find infuriating that people tells me that I'm lucky to have such a nice kid. Of course they weren't there when the work was done.

In the supermarket I need to bit my tongue when I see a parent doing it all wrong. They are terrified when their children start to throw a tantrum. And of course the children smell the fear and do it every time.

I offer a complicity nod when I see a smarter mother acting as if it's nothing and smiling even when the child is rolling on the floor crying.

Absolutely. In the OP's defense, often parents are pressed for time and can't focus on using these as training moments. It's important to try to have completely unambitious days with children -- where there aren't any scheduled activities to be late for. I feel for parents who are in a perpetual rush and are under too much stress to engage in unpleasant confrontation with their children.

Even without a reward or punishment, simple repeated resistance to the behavior makes a difference. Starting early is easier; a five-year-old is more set in his ways than a 2 or 3-year-old, but there is still plenty of opportunity before friendships take priority over parental influence (around 11 years old).

If these opportunities aren't taken, then the child will grow up with less impulse control and delayed gratification than he would have had otherwise.

I'm not saying he'll be a bad kid, I'm saying it's a lost opportunity, e.g. the difference between being able to concentrate on studies for 30 minutes versus 60 minutes; deciding one doughnut is enough instead of going for the second one; being able to walk away from a confrontation with a loved one instead of attacking with the perfect sarcastic barb.

Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the practice is kind of fucked up on a conceptual level.

5 year olds don't have the prefrontal cortex to cope with this. The reward has to be as close to instant as possible, and "when we get home" is nothing like instant.

Also, this technique is going to work very much better with some children than others.

And that attitude gets you a kid who has missed significant cultural influences, can't share the excitement over it with other kids and who won't be able to share the nostalgia for it with friends of similar age.

Yes, I'm salty that I never was allowed to have a console or watch most popular TV shows because they're too banal/grapic/sexualized/adult. It sucks only being able to experience those things at friends' houses, because you'll be terrible at it if it's games and not know the lore if it's shows, so you still can't really share the experience. It sucks to be an outsider as a kid and I wish my parents had not made me that. Its one of the few things I really regret.

I think parents should set an allowance, rather then a straight no.

kid wants a lolly from the checkout? subtract from the allowance, and make sure the kid knows the remaining. don't restrict what the allowance can be used for, but strictly police the amount per month.

they have to learn from early on, this useful skill of trade off and long term planning. it's never too late to start.

Letting kids waste their allowances is an incredibly useful tactic.

My parents gave me an allowance, then carefully audited every purchase and refused to let me spend it on things they didn't think were good value. Which is 1) a waste of their time 2) frustrating for the kid and 3) utterly defeats the purpose, because I never got to learn restraint or budgeting, and it bit me on the ass when I was in my early 20s.

Thats doubly clever, because it makes the child complicit in not getting the candy. "Well, you spent all your money yesterday" is a much better reason than "I've decided you won't have that". Children don't yet have the skills to question the system their choices are embedded inside. (That comes waaaay later - arguably not until your 20s.)

I...no, that's an issue with parenting, not the store.

The earlier your kids learn about delayed gratification, not always getting what they want, not throwing tantrums, and not paying too much attention to advertising, the better.

You're just saving up bigger problems.

Edit: My parents went through a hippy phase when I and my brother were growing up; we went vegetarian, and we were not allowed refined sugar, caffeine, etc. What treats we did get were all organic, wholewheat, honey sweetened, carob flavored, etc. Quite horrible, honestly.

And while the rules were silly and arbitrary, they were enforced consistently. As a result, neither I or my brother ever threw a tantrum about wanting candy, because we knew it wouldn't do any good. It didn't even occur to us to try; it would be like throwing a tantrum because we wanted to fly.

If your kids sometimes get candy, want more candy, and know they can throw a tantrum and get the candy, they will. They're 5, of course they will. There's a lesson to be taken from that, and it's not "pretend candy doesn't exist half the time".

It's important for kids to respect their parents guidance. It is a PITA to discipline kids, but they are so much better off for it. It's self-reinforcing (in both directions). Kids who get discipline and have heard "no, you cannot have that" before will not pitch a fit when they hear something they don't like.

I hate to be in the position of advocating in favor of a reality TV show, but "Super Nanny" was transformational -- it's got a handful of simple, effective suggestions for parenting.

This is one reason I prefer Foodcoops.

Thanks for reminding me why I don't want kids ;)

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