How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger (2019) | Hacker News Reader

How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger (2019)

npr.org

177 pointskevinconaway134 comments

The Briggs book referenced in the article is a really interesting read. I tracked down a copy after several articles like this one appeared shortly after her death. I assumed that the book primarily focused on child-rearing, but while that aspect of their culture is certainly an aspect of the book, her study of the concept of "ihuma" and how it applies to interactions between her host family and other adults in the same band were even more interesting to me, and her general observations about day to day life both on and off the ice were very enjoyable. It's not a tale of adventure unless you're really excited by cleaning fish, but as a voracious reader of native american culture it provides a great glimpse into a way of life which tragically would not last much longer.

This isn't "Native American", it is Inuit. I am actually not sure which Inuit, but it is unhelpful to use such a blanket designation as "native american". Using that term would be like reading a book about Irish dancing and then telling someone you read a book about "European dancing", or reading a French cook book and declaring your love for "European cuisine". One day the same awareness, knowledge, and respect afforded to the nations and people groups of Europe will be afforded to those on Turtle Island. Not using the label "native american" when the focus or topic is a specific nation is a good start.

Some of the stuff in here is obvious stuff that nonetheless is great to get reminders of, like leading by example. There was a unique piece that really intrigues me: Putting on a play/putting on a drama.

"Putting on a drama" seems like a pretty romanticized way to say it, but if I understand correctly, it's practicing better responses to events that led to bad behavior. "Johnny, I'm going to steal your toy, and instead of hitting me like you hit your brother, use your words." That kind of explicit practice/rehearsal of skills isn't something I'd have thought of, but it makes total sense as a valuable way to teach and learn.

And it seems to me that deliberately teaching and practicing these methods in early childhood -- like in school -- could have profound implications. Right now, my impression is that public schools tend to take the approach of letting social skills develop organically through peer interactions. This seems like a huge missed opportunity.

> schools tend to take the approach of letting social skills develop organically through peer interactions

I believe this leads to peer-pressure and bullying. Bullying doesn’t have to be physically violent for it to have a lasting impact on someone’s life.

> This seems like a huge missed opportunity

I suspect it’s by-design - there’s a large chunk of parents[1] who adamantly insist that schools should only teach the Three Rs and that it’s exclusively the parents’ responsibility to “raise” children. It’s difficult to advance this agenda without it being misrepresented as “liberal indoctrination” and then becoming politically unpopular.

[1]Invariably of the authoritarian-bent...

This was discussed a year ago at length: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19396563

My kids heard this story on the air while we were in the car. My then-eight-year-old remarked, "Yeah, that wouldn't work with us."

First, we mustn't discount the importance of properly expressed anger. Just as there is such a thing as excess or inappropriate anger, there is also such a thing as deficient and inappropriate anger. What "inappropriate" and "excess"/"deficient" anger are will require mature situational judgement on the part of the parent. There's no way around that, and defaulting to "no displays of anger" is not a true substitute. Anger is in fact necessary to convey, both to children and adults (though the degree and manner will vary), the gravity of an injustice and this communication enables remorse, repentance, seeking forgiveness, and edification. It is one elements in shaping discipline and character. That doesn't mean flying off the handle like a madman, of course. Reason should remain intact.

Second, lying to children with silly stories is not a solution. It's one thing if you tell the child a funny story with the understanding that the child doesn't really believe it, but rather finds it both amusing to imagine and comprehends the underlying message. It's an entirely different thing to outright lie. Lying is never admissible, certainly never noble, and will only work to undermine trust toward parents and consequently parental authority.

P.S. Is there perhaps an element of romanticism in this article?

"P.S. Is there perhaps an element of romanticism in this article?"

Totally. With all the readings about controlling anger, I missed a reference to the inuit custom of violence towards women.

https://www.pauktuutit.ca/abuse-prevention/gender-based-viol...

Although, maybe that violence is without anger. Would that be better?

>Second, lying to children with silly stories is not a solution. It's one thing if you tell the child a funny story with the understanding that the child doesn't really believe it, but rather finds it both amusing to imagine and comprehends the underlying message. It's an entirely different thing to outright lie. Lying is never admissible, certainly never noble, and will only work to undermine trust toward parents and consequently parental authority.

Were you one of those kids who never figured out the Santa Claus thing on your own and is still salty about it?

Obviously just being angry but keeping cool while saying something like, “I am angry” is fine. I think that the point is that usually anger comes with raised voices, yelling or worse which is not going to work. I don’t know if you have kids but I noticed that yelling at my 3 year old son only lead to him yelling at me in other circumstances. Similarly, even yelling at the dog to stop barking had the same result. I was teaching him to yell not how to behave. I do disagree with the article in that timeouts are highly effective if you get rid of the yelling aspect.

Your entire point is relative, perhaps to your individual views or your society's norms. "Properly expressed anger" can be a stern talk in one culture and violence in another. Perhaps it's best to keep in mind that there is never a universal solution, only different options that have different effectiveness based on a particular situation

One Inuit parenting technique that works on my kids. If a child hits you or bites you, don't yell at them. Instead pretend to cry in an exaggerated way. I have found this to be way more effective than yelling or timeouts. My oldest is almost 4, so this might not work on older kids. But then older kids do not bite very often anyway.

This works on puppies too. If they get a bit nippy, overreact to the biting.

There's probably a lot of similarity between what works on very young kids and puppies, at least until they learn to use that brain of theirs better.

That's the reaction a puppy would get from a sibling or its mom. The fake yelps immediately stop rough play, everyone looks around for a few seconds trying to figure out what happened. Then they bow to invite to play / signal no intent to harm, and continue playing with less biting.

Biting them back also works.

Will try this!

Also something from indigenous cultures.

So a large part is to lie? I don't know. I mean, yes, I get angry by my children, and I don't know any parent that does not. Probably I get angry too often too early. But I really try hard never to lie to my kids. I even show them that I am angry because I think that's part of the game. Kids need to learn that other people have emotions.

But telling stories about horrific creatures to avoid dangerous places? I don't know. I mean yes, I guess it works, but why not tell them the (horrific) truth?

In the Western culture, lying is primarily connected to deception. In cultures where Semitic religions have not influenced, lying and deception are not same: one can lie, without intending to deceive. That's how one has to look at.

One can lie for multiple reasons. For instance, to avoid conflict; or because one is not in a mood. Deception is one among many reasons.

Why the western culture focuses so much on the unity between lying/falsehood and deception? This has to do with the secularization of Christianity: Christian ideas becoming less Christian, more 'universal'. Satan, falsity, lying, deception--all form the unity in Christianity; in secular thinking, Satan is pushed out, but the unity between lying, falsehood and deception is present. This unity does not exist for Inuits or Chinese or even east Indians. It is part of child rearing practices in China and in India, to teach kids to lie.

> One can lie for multiple reasons. For instance, to avoid conflict; or because one is not in a mood. Deception is one among many reasons.

In all of those cases deception is the purpose of lying, the other purposes described aren't alternatives to deception, they are the purposes for which one seeks to deceive.

It's true that focussing on this has a nexus with Christian moral theory and it's influence on secular morality, since Christian moral theory distinguishes between bad ends sought deliberately as intermediate means to permissible ends and bad ends which are incidental to acts seeking permissible ends.

>In all of those cases deception is the purpose of lying, the other purposes described aren't alternatives to deception, they are the purposes for which one seeks to deceive.

That's what Christian morality says. There are other cultures which don't see the way you see. Western philosophy doesn't even answer the question "Why truth?"; only Nietzsche raises that question.

In Christianity, truth doesn't need any further justification; truth is its own foundation, because God is the Truth. Here the dispute is about how different ways of being in the world; how different cultures are different in different way, not as a variant of the West. Of course, the west thinks that every other culture is a variant of itself; in that sense, your answer is 'acceptable' to the people belonging to the Western culture.

> That's what Christian morality says.

No, it's a simple fact: each of the examples provided is a further end that relies on deception in order for lying to further it, not an alternative end which lying can serve independent of producing deception. Christian (and Christian-derived) morality assigns particular moral significance to that fact, which other cultures might well disagree with.

FWIW, I agree with you completely.

I think the conversation gets muddled when we start introducing value-laden words like "truth." The crux of the matter for me is, am I lying in order that someone will behave in a way that they wouldn't behave if I told the truth. There are, I believe, good reasons to do this, and undoubtedly, moralities that believe there are never good reasons to do this.

But it is clear (to me anyway) that it is definitely deception, regardless of the justification.

If I'm not trying to get someone to act differently, then there is no deception (and perhaps this is what the other commenter is referring to), though it's hard to imagine a situation where you'd lie without intending to affect someone's behavior, even trivially, like to avoid a conversation with a passerby in the street...

What you say is true, but stating the fact this way is already framing the conversation. To see this just reflect how you feel when you hear the "deception", it's already a loaded term. Given most of us here grew up indoctrinated in western thought, we're now fighting up-hill to demonstrate a meaningful distinction which eastern cultures take for granted.

To deceive someone is to tell them an untruth for personal gain. There are cases where an untruth is told for the greater good, or for the good of the listener. In those cases, there is a divergence between lie and deception.

I never got that connotation from the word 'deceive', I thought it just meant misleading someone, not necessarily for your own gain. Furthermore, I grew up christian and was never told all lying was for personal gain.

To me there is a difference between mislead and deceive. Deceive has a stronger negative intention behind it. Consider someone saying "I was misled" versus "I was deceived".

I made no connotations between what I wrote and Christianity / all lying is for personal gain, so we can skip that part of the discussion.

> To deceive someone is to tell them an untruth for personal gain.

No, it's to cause someone to believe something that is not true.

Personal gain is a common goal served by deceit, not part of it's essential character.

Causing someone to believe something that is not true is too weak of a definition for deceive. Consider the difference between telling someone a falsehood versus deceiving someone. There is a malicious intent behind deception, which is not present in falsehood.

> Causing someone to believe something that is not true is too weak of a definition for deceive

No, it's literally the definition of the word.

> Consider the difference between telling someone a falsehood versus deceiving someone.

The difference is intent; if you don't know that it's false, or you don't intend it to be believed, it's not deception.

> There is a malicious intent behind deception,

It certainly is a matter of intent, but aside from the sense in which a false belief itself is a harm, and any intentional element of harm even if not a net harm is “malice”, I wouldn't say it is necessary malicious.

If you are referring to the dictionary definition of the word, then let me refer you to my experience learning different languages. The dictionary never fully captures the nuances of a word. I've had to get detailed explanations of different words where they all have the same definition, but are all used in different contexts. So technically deception means telling an untruth, if you limit yourself to dictionary definitions. But we live in a world where the nuances make or break kingdoms, and nobody reads text with only the dictionary definitions in mind.

Of course, based on your exposure to various literature, you might have a different feel for what the nuances of the word deception are, and maybe it matches exactly with the dictionary definition. But based on my experience, deception is a heavily negative word with malicious intent behind it.

There are no such things as facts; that's the consensus of the debates in 1960s from history and philosophy of sciences, philosophy of language. Facts are facts of a theory: or, facts are theory-laden. Or observations are theory-laden.

When two parties engage in an argument, some theory-laden facts become facts (for instance, propositional logic in this context is seen as fact), other facts become theoretical claims.

That's the issue here: you call it a 'fact', I call it a theoretical claim. The dispute is at the level of describing the phenomenon itself. If one follows the best theory of argumentation in the market (that of pragma-dialectical school), this way of transforming theory-laden descriptions into facts violates one of the rules of dialogue.

> There are no such things as facts; that's the consensus of the debates in 1960s from history and philosophy of sciences, philosophy of language.

That is itself a fact claim—not just that that is the consensus of the debates in those fields, but even that such debate has occurred is such a claim. So either there are facts (and the conclusion of the debates to the contrary is false) or there are no facts and it makes no sense to cite the supposed debates or their supposed consensus. In either case, the claim about the debates is of no value.

Beautiful. Use the claim recursively on itself to destroy it. (And I suspect that all "there is no truth" positions are vulnerable to the same argument.)

That’s untrue. Kids in western cultures are taught to lie. It’s white lies, for example your mom baked your a cake and it didn’t taste good. Parents still say you need to say it was good no matter what.

A white lie is told to “avoid “conflict” as you stated above.

I wouldn't generalize that to all western cultures. America, for sure -- that goes along with the superficial "How are you?" questions where nobody actually even wants an answer. Superficial politeness for the sake of superficial politeness, even if that means deceit, lies, and laying down groundwork for later disappointment.

But many places that would be considered poor form because you are setting up for disappointment later (when the truth comes out), and the thinking is "why would you do that to someone?". In those places, kids might be forced to say thank you, but not that they enjoyed it.

This isn't a lie- it's mythology. The information is stored in the emotion and values presented in the story, not the literal details.

Most native american cultures have a complex mythology that explains the worldview, values, and philosophy of the culture. This is how the culture is transmitted, and even young children in these societies are used to mythology, and understand how to use it without interpreting it as a simple literal explanation of 'fact.'

The 'literal truth' doesn't work in place of mythology, it is hard to remember and interest kids with unless they've experienced it directly... unlike mythology, it fails to serve as a stable and effective way of transmitting cultural values over long time spans. The emotional content is critical for memorization, and attention... and also serves as a sort of 'checksum' where erroneous changes to the story generally reduce the emotional content, thereby causing the original 'correct' version to remain dominant.

Humans are really bad at estimating certain kinds of dangers.

Invisible and slow acting dangers are consistently under-estimated, immediate & physical dangers are recognized easily.

Teaching a very young kid that even if they are warm right now (especially inside, before going outside, or in the sun) that they still need to keep their hat on because they might lose it or not put it on correctly when it becomes cold and cold can kill.

Cold is invisible, it's not immediate. Replacing it with a captivating story about a mythical monster that will come and get you should serve to stay in their mind better & they might even enjoy hearing about it.

> Invisible and slow acting dangers are consistently under-estimated, immediate & physical dangers are recognized easily.

See: 2020

This isn't a lie in the way we'd typically talk about lies. It isn't meant to deceive. It's a myth.

As a child grows and discovers that there isn't really a monster in the sea, are they going to resent their parents when they understand the explanation?

I think that's the difference here.

Perhaps these kinds of magical ideas that we teach our kids makes them more susceptible to believing various religions/cults are real. That would be a downside.

unless, to quote the late Terry Pratchett[0], we _need_ to learn the little lies so we can believe the big ones. Justice, Mercy, Duty, that sort of thing. :)

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655-hogfather

When you stigmatize suspension of disbelief (myths, stories), you setup the child to chronically suspend belief. You get a person who can only value what can be pointed to and measured. A gullible person is bad, but the other extreme is no better.

Do you have a citation for that last claim?

Not the OP, but in the book Impro, Keith Johnstone strongly lamented the suppression of imagination in and by grown-ups. He wrote: "Most children can operate in a creative way until they are eleven or twelve, when suddenly they lose their spontaneity, and produce imitations of 'adult art'." He cites schools suppressing imagination as a factor, saying that, "The research so far shows that imaginative children are disliked by their teachers."

I feel that suspension of disbelief and imagination are closely related, as a lack of suspension of disbelief will close you off to many avenues of imagination.

Thanks for that response. It's funny that you mention Keith Johnstone, because I'm rereading him now. The suspension of disbelief v. suspension of belief concept comes from a writing pedagogue named Peter Elbow (highly recommended if you enjoyed Keith Johnstone).

Reminds me of Luke and Obi Wan. What the parents are saying is true, from a certain point of view.

It's just reverse Santa Claus.

Besides, I think of education as a series of increasingly small lies anyway. If you can get the kids to model correct behavior, you're just helping them visualize success. Is it a self delusion to visualize success for yourself? Maybe, but so what?

That's what I took away as well. At some point all these stories have to be retracted and the truth told. It was a big deal for us as kids about Santa, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc. What if there were hundreds more though? What if the parent only corrected a portion of these? What if the situation never arose again where the child would identify the lie and instead propagate it to offspring?

Perhaps we've just solved how religions start... /s

We used to tell children the truth. Just read the old fairy tales—Pinocchio, Little Red Riding Hood, etc.

You could compare oral cultures to mnemonics (memory aids) — the more extreme the story, the easier it is to remember / recall the underlying message. That's how our brains work. I recommend a book about oral cultures (and storytelling) called: The Spell of the Sensuous.

If you told a child "you see, when you go in the water, your lungs stop being able to absorb oxygen and your brain shuts down - after long enough - we cannot start it back up again" they aren't going to understand.

Using allegories you can put things into terms the child understands more easily. As they get older you can explain the truth behind the "lie" or story, if you like.

I remember in high school learning electrons were balls. Then, later I learn they are actually fields. Was I lied to?

Yes, but only in an educative and reductionist way, in order to help your brain being able to grasp an idea, by introducing a simplified model of it before jumping into the details...

I wouldn't expect toddlers to fully grasp the dangers of the sea either, and it seems that the Inuit's "sea monster" serves equally as a simplified model -- just simplified further for a younger mind.

It's a phenomenon known as a "lie to children". Each level of academia produces a wrong but convenient model which is then subsequently replaced with a slightly less and slightly less convenient model.

I suppose you'd count the exclamation of pain after strike that a parent asked their child make against the parent as a lie, too.

But, then I would know for sure you have missed the point.

You can just base the story on the truth, you don't have to lie.

Curious on your comment... Do you do Easter bunny, Tooth Fairy or Santa with your kids?

So you told your kids Santa Claus doesn't exist at the first possible opportunity? There are many positive reasons to lie.

You mean like how we lie about Santa Claus?

Maybe it is wrong, too?

No. . .its more like stories about Hell.

> why not tell them the (horrific) truth?

Because kids are not capable of understanding it.

It's easy to shape children so single mindedly when the cultural context of that child is completely controlled.

More simply, public schools and Youtube would break this sort of conditioning in short order. It only works if you only expose a kid to that singular unified world view until they lose easy plasticity. And as a personal note, I don't think that reserving kids to a single world view like that is net good, even if you view numbed anger as benefit (which I also don't).

> More simply, public schools and Youtube would break this sort of conditioning in short order.

Ehh? I've been exposed to decades of stimuli and yet I still have feelings and emotions that were created in my childhood, and it is difficult trying to unlearn them.

> even if you view numbed anger as benefit (which I also don't).

I know someone whose parents are unable to control their irritation, they are in their 50s and 60s and they will spend 5 - 10 minutes shouting at the tablet simply because it is slow, etc. I and their other friends agree that their parents are essentially emotional children in the ways that they present. It's not a happy situation for anyone in the vicinity. Part of living in this world is learning to control some of your reactions and find more beneficial and productive ways of dealing with your feelings that satisfy you, and do not hurt other people in your surroundings.

Unfortunately, my friend's parents were traumatised early in life by their own parents, and never sought help. Never saw a therapist that would help them to deal with this stress in non-harmful ways.

Anger isn't necessarily a bad thing, for example in a revolutionary sense it has been vastly productive, but when you're screaming about throwing a computer through a screen because you misclicked something or because it is slow to load, then it is childish and should be controlled, because it is unpleasant for everyone.

CBC interview/documentary from Ideas with Paul Kennedy “Never in Anger” parts 1 and 2 -

1) https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2263114454

2) https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2263120301

leading/teaching by example. Show, don't tell. I wonder though what selection pressure made for anger to be a non-beneficial trait in the Inuit society. In our typical society anger, while definitely not always, is a beneficial trait frequently and sufficiently enough to be practiced by many. It seems that in Inuit society anger is almost never a beneficial trait and thus is actively suppressed (so behavioral adaptation while curiously not fully selected out at biological level - probably the key here is "to control anger" in the sense of being in control, not eliminating completely, so that means an ability to deploy only when needed in a very controlled/measured/managed fashion. So may be by showing no anger while it is clearly supposed be there the Inuit parents teach not a "no anger" (which would be a lie as the other commenters pointed out), and instead they teach of how to be a master of your anger instead of a slave to it).

Harsh enough environment that people who couldn't keep their cool probably left, or died, was my guess.

I always find this kind of title weird.

Coming from a relatively "homogenous" (for lack of a better word) ethnicity, I think I can see a point to generalize something like "this is how X people teach their children math", but "control anger"? This seems to me a very personalized thing that varies wildly from family to family.

Why? This is the "hard skills are real, soft skills aren't" dynamic I see so often (Hello, I'm the PM in a room full of Engineers).

Your first mistake is that teaching itself is very personalized and varies wildly from family to family. If we're willing to accept the premise that there are some commonalities among families from the same culture, then how they teach social skills important to that culture would likely be at the top of the list of things that would exist

> there are some commonalities among families from the same culture

My exact point is this: I can't think of any commonalities for "(teach the kids) how to control anger", not for my culture at least. Maybe Inuit people are different.

A little necro-posty on my part, but I think this is worth mentioning:

I'm an American from a white Midwestern family born in the mid-80s. I can tell you that in my upbrining things like "time out" or being sent to my room or being forced to apologize when I hit someone were part of the techniques used to help teach me how to control my anger and be pleasant to people. From my observations, these things were being taught in school as well as reinforced at home. This is part of how my culture taught me how to control my anger.

However, I know that other people with different backgrounds may have had other punishments (physical abuse, being made to write out their feelings, etc). There are all sorts of social skills that cultures value and try to pass on. "How to behave when you're angry" is at the very top of that list.

I promise you, there are cultural differences between how you were taught to handle anger as a child and those of people raised in different backgrounds. They just don't seem novel to you. Without knowing more, I can't point to specific examples but the larger point is that cultures pass on social skills, not just language.

The article seems fairly problematic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/b0so4h/how_...

EDIT: Well this is proving to be a pretty wild ride. As far as I can tell both this post and its replies (by TheAdamAndChe and ebg13) are getting voted down, which is very surprising to me (I would've expected either/or not both).

That leads me to believe there's something wrong with my link.

Does HN know something about my link that I don't?

No offense, but "problematic" is a weasel word[1]. Based on your link, a better way to describe it is inaccurate or misleading. The link describes how intuit used to spank their children in the past, and how the studies the post is based off of were poorly designed.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weasel%20word

Any discussion of parenting and Native peoples needs to include the context of the Indian Residential Schools. The state (Canada and the US) would force Native children to attend boarding schools with restricted parental visitation rights (legally compulsory in Canada 1894-1948, and de-facto compulsory for the 20 years before and after). The schools would punish the children for 'acting Native' (wearing traditional clothing, not speaking english, etc). It was a program of forced cultural assimilation (sometimes called 'cultural genocide') which was supported by saying that Native parents were bad influences on their children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...

Any attempt to remove Native children from their parents needs to acknowledge the use of children by the government to attempt to wipe out Native culture. Around a quarter of Native children were removed from their homes in the US by child protective services and permanently placed in non-Native homes. This was such an issue that the Indian Child Welfare act requires that Native tribes and Native family have the first opportunity to claim custodianship over Native children removed from the home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Child_Welfare_Act

So for the comment you link to, I have the following objections:

- Native people were raised in government schools (until 1970) which used corporal punishment regularly. They're criticizing parenting styles which the government taught parents as kids.

- Canada and the US have a long history of removing lots of kids from Native parents. Of course Native leaders are going to care about CPS rules

- The SSC guy is completely ignoring how shitty White Canadians have treated Native people when he compares abuse rates between Inuit and "Western" (White) populations. This reeks of a long history of calling Native people "savage".

Hmmmmm now we're getting somewhere if this is the heart of the objections.

However, this seems like it's covered by

> Also, the Inuit have changed a lot recently as they get influenced by European culture (but NPR did their interview with Inuit this year, who talk as if they're describing the present).

Granted I'm sure you'd find this far too lenient in terms of phrasing, something more like "Traditional Inuit culture was both destroyed by what was effectively Western cultural and actual imperialism and retroactively viewed and criticized through a warped Western lens."

But the basic essence of that is still addressed by Scott's comment. It may not be the way things used to be, and it may not be the "fault" of the Inuits at all, nor may it even be the right perspective to view Inuit culture.

Nonetheless the empirical observations made in this article seem to be in direct opposition to multiple other sources of data we have. That seems bad. More specifically it suggests the article is suffering greatly from selection bias and its conclusions are therefore suspect.

> Nonetheless the empirical observations made in this article seem to be in direct opposition to multiple other sources of data we have. That seems bad. More specifically it suggests the article is suffering greatly from selection bias and its conclusions are therefore suspect.

Yes, the article is overly broad if you take it to mean 'all Inuit', but I don't think that's a reasonable reading of the article. This is a 'feel-good' story talking about ideals of child raising in an Inuit town. Scott objects to this narrative, so he collects negative evidence to debunk the article. He isn't picking neutral counter-evidence, he is exclusively saying that Inuit abuse their kids and each other:

- "protesting Canada's anti-child-abuse policy": this cannot be discussed without the context of history mass child-separation by the Government.

- Interviews of "how things were in the traditional old days.": This book interviewed elders in 2000, which means they grew up in the Residential School era. The white culture approved of corporal punishment at the time, and the residential schools used most corporal punishment than average. Scott is focusing just on the existence of spanking, and is ignoring the ideals the interviewees express.

> Ilisapi: Some of us tended to take out our frustration on our children when it was our husband who we were angry at. Even if the child had done nothing wrong, if he made one small mistake, we took out our frustration on him. If children were treated like that, they could be damaged. It was their spouse they were angry at in the first place but they took their frustration out on their child. That is not the way to treat a child. It is not good.

...

> Tipuula: Yes. When they are finished crying and are feeling better, that is a good time to talk to them. You need to explain the situation. Let them know you do not like spanking them but what they did required discipline. Once they understand that, they will feel closer to the mother or the father. Things are completely different today. We only reprimand our children verbally because we are not allowed to use physical discipline with our children anymore.

- "(some of these are adult abuse statistics rather than child abuse statistics, but if adult Inuit never get angry or act impulsively, why are they doing all this abusing?)": This is straight-up character assassination. This is the point which I most object to, not because the abuse statistics are wrong, but because it is being used to discredit the ideals of a community.

For anyone interested in Native American / Canadian issues, I can't recommend Kent Nerburn's "Neither Wolf nor Dog" series [1][2][3] highly enough.

The second and third books deal more directly with the boarding schools, but all three are fantastic in terms of giving a perspective that is usually left out when it comes to Native issues.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/72662.Neither_Wolf_Nor_D...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6532022-the-wolf-at-twil...

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17707906-the-girl-who-sa...

If people find this link valuable can somebody please just rephrase this comment however it's meant to be phrased and repost it so that it doesn't getting buried due to my poor wording?

It's surreal to me to see a bunch of sibling comments higher up arguing over its conclusions when the article's premise is in serious question.

I think your downvotes are entirely because you used the word “problematic” which some people feel is often used to shut down debate.

A shame, because your link pretty convincingly shows that the article’s claims about the Inuit are simply false.

dwohnitmok in response to your edit, I agree this is the issue. Your link was fantastic and adds to the conversation.

But you're getting voted down too! (Maybe not anymore?) And ebg13 is getting absolutely destroyed.

That happens on HN, it can take a while for consensus to stabilize. Then another comment can come along and destabilize the consensus.

I try not to think about votes and instead of think about the signal-to-noise ratio of my comments. As long as we all try to learn and contribute positively to the community, occasional downvoted comments are fine.

HN's gonna HN. I try not to worry too much about it.

Please don't go on about downvotes like that. It's tediously meta and breaks the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

My apologies, all the more so because this is something I dislike in comments myself.

I was genuinely surprised by this though in a way I haven't been by previous downvotes. "Everyone" so to speak were getting down votes and the only common factor I could find was the link itself, which as far as I could tell was entirely unproblematic unless it was referencing some studies which were widely acknowledged to be bad scholarship.

Regardless I'll take the humbling reminder to read the guidelines and my own comments more closely.

Appreciated! I know it sucks to get a mod reply like that.

"Problematic" is a kind word for cherry-picked, misinterpreted, hypergeneralized, and contrary to available evidence with a hefty dose of noble savage xenoromanticism thrown in.

I’m always amazed at how English speakers took some loanwords from French, then derive their meanings up to the point they became offensive (examples: problematic, oriental). The issue is that for non-English native speakers those overloads are easy to miss (and usually absent from dictionaries), and a post can be made pretty trollish accidentally.

I don't consider it offensive. I consider it vague and euphemistic.

It happens with all non-specific language. The word "problematic" is vague; it doesn't say anything about what the problems are, just that someone thinks something is wrong somehow. The only thing the reader can do given vague words is guess at what the writer meant.

Then _that_ phenomenon collides with idiomatic euphemism. Vague words become euphemisms exactly because of how vague and weak they are, weakness being basically the entire purpose of a euphemism.

IMO the first thing that people should be taught in school about writing (assuming schools bother teaching anything about writing) is that writers should always use the most concrete, specific, unambiguous words possible. But we don't learn that, so the world doesn't communicate that way, and so the world falls apart.

It is noa names, like eg. bear or how characters in HP speak about Voldemort. An old superstitious concept.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa-name

We have so much french in this language. Ever wonder why it's called a "vending machine"? Look up the french verb for "to sell"

It's everywhere. English usually has a competing french and German derived word for each experience.

Yes and even some like factory that sounds totally English actually come from French too. One day I’ll work harder on my French language merhod for English speakers that is based on cognates. There is so much that can be shortcuted with little etymology thrown in.

That is indeed a problematic point, for non native speakers.

You can witness something similar in many rural areas, specifically where people are surviving off the land. Rarely does mother nature or anything else cooperate with plans or expectations. People just get used to it and develop a very workmanlike attitude.

I had to read the title a couple times to make sense of it. I was reading "Intuit Parents", thinking it was some new product...

Highly counterinuitive.

> Winter temperatures could easily dip below minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit

Trivia: you can omit "Fahrenheit" after -40 without introducing ambiguity. -40 F == -40 C. (You can assume it is not K or Ra because those place their 0 points at absolute zero so -40 K or -40 Ra is not possible).

You _can_ omit it, but why would you?

And it absolutely introduces ambiguity for those who don't happen to know where these scales are equal.

Just to add some clarification, this only works at -40.

-44F is -42.2222C.

Kelvin is only used without "degree" or °. So -40°C would be 233K.

That's clever, but you're going to confuse readers and interrupt the flow of the article if you omit a unit where people expect one.

Hence "Trivia".

Could be degrees Reaumur though.

it's funny how the world works

> a Harvard graduate student made a landmark discovery about the nature of human anger.

the article doesn't credit the inuits with the discovery.

> By contrast, Briggs seemed like a wild child, even though she was trying very hard to control her anger. "My ways were so much cruder, less considerate and more impulsive," she told the CBC. "[I was] often impulsive in an antisocial sort of way. I would sulk or I would snap or I would do something that they never did."

but instead credits Briggs, who is the one exhibiting primitive behavior and being exposed to the higher path

This comment doesn't seem to be made in good faith and seems to be looking to take offense. It's reasonably clear here that "discovery" is relative to the society Briggs is from. The people who cared for Briggs made a discovery (whether on their own or through a different nation themselves), and Briggs' people ("westerners" to use a simple descriptor) made the discovery through Brigg's experiences.

Discovered is not reasonably understood as "discovered for the first time by a human". For all we know the Inuit tribe themselves only discovered their techniques from another nation.

Does not seam to work very well either:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/23/canada-indigen...

Do you have any evidence that those murders occur _within_ their communities by people raised like this?

>Do you have any evidence that those murders occur _within_ their communities by people raised like this?

No, do you have any evidence that they are NOT raised like this?

Many adult Canadian Inuit are from a time when they were forcibly removed from their families and raised in residential schools which applied corporal punishment liberally, and sexually abused many of them. Christians routinely complained that the natives refused to beat their children, and couldn't be trusted to raise their children 'properly'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...

How about an electric chair? https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/st-anne-residential...

https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-people...

https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_sc...

The Inuit are around 4% of Canada's Indigenous population, so I'd be surprised if many of the people committing those murders were raised with this particular traditional Inuit anger-management strategy.

"Inuit make up only 5% of Canada’s population, but in 2018 they made up 22% of the country’s homicide victims."

>so I'd be surprised if many of the people committing those murders were raised with this particular traditional Inuit anger-management strategy.

So what do you wanna really say with that?

You changed the meaning in your quote: "First Nations, Métis and Inuit make up only 5% of Canada’s population, but in 2018 they made up 22% of the country’s homicide victims."

There's a massive inferential gap between Inuit children in the 1960s being taught to control their anger like this and Indigenous people being murdered now.

- How common are these parenting techniques across Indigenous populations?

- What sorts of people are committing those murders? Why?

You brought up the murder rate to claim that this "Does not seam to work very well", but linking this one method of teaching Inuit children emotional regulation to Indigenous murders is a big stretch in many different ways.

There are many issues these populations face, but it's unlikely that many of them stem from any particularly good (emotional regulation?) or bad (spanking?) parenting technique used on 3 year olds.

The article you linked talks about indigenous people being murdered, not committing murders.

So what do you wanna really say with that?

Murdered by white Canadian males...that's what you wanna say?

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ppvx8g/a-closer-look-at-n...

That article doesn't support your claim that this parenting style doesn't work, if anything, it refutes it:

> Nunavut has the highest per-capita murder rate in the country, but statistics can be misleading.

> Nunavut is in line with the national Homicide Survey: a large percentage of murders are committed when the assailant is under the influence of alcohol.

> if you took another area similar in housing shortages and alcoholism, you would have a similar crime rate.

> "It's a little unfair to look at Nunavut and the crime rate that it has and sort of assume that it's all Nunavut's fault," he said.

The geographic and economic uniqueness of Nunavut are gigantic uncontrolled variables in your assertion that the cultural correlation is causation.

>your claim that this parenting style doesn't work, if anything, it refutes it:

What claim?

But this is what we have ATM:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/23/canada-indigen...

Your parent comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23930146

That's not a claim but rather questioning the efficiency.

But sure it's not that easy, if you destroy one's culture, trow them into another world and let them barely "survive" other factor's play into the hole thing.

You have to know there is a huge difference between showing and managing your initial anger response, and plotting a murder.

>managing your initial anger response

And whats with long term anger response?

Inuit people have terrible life outcomes with disease, alcoholism, and suicide, and while there might be a lot of reasons for this, I would still take any of their examples with a grain of salt.

Yeah it’s not great for your society when you’ve been conquered.

That's only because they have been dominated by Western culture.

Remember that they have prospered for thousands of years in a difficult environment, where everyone needs to help each other and you have to get along if the tribe is to survive.

Look up vikings in Greenland about outcomes in that kind of environment with differing mores.

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