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Comment by khazhou | Hacker News Reader

Eh, this article was a bit "Reader's Digest". Parent tries to solve problem, gives up and lets fate have its way, problem goes away when parent wasn't looking, parent-child have a moment of trust which reveals that the problem was something simple all along. Life lesson learned.

How about when it's not a simple underlying problem ("hands get dry in cold climate")? A speech impediment which is cute in a small kid but weird in middle school and socially+career-limiting in an adult. Or an aggression issue. Or one of the many spectrum issues, which won't go away by moving to a warmer climate.

I agree with the article on not getting angry, but I'm not going to get a new life lesson from "if your kid trusts you they will open up."

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> I agree with the article on not getting angry, but I'm not going to get a new life lesson from "if your kid trusts you they will open up."

I think expecting life lessons from everything on HN is counterproductive -- we don't need to get something life-changing from every single thing here for anything to be worthwhile. I think there were a lot of takeaways about communication and relationships -- not just parent-child relationships -- that could be useful to almost anyone here.

For me, "Investing energy into fighting with someone because no one knows the solution is just an exercise in undermining trust." was worth the entire read. Someone could just come out and say that, but it was made more meaningful and memorable to me because of the story. I'd always been aware of this concept but had never seen it verbalized until now, and that was valuable to me.

Shortly after that is another line: "I had caved to pressure because I felt threatened."

This is another concept that I thought was really important in conjunction with the first and it was nice to have them verbalized together; together they probably explain a lot of conflicts within a team.

Just considering them is useful for me, since it brings up related thoughts, like "don't threaten people, they may cave to pressure instead of reacting reasonably."

Sure, these are all simple concepts, but I appreciate the stimulus that made me sit down and recall/consider them. :)

Author here.

I had all of those issues. Both my sons are Twice Exceptional. One has a bad temper and is prone to violence. They both likely qualify as ASD. One had a serious speech impediment. He still has a speech impediment, but most people don't realize it.

All of those were easier to deal with because my kids trusted me. Trust was absolutely critical for resolving the hardest problems.

It's one post, so it's not going to answer everything. Hopefully, things will get fleshed out over time in a useful way for parents with such concerns, assuming I can get engagement and also find time to do this kind of writing instead of freelance writing to keep the lights on and food on the table.

> Both my sons are Twice Exceptional

I've never heard of this before -- what does it mean?

Gifted plus special needs. Often described as "gifted and learning disabled," but it's really a gifted child with any disability.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional

Thank you! It says that it came around in the mid 90s, which would have been when I was in elementary school, but I've never heard of the term despite fitting in the group. I wonder if it was related to a certain set of schools/philosophies.

I learned the term because I was homeschooling and active in the oldest online gifted community. I kind of was rubbing elbows with some of the luminaries in gifted education circles. So I was kind of in on the ground floor.

I believe public schools were much slower to adopt such concepts.

That makes a lot of sense! Thank you. Do you know if it is (yet/still?) in use in public school systems in the US?

No clue. My youngest is 29 and I have no grandchildren, so I have no current involvement with the school system.

Yes, I heard 2E being recently mentioned in a public elementary school. So, it seems it's still in use.

A nice way of saying two disabilities.

That's not what it means.

You're missing a deep and prevalent problem described in the message of this story. Parents feel pressure to crank on their kids and when they aren't getting to the problem, it can quickly become borderline abusive. This is COMMON, and not every parent eventually figures it out. This is a call to find real solutions and stay humane along the way. I love it.

> A speech impediment which is cute in a small kid but weird in middle school and socially+career-limiting in an adult.

Amusingly enough, I had such a thing in elementary and middle school: I couldn't pronounce "r" or "l", but was convinced I was pronouncing them fine. (No one showed me a recording of my speech.) I was sent to speech therapy and learned some alternate way of pronouncing "r", which I almost never carried out because it wasn't what I'd originally learned and seemed weird and wrong.

Eventually, I had a dental appliance (a "butterfly expander") removed from my mouth, and I resumed correct pronunciation of "r" and "l" sounds immediately (while still in the dentist's office, I think). The expander sat just below the roof of my mouth, blocking a certain range of my tongue's movement that is indeed involved in making "r" and "l" sounds.

I wonder if the speech therapists knew about such things.

Hang on. You had a temporary dental appliance that was interfering with your speaking, but were diagnosed with speech impediment and sent to therapy?

That just sounds like some sort of oversight.

It's not visually obvious like braces; it's on the roof of the mouth and behind the teeth. You'd have to be looking upwards into my open mouth to see it, and if you're an adult—taller than a child—you wouldn't usually be in a position to do so. Here's a reasonable approximation to what I remember it being:

http://www.gregjorgensen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08...

I'll ask my mom what they were all thinking.

Incidentally, I find one other case on the internet that bears some resemblance: "I had a narrow jaw, and I had a palate expander when I was 11. Basically, my mouth was way too small for my tongue in a way that pulling five teeth and doing spacers couldn't fix (we had to do that too, in addition to the palate expander). I had a pretty severe speech impediment (largely -R and -L sounds), and the expander cleared that up (after four years of speech therapy that did nothing). It was amazing! When they took it out, I could just TALK. I used to come home from speech crying because the teacher would tell me I wasn't practicing and wasn't getting better, and I WAS practicing so, so frequently. I just physically could not make certain sounds." https://community.babycenter.com/post/a51272845/narrow_upper...

According to my mom, I had been mispronouncing R and L as far back as age 2, and there wasn't any period before the expander was removed when I did pronounce it correctly. So my experience exactly matches that of the above internet citation regarding pronunciation, speech therapy, and expander removal.

Ah thanks for clarifying.

> How about when it's not a simple underlying problem?

Then applying brute force instead of empathy is still not going to work?

I am not sure exactly what nit you are picking.

I'm not arguing against empathy. I guess I'm just saying it's necessary but very far from sufficient in many cases. In the article, it was basically sufficient.

I think the main lesson is not to lose your cool or act against your own instinct when others are in crisis or putting pressure on you.

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