Last Psychiatrist rebuttal to "why parents hate parenting" | Hacker News Reader

Last Psychiatrist rebuttal to "why parents hate parenting"

thelastpsychiatrist.com

87 pointsdelackner46 comments

Wouldn't normally post this, but the original article appeared on HN recently as well, and I think this rebuttal has some really good insights on adjusting our thought processes and expectations.

I would have posted it if I thought there was one other who read thelastpsych :)

Seriously, I highly recommend the rest of his posts (if you can forgive the ads and site layout).

Discovered it today from a previous thread on HN, and was immediately sucked in to reading nonstop.

Our minds are the most important program we have any control over modifying, even if the interface is pretty bizarre.

This is good advice. In the words of the great George Carlin: "You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." (See: http://harmful.cat-v.org/society/children/fuck_the_children)

Or another good article on the subject of leaving your kids alone: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/familyadvice/3355719/Idle-...

It's great advice.

I agree, and follow the advice with my kids. But this is the key bit:

When you have something to offer, maximize and concentrate that time, and then get the hell out of the way.

I know some parents that kneejerk to helicopter parenting by not parenting at all. As with most things, neither pole is very effective.

> Kids don't smoke because a camel in sunglasses tells them to. They smoke for the same reasons adults do, because it's an enjoyable activity that relieves anxiety and depression.

He totally lost me here.

That is almost word-for-word why my sister told me that she started smoking at age 20.

Kids mimic you. You smoke, guess what your kids will think (the same thing I thought) "wow, everyone seems to be enjoying it, I wonder what the fuss is about".

With my sister, I grew up telling her about what smoking feels like and the addiction. Guess why she does not smoke... Its not a big curiosity anymore for her, she just knows nothing good will come of it. She also tried (unsuccessfully) to get my mom to quit smoking. She understand addiction and why its bad to start.

Once you realize just how much they mimic its incredible the things you can realize. When I saw my daughter standing idly doing the same little motions with her feet as I do when I stand Idly, I realized: Nothing too little will go unnoticed with the child, the child will pick up on everything I do and thus if I want her not to do it, I must MODEL the right way for her.

Neither I nor my parents smoke. My sister says that her peer group doesn't smoke and that, when she first started, she hid it from them. It was something she did by and for herself to cope with the anxiety of exams at college.

She was anxious and depressed, and cigarettes helped.

Just presenting a data point in favor of the assertion that the great-grandparent post dismissed.

That's something smoker might say to rationalize his/her choice when he/she had any choice to make.

Nicotine only alleviates anxiety caused by lack of nicotine. Instead starting smoking she could withhold her pee to feel greater relief when she finally pees. It would be just as much help in coping with life stress as cigarettes are.

Is this just an example of how 'big media' is often held to lower standards than a blogger?

Blog posts are often labeled as flame-baiting or simply trying to promote self interest (eg - articles that knock 37signals / Calacanis / Apple fan boys, etc.).

The original article was pretty shallow; Jennifer Senior, the author, followed the conventional Gladwell-style of anecdote and insight mixed with research. TLP's dismantling of the original New Yorker article isn't as rough as it could have been.

The original article got attention, was up-voted here and elsewhere, in many ways because of the provocative title, which wasn't well supported in the article. Thankfully, someone has pointed this out. Had this article been on LISP, geo-location, web2 business models, this community could have done it on its own, but here having someone who is a relative expert (assumed to be the case given TLP's title) was needed.

[Side note - I am the father of two kids under age 4 and my wife has a master's degree in education and teaches. I disliked the original article.]

I only recently realized* and internalized the fact that I don't need to have children. The social pressure to do it is enormous, even if it is not explicit. This article is yet another data point that it is not a good idea to have kids unless you actually want to.

* Through this wonderfully thought-provoking site: http://vhemt.org/ . Highly recommended read.

I think you completely missed the irony of the article.

I guess I did, and I still do - I didn't see any irony there, just analyzing and poking fun at the original article. I might have read it a bit to quickly, but what I got out of it was that kids won't make you any more or less happy than you were: The original article stating that you will become unhappy, and this rebuttal saying that your happiness is determined by yourself, not your kid.

So my conclusion was -- though poorly worded -- that, if I don't really want kids now, I certainly won't be happier if I DO try to get one now.

I found vhemt.org unfunny, bleating and dim-witted. The very dogma it attacks is on the basis of another dogma, almost entirely composed out of the naturalistic fallacy and appeal to nature. YMMV.

I certainly agree that they take it too far. I don't see what's so great about a planet with no people, and how it is it better than what we have now.

What I do find interesting, is the idea that having a child can be seen in an environmental and altruistic light. For me, it was a new thought that not having kids might be a good choice for myself, my girlfriend and the world in general.

An empty world would be a horribly sad thing, but perhaps a billion fewer people would make the world better for the remaining six billion. (And for the record, I'm talking about voluntarily getting fewer, not any forced methods)

Wouldn't the exact same arguments also work for suicide? Just saying - there might be other aspects we tend to consider when deciding to stay alive.

vhemt.org seems like a wonderful Christian-fundamentalist right-winger site. Just persuade all the liberals to stop breeding, and wait a few years.

Unfortunately (perhaps?), those ideas seem to have become very popular (I have heard from many people that they don't want to have children because there already are too many people).

Not saying people should have children, but to not have children for ideological reasons seems likely to backfire.

The problem with children is that eventually it is too late to change one's mind, at least for women.

The pressure to have children is biological. If you could measure it, there is arguably more social pressure NOT to have children than otherwise.

How about this? The biological pressure is to have sex, and only indirectly to have children. The only direct pressure to have children (as such) is social (people asking about grandchildren, cultural values, tax rates, etc.). I'm not sure if I believe this, but I do want to distinguish the target of the biological drive versus the social pushing.

On the other side, why do you think there is more social pressure not to have children? As a (childless) married male in his 40s, I can say I've experienced a ton of social pressure to have children and zero pressure not to. I grant that this is anecdotal, but I'm not sure what you're basing your statement on - no evidence comes to mind.

There is a biological pressure to have grandchildren. That is why there is a social pressure to have children.

"The biological pressure is to have sex, and only indirectly to have children."

I'm guessing you're a man.

You don't have to guess if you read my response. That said, I believe the same goes for women. The biological push is towards sex; children are a result (sometimes) of the sex. (You can argue about variance of intensity or frequency of desire among males and females, of course. I'm not sure what I think about all that, though my instinct is to say that a lot of the variance is cultural rather than biological. But that's neither here nor there, at the moment.)

Here's a way to play with this claim. Imagine you have a person (male or female) in the right age range. Would giving the person a child to care for by itself remove or diminish the person's desire for sex? I'm not so sure. (Note, I'm not talking about exhaustion due to taking care of a child - a clear side-effect, nor about the biological changes that occur after childbirth.)

Again, I'm thinking about this issue myself, but I don't think it's cut-and-dried male/female, as you imply.

Are you saying there's no biological impulse to have children? In my experience, both men and women have sex drive, but females often (males less often) have an additional drive to have children. Why would satisfying one impulse also satisfy the other? Even if I eat, I can still get bored.

The biological imperative is to procreate. I don't want to split hairs and separate the mechanism from the goal. It's true there is plenty of social pressure to have sex or to be more sexually appealing, short of achieving the goal to have offspring. It doesn't matter. Remove the social pressure and people will continue to have children. It's not like they're going to forget how. Biology will take over.

I think there's overwhelming evidence for the social pressure to NOT have children. China's one-child policy comes to mind, along with the trend for certain categories of women in developed countries who are delaying childbirth until long after they become fertile. The contraception industry alone is enough evidence, and I'd be willing to bet that most abortions are a result of social pressure than medical necessity.

Both types of social pressure exist, I'm just under the impression that more people are actively discouraged from having children than otherwise. Neither trump the biological imperative we feel, consciously or unconsciously, as sexual organisms to reproduce.

I understand that you don't want to split hairs, and I don't want to split them merely to be difficult (or pick nits). Nevertheless, I'm not entirely convinced that we can avoid the distinction between the desires for sex and for children. I remain unconvinced that the driving desire is for children (or procreation, as you put it now). My argument, in a nutshell, is that we can see that the desire for sex is primary and paramount by observing human behavior. The desire for sex precedes, outlasts, contravenes and cuts across the desire for children.

Beyond that, I don't think contraception is necessarily evidence for pressure to not have children, so much as evidence for a desire to control when and how many children to have. Certainly some people use contraception to avoid all children, but surely many more people use it in an effort not to have over large familes, no? As evidence for this (partial, because there are other factors like fear and permanence) consider that most people choose less reliable one-off contraception rather than a vasectomy or tubal ligation, even when both are readily available. China is one country, and in this regard somewhat exceptional.

To borrow an argument from vhemt.org, the biological pressure is to have sex, not to have babies:

http://vhemt.org/biobreed.htm#instinct

As for the second sentence, I would not be surprised if the social pressure works in different ways in different places. I am in Norway where social pressure is high: the state sponsors it, would-be grandparents will of course nag, and it seems harder to be recognized as a complete person in the media and by peers if you do not have a family.

Kind of fish in a barrel stuff, but the markmanship is fine at that range.

> Because, you know, no Scandinavian women ever kill themselves at double the rate of Americans.

Is that true? All women or only mothers? This would be a strange bias. General suicide rates are not that much different?

One aspect is that in Scandinavia winters are very long.

That was my first thought but I checked suicide rates by country and they are not much different between Sweden, Canada and US.

Now I noticed that there's list of suicide rates by country and gender here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_rates

There seems to be higher rate of suicides in females in northern countries but they are much less likely to commit suicide than males.

Suicides in males seem to be correlated more with economic situation that latitude.

Assumption made in article that suicide rates are correlated with how much child care is provided by the state seems unfounded.

> Assumption made in article that suicide rates are correlated with how much child care is provided by the state seems unfounded.

I don't think that that was the assumption made in the article. The original NY article made some vague claims about scandinavian women being happier and that being somehow tied to childcare... which was not thought out or supported in any way. The author of the rebuttal article used the suicide rates to show that other conclusions could easily be made about the happiness of scandinavian women.

Lack of support for this claim in that NY article is not proof for it's falseness.

Author in his rebuttal also did not show that suicide rates of women correlate with their happiness nor that their average happiness of all woman in the country has anything to do with amount of child care provided free if charge. I think it's far worse because he claims that more people help you with your burdens the less happy you are which seems paradoxical and tries to found this claim with suicide rates which seem to have some apparent correlation with how much sunlight individuals get.

I personally know young mother who gives her 3 year old daughter all her awake time and I find it hard to believe how she could not benefit from easing up getting child care for her. 24 hours in a day is for one person just barely enough to take care of the kid. You need other peoples help and I don't see how making it easier could lead to lower happiness let alone increasing suicide rates.

And Scandinavian metal is very very metal

Cause and effect, though? :-)

Of course it's true. No American woman has ever killed herself more than once, and no Scandinavian woman has ever killed herself twice.

(The article should have read "Scandinavian women don't kill themselves at double the rate of Americans")

It's true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...

General rate is almost twice as high as well, so it's not bias. Scandinavians are also generally much happier, according to OECD: http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/05/world-happiest-places-lifes...

Would one possible explanation for a country to have a very high suicide rate but also a high happiness index be survivorship bias? The winter depression might be so harsh that it pushes the unhappy off the edge, and the remaining population consists of those who are just so happy that it doesn't bother them. I suspect though that someone with more knowledge would find this argument a bit vapid.

Ok heres my response to the 8yo watching a movie and the mother wanting the child to go do homework.

Parents NEED to understand the difference in age. Don't YOU hate it when you have to stop watching a movie you are interested in mid-way and do something you don't want to. Well a child has a harder time coping. Imagine your mother walks in on you fucking your girlfriend, and says in a pleasant voice (she ain't being a bitch) "honey, please get out of her and wash the dishes". Imagine the response you will have. Now imagine the request "honey, I know I'm heavily intruding but you haven't done the dishes in 3 days and I am hungry, so finish up in 15 minutes and wash the damn dishes!" I assure you the second scenario will make YOU feel responsible for the fact that this shit happened, maybe even embarrassed. But the message is VERY different. There was no painless way to get into the situation but it was as painless as possible given the circumstances and the blame now lies in the appropriate party.

You need to alert the child that "homework is coming" give em a few minutes to cope, make sure they understand they have a few minutes and let that brain work at the coping, it just takes time. Be consistent with it. Also important to let the child know why it's their fault they have to stop, if the child did the homework first the child would have the ability to watch the movie without interruption. (make sure to not go back on your word, because that will not help later on). Now if the movie is on disk, let the child know you can pause and resume later, if not, hell 5 bucks to download the movie and let your kid watch it is worth it.

With children every potential conflict can be turned into a learning experience one way or another. The problem is the going up to a child "turn of the tv and do homework". To a child that might be too sudden and too intense to immediately cope with.

I am 26 years old and already me and my wife noticed these little things. Most the conflicts with my 3.5year old is avoided. AND she does what we want her to do. Sometimes we turn chores into a game, sometimes we turn something she dreads into something "fun" because we join her. Also PICK YOUR CONFLICTS. Believe it or not, the child will want to do things differently than you do. Sometimes the way the kid wants to do it is alright, so let them have their way. The child NEEDS to feel some control over their life, give them inconsequential choices "red or blue shirt" fine it does not match, who cares.

You will have to dedicate yourself to the kids, but thats what parenting is about.

> Also PICK YOUR CONFLICTS. Believe it or not, the child will want to do things differently than you do. Sometimes the way the kid wants to do it is alright, so let them have their way. The child NEEDS to feel some control over their life, give them inconsequential choices "red or blue shirt" fine it does not match, who cares.

This is very important. I don't have kids but I have been one. When I see parents micro managing their kids I feel sorry for them. Let your kids explore and decide and learn. Make "yes" the default answer.

Absolutely. Let your kids make mistakes. Let them do things wrong. Let them make odd decisions.

The best thing you can do for your children is help them to become good decision makers and the best way to do that is to let them make lots of decisions.

You can still make your values known and prevent damage and injury but let them do as much as possible and learn what works.

A great introduction to this type of thinking is Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn.

> Make "yes" the default answer.

This is really the key idea. I am blown away by how many parents make themselves and their children miserable by just saying "no" without thinking about.

If my boss walks in on me watching a movie at work and asks me to get back to work. I would have no problem "coping" with that and a getting back to work . My boss doesnt send me an alter that work is coming . There is never a "conflict". Not sure where all this advice for obsessive parenting is coming from, lets enjoy our time with our kids instead of designing alert systems or obsessing over their physcology . Kids are not small sized adults .Please...

  I grew up in shut the TV and do the homework world ..yea it sucked but its not any worse than many other things that i had  no control upon.

One problem might be that a lot of parents think they have to be the bosses of their kids. Or worse - for once they have someone in their life who has to respect and obey them.

Yes, but you're also not 8, and fully understand the "this is my fault because I'm not supposed to be watching a movie now" part.

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