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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule.

I grew up in a household where compliance to parental authority was the prevailing rule. This made me fairly compliant as an adult (which opens you up for exploitation by peers and authority figures), but this wasn't too difficult to unravel with a few dozen sessions of therapy.

As a result, I pass down very few rules as a parent, and it's been a joy to watch my daughter's creativity blossom. We've done what the article suggests - provided moral guidelines to live by, rather than any strict set of rules.

She loves real estate - specifically interior design, but also analyzing neighborhoods, improving curb appeal, and understanding what makes a good school district. I think the seeds were planted when I was taking her with me in the evenings to do various handyman tasks at our rental property. We would stop for ice cream and she would sit there and eat it while I put together furniture or changed light bulbs or swept common areas.

And while our lax rules have certainly inspired creativity and fed into her individuality, it hasn't done a great deal to build work ethic. I'm aware of the stereotype of parents believing their kids are lazy, so I'm open to being wrong here.

Striking a balance between giving a kid a framework to discover herself but also emphasizing the importance of work ethic is probably my greatest concern as a parent. I don't want to stifle her from dreaming, but I want her to do what's necessary to accomplish those dreams too.

My big question is this: when the time comes to put in the work the accomplish what she wants, is she going to be ready to put down the ice cream spoon and pick up a screw driver?

I don't know. But I'm going to continue with the light touch and hope for the best.

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From one of the comments on the article

> Backing off will no more produce a creative genius than pushing your child. Neither strategy makes the slightest difference to what is essentially an autonomous process. Beethoven's father did not back off. And Lars von Trier's parents left him to his own devices. Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood.

> My guess is that most parents who follow Adam Grant's spurious advice (one rule or none is better than six) will end up with the rude obnoxious brats whom you can see bouncing off the waiting room walls of any upscale Manhattan pediatrician's office. Maybe one of a million such brats will spontaneously become a creative genius as an adult but so will one out of a million drones who win spelling bees and piano competitions.

> But guess what, a large proportion of the remaining brats will be all attitude and no skill while the drones will at least become doctors and corporate lawyers. By using creativity as the ultimate-and perhaps only-benchmark, Mr. Grant falls into the same trap as the Tiger Moms he so despises.

> Enjoying a thing does make it more likely that a child will own it. But sometimes the initial drudgery is necessary to make the breakthrough to find something worth enjoying.

> When it comes to raising children the golden rule is that there is no golden rule. The greatest scientific creative genius of recent memory, Richard Feynman realized this when he tried to teach his children and discovered that what worked for his son did not work for his daughter.

Good point about Feynman. The only thing I've found to work is trying everything until something starts to work. Of course, you start with the books to get ideas for what to try next. Ive got one of those kids that bounces off the walls. The older I get though the less I care. Some kids just can't sit still. Kids are society's problem and when we don't build spaces for them to be kids, its gonna happen.

> Kids are society's problem

Respectfully, I'm sad for children whose parents think society is going to look out for them. Every kid deserves a couple of people who take personal responsibility for their behavior and well-being.

I have a pretty high tolerance for kids being bouncy and boisterous, but it's always nice to see parents giving the sort of information that helps them become considerate:("Look, that woman's trying to read. She wants it quiet!" -or- "That lamp could break - can you find a safer place to bounce your ball?")

Another big issue that isn't always mentioned is diet. A kid who eats a "normal" amount of sugar, corn syrup, and zero-nutrient high-carb products will understandably be going berserk on the outside because they're on a blood sugar roller coaster on the inside.

As an alternative perspective, I think that in France "kids are society's problem" doesn't mean building special places where they can run rampant, but training them to appreciate the culture and society they're inheriting. French kindergarteners spend 90 minutes sitting down to a white-table-cloth four course meal each day during school. This is done because it's considered essential for them to learn the table manners and appreciation of the cuisine that will allow them a lifetime of enjoyable, civilized dining.

(I think the creation of lots of "good", dignified jobs in the kindergarten-chef field is a wonderful side benefit, as opposed to cafeteria workers in the US who can hardly feel fulfilled while dumping bags of frozen nuggets onto trays.)

I wasn't making the point that society was in charge of my kids, rather that society needs to be tolerant of kids nature and adapt to it to some degree. I can get my kid to sit still, but its not his natural state so I don't often do it. I am glad that there are places you can take your kid to join and indoctrinate them into cultures you want to identify with. I am glad there are options. I would not choose french civility. I would probably more want my kid to eat a big burger with his hands and get ketchup all over his face at an outdoor bbq. God bless choices.

I don't think other people should necessarily have to accept that you prefer not to keep your child reasonably quiet, as an example, in public. Understanding that kids will be kids doesn't mean understanding that you as a parent prefer not to teach your kid how to act in public.

It might seem harsh, but you really do paint the image of someone who thinks it's fine for his kid to keep screaming and running around in public, and having people just accept that that's how it is. I don't know how it is where you live, but neither in my home country or the country I live in now would this be considered fine for a parent to think. In my home country I think the general sentiment would be "At least have the decency to be ashamed of your performance as a parent" and a little bit less harsh where I am now.

You can think the above cultural sentiment is harsh, but it's a culture based on valuing the collective very highly and respecting it more than you value even yourself.

Sometimes, the majority is wrong. There are many kids who might be hyperactive due to a quirk of their mind/body - say ADHD or a hyper fast metabolism. People don't see these things and expect kids who are really different to be the same as the rest. For that kind of a kid, the value tradeoff between keeping still and not disturbing anyone else vs. not can be very different if they cannot express themselves.

Society ROUTINELY throws minorities under the bus because we have simply accepted that a small inconvenience for a majority could not possibly be worth paying if it helps a few people a lot. I think the cultural sentiment you're talking about is really just "agree with everyone else, or else risk exclusion" - the usual extortion. The same reasoning can justify much worse things. Humans are very social and children are partly raised by the society around them - people deny it because they don't want to have to change.

Just to be clear, I'm really against this because the parent said he can keep his child still, but its not the child's natural state. And you go and call him a "bad parent" for not stifling his kid. Bullshit.

> the parent said he can keep his child still, but its not the child's natural state.

The child can be in its natural state in the privacy of their own home, not in public where it's a bother for everyone else. If we were talking about a child with real issues that could be blamed on disorders, it wouldn't just be about "natural state" and whatnot, and as you say the parent is able to keep the child quiet, proving it's just him preferring to not be considerate to his environment.

> And you go and call him a "bad parent" for not stifling his kid. Bullshit.

Screaming and running around in public doesn't foster any desirable or productive behavior on the part of the child, as far as I can imagine. I don't think it'll ever be in the favor of the child. All it really does is inconvenience people that didn't ask to deal with the noise of the child.

Edit: I want to add that I think there's a lot more that goes into being a bad parent, by the way. The only thing this "Society will have to adapt to me" behavior shows is a general lack of respect for other people and putting your convenience before them.

I would say that your sentiment encapsulates the attitude I disagree with. Public is, by definition, public. As in, for us all. Your norms are valid, but so are mine as well as my child's. I could make the argument that if you want solitude, you should visit the library where this norm is agreeably enforced by all, but I wouldn't. What I'd say is that the next time you are around a child who you feel is disruptive, go up to the parent and say, "I don't mean to be rude, but I was sitting here reading this book before you got here, would you mind asking your child to play more quietly or play somewhere else". I promise you I would not be offended by this (as a parent very little offends me anymore). Just don't expect the default state of a child to be child in church.

Adults aren't quiet "in public" either. While I do believe in boundaries, as long as kids aren't physically bothering strangers, they have every right to run around and make noise in public as the street musician, the loudly speaking teenager, and the arguing couple.

This doesn't mean a parent is not teaching the kid, it is that their conception of how a kid ought to behave in public is different from yours, thus they have nothing to be 'ashamed' of in their performance. Indeed, I often feel bad for the kid when a parent values other people's judgment more than their child's perfectly valid desire to explore their surroundings.

I certainly wouldn't and didn't go as far to say my kid goes around screaming in public. That's quite a leap from what I was saying. What I said was that at the pediatrician's office, my kid runs around and plays rather than sitting still with his hands in his lap. Kids at play -- laughing, running, exploring, being curious, sometimes shouting -- are a beautiful thing that some find annoying and the point is to remember that we were and are all children.

You've fallen into the very common trap of taking what someone else says (it's not my child's natural state) and then putting the worst interpretation on it (it's fine for his kid to keep screaming and running around in public)

You can see there's a wide range of behaviour starting at fidgety before you get to running around and screaming.

> French kindergarteners spend 90 minutes sitting down to a white-table-cloth four course meal each day during school.

No they don't, I'm not quite sure where you could've got the idea ?

table-cloth is embellishment, but four-course does seem to be part of the system: https://karenlebillon.com/french-school-lunch-menus/

Four-course sounds grandiose but it's nothing more than a little carrot salad, a meal, a little piece of cheese and a yogurt (and some bread), that you get on your meal tray. No kid spend 90 minutes eating that; they rather spend their time playing during the time of lunch break. So it's top 20 minutes swallowing everything (or half of it actually) as fast of possible.

Is this not standard almost everywhere?

If anything, the soup is missing.

Why we supposed to copy everything the French do? Aren't they regarded as rude? That implies not being considerate...

In term of perceived rudeness of French people, I think a lot of it is communication barrier (it's better now and it's changing but French people on average suck at speaking English and are self conscious about it) and the fact that Parisians are universally seen by French people as being ever so slightly snobbish and rude.

Good to know. Next thing the he was going to say they started educating children on the pleasures of France's great wine production while in kindergarten.

Teaching kids to sit for a 90-minute fancy meal sounds like the height of aristocratic folly. Didn't the French Revolution stamp this out? I'd be in favor of my kids learning to cook such a meal, though.

The sugar = hyper kids myth has long been debunked.

Instead what studies have found is if the parents believe their kids ate sugar they'll believe their kids are hyper even when the kids were actually given a placebo.

https://www.google.com/?q=does+sugar+make+kids+hyper

Its not controversial that diabetic behavior is influenced by blood sugar levels.

Studies used to exclude diabetic / prediabetic / obese kids because there were not many of them in the 70s before corn syrup.

Now of course over 1/5 of kids are obese or whatever definition, so once that legacy exclusion is eliminated...

> French kindergarteners spend 90 minutes sitting down to a white-table-cloth four course meal each day during school. This is done because it's considered essential for them to learn the table manners and appreciation of the cuisine that will allow them a lifetime of enjoyable, civilized dining.

I wish that were true... They do get a 3 course meal (appetizer, main dish and desert) but it doesn't last 90 minutes and it's not a white table cloth meal... That's embellishing the reality a little bit. There was more decorum than a self service (we were served the food at the table as a kid in kindergarten in primary school) and the food quality is definitely better than most countries in primary schools* but that's about it.

As a kid in kindergarten though we would be told off if we were too boisterous during the meal so I guess that kind of qualifies in term of table manner.

That said, I did find that kids in the US tended to be louder and less well educated than I was used to. The same applies for kids in Japan below the age of 5 (parents there have a laissez faire altitude during the early ages).

(*) Middle schools and high schools are another story. Lunch is a self service concept (so no one brings the meal to the table) and the quality of lunch is lower (it was downright atrocious when I was in middle school to the point where I would usually skip most lunches). This may have changed though.

I appreciate the correction!

Kids are society's problem

Did you consider consulting society first before foisting such a responsibility on us?

Yes. Turns out kids are part of society too.

Society is also society's problem. Kids are just part of that.

I don't see too many dads at sporting events proclaiming "that's societies boy!"

Sure you do, but only when it's the other team and they're losing.

Um, the raising of children is literally the thing that allows a civilization to continue.

Um, like, so is food production and uh air.

I'm not responsible for those either, last I checked.

Who do you suppose is responsible for air?

Going to be pedantic. With air, yes you are responsible. Even with food, our food habits determine the market and the market seems to treat the environment like poop to bring about all kinds of food that we want. So yes. Yes we are responsible.

I prefer to think that kids are society's solution.

This is a great idea.

I guess fuck all the parents who think their kids deserve more than an economically-optimized future?

Seriously with the future of humans doing work so utterly in question right now, especially work that can be done by "drones," this advice is fucking archaic. The days when you acquired some base skill, got good at it, and worked at it for 60 years till retirement are gone. I'd rather be broke and happy.

Seriously with the future of humans doing work so utterly in question right now

I 100% don't buy this narrative at all. I don't know who started it, but something about it makes me reach for a tinfoil hat.

The general historical trend has been towards automation but I still don't see any massive change in the horizon.

Robots do better work without breaks, rest, coffee and in many cases without even occupying physical space. We're on the edge of automating driving, one of the most complex and demanding tasks humans do on a regular basis. The benefits for the companies are infinite: a completely docile workforce of robots that don't need anything but a steady flow of power. There is no reason to suspect any jobs are safe any more.

It's not a conspiracy, it's a cost/benefit chart that any responsible executive is going to be looking at.

Automated driving on an industrial scale is still decades into the future. And even when it comes, arguing that it will be a huge, earth-shaking change seems far fetched.

Like I said, it's the general trend (we could talk about automations on the same scale as your human driver example that have already happened), but the alarmism is not justified.

Decades is a long time. The internet is only 2.5 decades old and now you can click and have anything you want delivered to your doorstep. Your phone can tell you how to drive to avoid traffic. Your car already runs more software in it over a few minutes than the largest research universities could run in weeks. Image recognition has gone from "scanning digits on checks" to "outperforming humans on classifying images" (at least on some tasks) just in the past decade.

Which aspect of it do you think needs decades?

I agree it's decades off but I disagree that the alarmism is not justified, simply because we are not set up as a society to at all handle the side effects of the last good paying job that you can attain without really any high cost/long term training (truck driving) going away, and that's not even taking into account the multitude of businesses that were built on the backs of truck drivers; diners, motels, truck stops, service centers, practically any business that operates right next to a highway depends to a certain degree on truckers.

Plus truckers themselves are risky as workers, they have issues with exhaustion, the turnover is insane, they have accidents and they steal things, I'm not trying to demonize the profession don't misunderstand, I'm just saying that if there is one job that companies would LOVE to get people out of, this is it.

Also I really doubt it's decades. Maybe two of them, maybe but I'd say it's closer to 12-15 years depending how the DoT keeps pace, but with so much money and so many interest groups involved in making it happen, I think it's something we really need to start putting serious thought into.

It's really not that good paying of a job. True, gross costs are over 100-200K, but the wage net of maintenance, insurance and food is under 50K.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to be corrected.

We continue to automate an simultaneously make new jobs all of the time. The same arguments you used about driving could be applied to the printing press displacing people who copied books, etc. The more technology increases, the more our quality of life seems to improve.

There was almost no automation during the great depression, yet most people were unemployed. Automation has most certainly increased since 2009 and unemployment has fallen.

I'm skeptical there is any correlation between automation and unemployment at all, unless you are measuring job counts in a very specific industry being automated away.

The question is does the automation create "the same number of new jobs".

Disrupting certain fields like "driving" has an even larger impact. Traffic signs, traffic cops, logistics companies, ... it goes on.

Or if you want an example that is just happening, look at journalism and how the internet has killed it. Once reputable news shops are now publishing click-bait top 10 lists and buzzfeed is here to stay.

It's not even hard to manage a small society functioning using robots for all menial work like cleaning, farming, cooking, transportation.

Automation doesn't "create jobs". People's desires plus their creativity to supply new goods or services create jobs. Driving is a relatively big part of the economy, but it's nothing compared to what agriculture used to be (upwards of 90% of employment). Automating agriculture freed up time for a multitude of new and totally unrelated pursuits.

The entire point of automation is to reduce human intervention in a process. If post-automation jobs = current jobs in terms of quantity and skill, there would be no economic benefit to automation. This means that of the people displaced, only a minority can theoretically get the "new" job, and even then, that hopes that there are no already qualified candidates from outside the displaced pool ready to take that job.

It's true tech increases our quality of life, no one argues this (mostly). That said our current political climate can have it's roots traced to the fact that so many blue collar workers have been displaced (first by overseas labor, second by automation) and their uphill battle to attain new work at even living wages, forget similar wages has been largely ignored if not a target for mockery by the middle class.

We need to start taking a serious look at how to deal with the groups of people who will be displaced so far and at such advanced ages that asking them to re-enter the workforce is impractical not just for them, but for the economy at a whole. Hell, even older TECH workers have a hard time finding new work after their COBOL shop shuts down, do we honestly expect it to be any easier at all for a factory worker or coal miner? I do not understand why so many obviously incredibly intelligent people in the industries I work in and read about have such a hard time grasping that for a worker who's done what they call "dumb work" for 10-30 years will have difficulty getting an education and entering a white collar profession. That was hard for me and I was a kid!

The hype is infinite.

When you look at the burn rate and technology investments required of a company like Uber just to dispatch cabs, that should hint at the difficulty of the AI revolution.

Cabs are harder though. Cabs need to negotiate the complex and often extremely busy city routes. Most truck driving is LTL to warehouses on the edge of cities, and if a truck had sufficient fuel, it would have no reason to ever leave the freeway.

Not really. All of the tech people like to talk about how easy trucking is because of the distance aspect. That's like saying pilots are obsolete because autopilot does 95% of the work. "The work" is actually the 5%.

Cabs need to drop you to a 50 meter circle adjacent to a street address. Trucks need to land at a specific dock at a specific warehouse at a specific time. Some warehouses are highly optimized and organized. Others are a total shitshow... Amazon warehouses for example often have trucks queued up for hours due to staff shortages or general incompetence at the docks.

So the business case for the automated truck is to take a trailer from X to Y, and be capable of taking direction from a $10/hr temp who can't find his ass with both hands. Or... you need to deliver the trailer to some staging area, and pay drivers to figure out that mess. Or some other solution. In any case, the "getting on the interstate" part is the most trivial problem to solve.

In the distro center I worked at, it was incredibly rare for the long haul trucks to actually attach the trailers to the building. They would jack up the trailers in the lot, let the truck go, then use a switcher to do the remaining lot because the switcher can just pick the thing up and go instead of having to have a worker there to wind the legs up and down on the trailer. Ours was not a huge distro hub either, pretty small one so I'd imagine larger ones have even more infrastructure to handle the freight that doesn't involve the pull truck.

oh but its already started. Dont think robots though, think ai, digitalization etc.

It started in the industrial revolution.

> I'd rather be broke and happy.

Hard to be happy if you are broke.

Proof that genetics has some effect, his daughter was adopted.

"Proof" is a very strong word for one data point/anecdote with thousands of possible lurking variables.

> The greatest scientific creative genius of recent memory, Richard Feynman

I was going to pick apart the whole comment, but then this stuck out at me. WTF? The Feynman cult truly knows no shame or rational bounds.

> Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood.

I don't know anything about their respective childhoods, and I have greatly enjoyed some of Mr Trier's films, but I fear this is a dangerously egalitarian notion of "genius."

We can't all be Beethovens.

And that is okay. Labels like "genius" and "hero" get watered down in our participation trophy culture.

> Feynman realized this when he tried to teach his children and discovered that what worked for his son did not work for his daughter.

Feynman's son was his biological offspring, while the daughter was adopted.

I think this is relevant information that was left out.

Edit: Also, Feynman's son chose to pursuit philosophy, much to Feynman's dismay.

In an article discussing the dispensation of advice to the parenting community as a whole - which includes the whole variety of genetic heterogeneity - her being adopted isn't relevant.

A lot depends on ones beliefs (and possibly facts) about being self taught and if a difference exists in outcomes when various teaching styles and techniques are applied.

Its highly likely that the "best" or "right" way Dad X learned topic Y will work pretty well when helping teach a little clone of himself and not so well when teaching random kids. I'd theorize that parents are generally better at teaching their own kids than public school teachers for this reason, even if on average a public school teacher would be better on long term average at teaching a very large pool of kids.

As a very specific example I remember reading one of Feynman's books where he explained he had very high spacial reasoning performance, much like a mechanical engineer would have. Its much more likely his child would have that ability than a randomly selected kid. So his teaching style for something like calculus volume of a solid of revolution disk vs cylinder seems self explanatory to someone like Feynman, probably his son, or me, because of high spatial reasoning performance but someone without it probably needs to memorize very hard or just guess -n- check, I mean 50:50 odds getting it correct? That's actually an interesting question, how does someone (like his adopted daughter perhaps) without unusually high spatial awareness decide on a disk or cylinder strategy for that class of calculus problem?

> Its highly likely that the "best" or "right" way Dad X learned topic Y will work pretty well when helping teach a little clone of himself

Perhaps, but children aren't clones of either of their biological parents, generally.

Care to explain how? I understand the original comment didn't really add any other information but surely the differences in nature and nurture account for something, when considering Adoption Studies are a thing. [1] Perusing the results of a quick search bring up loads and loads of differences between adopted and non-adopted children, across many different metrics. I'm sure the "parenting community as a whole" doesn't exclude adoptive parents. Almost all of these studies show differences, such as with social skills or behavioral problems [2], and with these differences might the parent have to adapt? There are many things that come into an adopted child's mind about their own adoption too, and challenges specific to adoption [3]. Is this particular information relevant?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_study

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/the-adopt...

[3] https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/f_adimpact.pdf

> Also, Feynman's son chose to pursuit philosophy, much to Feynman's dismay.

Wow really. Poor Feynman.

My son is only 8 months old, so we’ll see how it goes, but my intention is to give him lots of freedom to define what he wants to learn about and work on, but then help provide lots of structure and support for actually doing the work, and making sure it gets pushed all the way to a quasi-finished state.

The thing I was most disappointed about in my own schooling was that I got very little support or time to do serious medium- or large-scale projects, and I got very little mentorship or instruction about the subjects I most cared about personally.

Even in a very good public school district, and then at a very good college, most of what I learned about my own research interests was learned entirely from books and my own experimenting, while most of the work I did felt like pure make-work for the convenience of my teachers.

I feel that it was partly because school only ever provided bite-sized assignments with prescribed subject and scope that I still don’t feel like I have mastered the skill of motivating myself to keep working bit by bit at larger-scale projects.

I wound up with lots of creative ideas, and a fine ability to do specific narrow small tasks, or to do tedious polishing work, but a serious “writer’s block” kind of problem when it comes to diving into the meat of large projects.

I think kids do need freedom, but they also need relationships and guidance. My own girls are 12 and 13 now and doing very well at school. I read a few articles and books about parenting and I do think that helped, not because all of them were great, some were some weren't, but they all helped me think about the problem from different angles.

The best advice I can give is to support their interests and get involved in activities they enjoy, sure. But also allow them to get interested and involved in the things you enjoy. Kids go through a phase from 2 to 6 or so where they love to help and love to find out about everything adults do. They will help do housework, help do shopping, watch you do whatever you are doing. Talk to them and answer their questions. Pitch your answers to their level without being condescending (google maps on your phone works because a satellite floating no up in space can see where you are), spend the extra time it takes. Letting them help will make the job take twice as long, and that's fine. Invest that time and be patient, it's well worth it and will pay dividends for the rest of your life.

What books did you read? I am interested in books recommendation for parenting.

The one that stands out is Raising Happy Children. It brings together a lot of information and advice and isn't one of these 'weird trick' type single author books where someone claims to have discovered the one true way. Just practical down to earth stuff.

I'm late to this discussion, but if you could please drop a link to the book? There are many with that title. Thanks!

I have a question, did you ask for or seek out mentors?

End of the day, do your best and don't sweat the advice that you'll get from anyone with a mouth.

Being there and giving a shit is 90% of the battle.

There's a kind of debate forming on individuals deriving good behavior from core moral principals vs good behavior being externally supplied by some kind of punitive framework. It seems that in cases where the behavior parameters are externally supplied, a person may not have developed any ability to figure out what to do when circumstances change outside of the parameters that were set for them. Whereas when people are taught principals and taught to derive behavior from those principals, they simply don't need lots of rules (if the principals are good ones I suppose), and in many cases will reject rules that seem arbitrary and not useful.

I think it then follows, if this turns out to be the case, that people who are raised in rule "free" environments learn more independent thought and reasoning and more creativity than people who are raised in highly restrictive environments where their internal thought processes may be less developed, and their tasking and behavior needs to be externally supplied.

However, I think this is a very difficult idea to use for child rearing. The balance and thought that needs to go into teaching good principals is much harder than simply making a list of rules. In the worst case, a child will get neither.

Sounds like phony pop psychology. I was raised with strict rules and was able to derive what to do in other circumstances because I was still taught moral principals. I know plenty of people raised with strict rules but nobody that was raised with completely unexplained rules so it's a bit of a strawman comparison.

I'm not a psychologist, but my understanding from people I've spoken to in various psych disciplines is that this is a fertile area of research and there are fairly regularly published papers on this topic. There appear to be deep connections between derivation of behavior based on principles and other-oriented empathy and punitively enforced or superficial behavior training and tendencies towards authoritarianism and various other negative tendencies. Apparently the theories coming out of this are making inroads into various therapeutic and treatment approaches for everything from children's therapy to prisoner rehabilitation.

> but nobody that was raised with completely unexplained rules so it's a bit of a strawman comparison.

That's your strawman creation. I never claimed people were raised with arbitrary and unexplained rules. Typically strict rules are given punitive reasons as motivation for following, not some intrinsic rationale within the rule -- and that's precisely the difference.

"Wash the dishes or you'll be sent to your room" doesn't teach why you should wash the dishes, only that you'll be punished for not doing so.

"I should wash the dishes so I have clean ones to eat off of later, eating off of clean dishes prevents sickness." Provides a complex rationale to drive the behavior.

The punitive approach requires no brainpower to follow, there's no specific reason why the effect (punishment) follows from cause (not washing the dishes) other than it was something imposed.

The principle based approach requires understanding logical cause and effect, chain of events, pre-planning and might drive the person to investigate why dirty dishes make one sick, opening up inquiry and forming connections into hygiene, medicine, pathogens, etc.

Given a different, but similar situation, why should the rules based person create a behavior?

"Wash the thermometer before and after use" is something the principle trained person would come up with naturally based on prior experience and reasoning, but unless some cause and punishment were set out for the rules trained person, it's likely they won't arrive at that behavior.

More sinister, and the context I'm familiar with this work in, is in advertising, building and forming habits. Advertisers are seeking to train consumers to logically arrive at buying their product rather having to be constantly reminded to. Especially since a company has much more trouble "punishing" a consumer for not buying their stuff than a parent might a child. If you can convince a consumer to derive the thought themselves to buy your product, then you own that consumer and no longer really need to advertise to reach them.

>Typically strict rules are given punitive reasons as motivation for following, not some intrinsic rationale within the rule -- and that's precisely the difference.

No, that's the strawman. Rules without explanations. It has nothing to do with punitive enforcement.

>"Wash the dishes or you'll be sent to your room" doesn't teach why you should wash the dishes, only that you'll be punished for not doing so.

Strawman again. The unexplained reasoning is the problem, not the punitive action.

>The punitive approach requires no brainpower to follow, there's no specific reason why the effect (punishment) follows from cause (not washing the dishes)

Ugh, I hope I made the point clear above, but I'll state it one last time: punitive punishments are not the same as unexplained rules.

The rest of your comment is based on this strawman assumption that all parenting using punitive actions follows this stupid method of not explaining rules. It's just as dumb as assuming the opposite (i.e. parents that don't punish children don't teach their children any morals).

"Principles", not "principals".

I think the work ethic thing has less to do with rules, and more to do with how you approach small adversities. For a lot of people, if something is hard it's not worth doing. I think kids pick up on that.

Is struggling with something difficult bad, or good?

I read in John Medina's book Brain Rules for Baby that one of the most important things you can teach children is to associate difficulty with progress, to understand that learning how to do something most likely requires failing a bunch of times before you figure it out and that failing is okay, that it doesn't mean you're incapable but rather that you're actually making progress.

My daughter is three years old and for the past year or so, whenever she becomes frustrated that she can't do something—whistle, pronounce a word, build a lego set, draw a letter—I calm her down and remind her that not being able to do it is part of learning how to do it. I often use the example of how she didn't always know how to walk or talk, that she failed lots of times but she tried and tried and tried and eventually she got it, that after falling down so many times now she's running around the room and talking non-stop.

I've been blown away by how that reframing of difficulty has made her seemingly unstoppable. Sure, she still gets frustrated and overwhelmed, but when she starts whistling—full on whistling at three years old—and she tells me, "Daddy! I tried and tried and tried and eventually I got it!", I can't help but think that there's something to this. When she doesn't know I'm watching, I've observed that she seems a lot more determined to do things even when she's repeatedly failing—she doesn't give up as quickly as she did (often quickly followed by a tantrum) before I started explaining to her that learning requires challenge.

I have the same anxiety, on the opposite side of the spectrum. My parents were very relaxed, and now I'm trying to impose more structure on my son's life.

You can't guarantee any outcome. I don't know what level of influence you can even have, there are so many variables involved. All you can do is what you think is right, and react to circumstances as you go along.

> I don't want to stifle her from dreaming, but I want her to do what's necessary to accomplish those dreams too.

This is something I've thought a lot about. I have an (almost) 2 year old, so I'm not speaking from experience exactly.

I know that growing up, I wish someone was more involved in talking to me about my dreams and goals, and asking me the tough questions about how to achieve them.

I'm planning on doing that with my daughter; not telling her what to do, or giving her strict rules for accomplishing things, but asking her to come up with her own rules and her own plans for how she'll accomplish things both big and small.

It's that conversation with her that I hope will be what she needs.

(I think this relates to the idea of encouragement vs. praise that you often see in parenting books.)

My childhood experience was similar to yours: lots of discipline, authority, and dogma. I have turned out to have issues with authority, and dislike working for others (even good bosses). Someday I suspect this will lead me to do my own "thing." In any case, I turned out okay, but the road to "here" was pretty rocky and uncertain. Lots of moments things could've gone sideways.

I have a daughter who reminds me of myself, and I (like you) try to take a gentler approach with her. I hope she can tap her intrinsic motivation and skip a lot of the needless misery I endured. Or at least always know her parents supported her as she spread her wings (whereas mine did not). I too worry about how to develop grit a work ethic for her, but I think that's the key: I CAN'T do any such thing. I can help expose her to things which might engage her interest (arts, inventing, medicine, engineering, etc...) but I don't dictate how the story ends. Stepping back, to me, means honoring the fact that it is their life to make something of, or not. I know until my parents adopted that strategy with me, in my mid-twenties, I was going nowhere fast. Suddenly they behaved like they didn't care if I worked, went to college, dropped out, or whatever. They told me they loved me, but otherwise would just pretty much grunt when I'd tell them what I was up to. So I think we have to communicate to our children that we're not going to try and make them some form of what we think they should be, and that if they want to do anything with their life that will be on them.

With my daughter that means lots of conversations about things like "oh, you want to play guitar, but you're frustrated because you're not good at it right away. Hmmm, well you know the only way to get good at something is to practice, work at it, spend time with it." Somehow she has the completely baseless idea that she should just know how to do everything, and beats herself up for all her perceived inadequacies.

So yeah, as you can tell, I too don't know if this is the best way... I'm just trying to find my way in the dark as best as I can, just as you are. Hopefully as long as we're operating from a place of unconditional love, understanding, patience, and kindness ultimately things will turn out for the best.

If my kids can grow up to be capable of creating their own meaningful lives then I'll be satisfied, no matter what that looks like.

>I CAN'T do any such thing.

You absolutely can. Praise effort instead of talent.

One of the mistakes my parents made when I was younger was to call me talented in things. It resulted in a tremendous amount of stress, and did not make me more likely to try. I felt like I should automatically know how to do things (because that's what talented people do, right?), and hated that I didn't. It made me more resistant to pushing past my comfort zone, because I knew I wouldn't be good at doing so, and I didn't want to disappoint.

There were times they pulled me out of after-school language or music classes, because again, I was stressed out and miserable. But it wasn't because I didn't enjoy the subjects- I just had unrealistic expectations of my own abilities.

I eventually figured out that hard work brings its own rewards, but it wasn't an easy path, and I only found it thanks to other family members who pushed/encouraged me in their own way.

Now, I do not have any children of my own, but I'm uncle to a lot of friends & family. I do my best to encourage the younger ones' efforts, making sure that they know that I see them trying hard. And it really seems to work. Kids need guidance. They do not yet have enough experience to know what they would enjoy. And that sometimes means making decisions for them, and that is OK.

[edit] I want to be very clear, overall I loved my childhood, and I feel very lucky to have had the parents I did. We had (and have) a great relationship. It is simply that with the benefit of hindsight, I can identify choices that I would make differently. I do not expect my parents (or me) to be perfect. The best we can do is try to improve things for the next generation, until it is their turn to do the same.

> As a result, I pass down very few rules as a parent, and it's been a joy to watch my daughter's creativity blossom.

I love the idea that you have your own rules, different than your parents, therefore better. And thus you will completely ignorant of the mistake you will be making, and focusing on the mistakes that your parents made.

Yes, if she is really interested. Lazy people are people not interested in doing anything -- or people who didn't find where their interests are. If your approach is enabling her to be interested in stuff that needs a screw driver it's 100% sure that she will pick up the screw driver.

Thank you for sharing this. It is encouraging.

What sort of therapy? Like did you do CBT, or something more standard?

you're a good parent for thinking a lot about your daughter and by giving her your best, keep it up! :)

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