The ABC's of Guiding the Child (1967) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The ABC's of Guiding the Child (1967) [pdf]

centervideo.forest.usf.edu

117 pointsjyriand25 comments

I appreciate the era of instructions where you could call a document "The ABC's of X" without then feeling obligated to actually run through the alphabet in order and crowbar different sentiments in - speaking of which, backcronyms need to go away forever now.

Was there a cut-off year after which all "ABCs of X" guides were obligated to actually run through the alphabet? When did such legislation pass?

On a related note, here's a mobile-formatted PDF called "How a Saint corrected children"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wEdBKMA2VZtz0BzOsZEOGc5X7HJ...

And similarly, the "Salesian Preventive System":

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LsfGlh0MiOMOLoYco9IAlxjqWgW...

(Taken from http://salesianfamily.org/pedagogy/preventive-system and formatted via LaTeX.)

Natural consequences: What if the child doesn't care about consequence, or what if he/she likes the consequence? In the example of being late for school, the child could consider it as a reward, that he/she doesn't have to go to school anymore.

Ugh.

The method of natural consequences looks great on paper, but its practical application is extremely limited, because:

- many consequences are prohibitively dangerous (Dear son, surely the choice is yours, but I would suggest not to play with your toys in the middle of the road)

- many times the consequences are worse for parents (No, you may not play with grandma's golden necklace. I know you'll be careful and will never lose it, but, sorry, nope)

- children have much shorter time horizon: from hours at two years old up to months for late teens. Anything more than that is "infinity" and all consequences disappear at such distance.

I think the assumption was that the child would arrive late at school and would suffer some unpleasant consequence as a result, such as being marked tardy where a certain number of tardies results in losing privileges of some kind, or in some kind of punishment like having to stay after class. That was probably a reasonable assumption in 1967; I'm not sure how reasonable it is now. :-)

Few parents are equipped to raise sociopaths and nearly all people respond to self-preservation. I would hope a child would be able to empathize if communicated with in way they could easily understand. 'Love and Logic' is a parenting technique where the use of natural consequences are used heavily; when kids understand you are their teacher, failure becomes an opportunity to learn. If you are simply there as an enforcer, you are viewed as a warden. They focus on not getting caught rather than gaining wisdom.

> I would hope a child would be able to empathize if communicated with in way they could easily understand

As the parent of a four year old, I hate to break it to you, but this is not commonly true. It is not true for us, and it is not true for any of our friends who have kids this age. The child has their own order in which things are prioritized, and they do not care if that is different from your order. Unless you're willing to let your entire life be dictated by what your child wants to do from moment to moment, it's not going to work to just talk to them about why what they're doing is wrong or unacceptable.

All kids are sociopaths to some degree, they don't really have fully functioning empathy until 6-8 years old at the earliest.

Being "a teacher not an enforcer" sounds like one of those approaches that only works on kids who are already well behaved. Many kids won't give a crap what you're trying to teach them once they've established that there are no consequences for ignoring you.

Find a consequence that the kid does care about and use that instead. It doesn't have to be related, it's just neater if it is.

This is basically a listicle from 1967. You could publish this on Buzzfeed by making the title "21 Ways to Raise AWESOME Children (Number 12 Will Shock You!)" and adding emojis.

Yes listicles are lists with added flair, and this is a list.

Seems like good advice for adults as well.

This appears to be the related talk: http://centervideo.forest.usf.edu/qpi/goalsofpar/goalsofpar....

Mobile Friendly View: http://pdf.cab/centervideo.forest.usf.edu/qpi/goalsofpar/han...

I only see a white page.

There's some good advice here, but I don't know how evidence-based it all is. For example, I understand that there is some evidence that extrinsic rewards have problems when delivered in certain ways, but I don't think we've entirely overturned behaviorism. Rewards and punishments are a tool that the world uses on us, like it or not. It would be surprising if there were no place for that tool in child-rearing.

Likewise, I question the advice to not involve oneself in children's fights. If one child is much bigger than the other, they can impose their will on the smaller child. Growing up, I saw friends who were on the losing side of this exchange, and it can be scarring.

Still more of the advice is well meant but impractical. "Never do for the child what they can do for themselves." Suppose I have a flight to catch, and my son refuses to put on his own shoes. Am I to miss the flight then? My son can be stubborn. On one occasion I tried to follow this advice when he refused to walk himself home. We stood on the sidewalk for half an hour in twenty degree weather before I gave up and compelled him to walk home.

I suspect, like much parenting advice, this stuff works for some kids and doesn't work for others. So much of parenting advice is survivorship bias. That a particular technique works for one child does not imply it works for all children. I can buy that these points are effective for most children, but ultimately you have to do what it takes to survive, and part of that is tailoring this stuff to your unique relationship with your own child.

Agreed, and also in terms of evidence-based conclusions: if this was published and widely read starting in 1967, that means a good chunk of Gen X would have been parented along these lines. Given what a bunch of slacker fuckups we all are I'm not sure that's evidence in favor of this being a good approach. ;)

Yeah, I have seen products of non-involvement and did not liked it. They did not got along better. In one case, they hated each other progressively more and more, in other mini culture emerged where it is ok for stronger to mistreat whoever no one has right for respectful treatment unless can fight. Did not impressed me at all. We tell kids when they do something else wrong: be it littering, stealing from someone, destroying something, whatever. We dont expect them to figure it is wrong magically. They dont magically figure it is wrong to mistreat smaller kids for fun either.

Also, it often amounts to enabling bullying. The biggest asshole kid gets its way, whether for benefit of for just fun, the bullied one is blamed for not being able to solve situation.

"Middlebrow dismissals" like this are discouraged on HN.

I don't think my post is "middle-brow". It's also not a dismissal. Can you explain what about it made you think so? I posted detailed, personal experiences that directly argue against particular items of advice in the PDF. This is DH4 in http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html.

I was interested what the exact meaning of a “Middlebrow dismissal” is (non-native speaker). But I could only find the following in the HN guidelines which doesn’t seem to mention middlebrow dismissals nor does it seem to be applicable to the toplevel comment:

“Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something”

What exactly is a “middlebrow dismissal” and why would the toplevel comment be that?

I'm a native English speaker and can take a stab here. Lowbrow typically means unsophisticated (as in, like a neanderthal or ape) whereas highbrow means sophisticated. I'm assuming middlebrow means, well, something in the middle.

All of that being said, the "middlebrow dismissal" observation/criticism makes zero sense to me here.

I think this link answers it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224

This is pretty good, too:

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissal...

I'm a native speaker and I've got no idea what he's saying. honestly I thought the guy made it up to try to sound cool...

I also assumed given that it was a green account and a one line response that it would be downvoted and marked as spam.

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