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Comment by ImSkeptical | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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