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Comment by rivo | Hacker News Reader

I recently witnessed a boy's first time at the hairdresser while waiting for my turn. Both his parents came with him. Long before they were called to the chair, his parents already discussed how they were going to handle this situation. (The boy likely didn't understand the details but could feel that something was up.)

When it was his turn, they immediately started telling him not to be afraid and that it wasn't going to hurt. He sat on his dad's lap, his dad holding him tight, while his mom desperately tried to deflect his attention by waving a teddy bear in front of him and non-stop talking to him. Predictably, the boy was completely terrified and cried the whole time. I'm sure it will be a long time before he can get a haircut without being scared.

It was such a missed opportunity because there are indeed so many interesting things going on at the hairdresser. I've seen other children almost fall asleep on the chair because it was all so relaxing to them. It's too bad they chose to focus on all the scary parts of the experience.

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Something in defense of the parents: they were there for their kid, both of them. And they both wanted to protect him and make sure he had a good experience. Many kids don’t even have something close to that.

Their attempt might have failed, but not for lack of good intentions and putting in the effort.

I think most parents can relate to the fact that parenting is basically being thrown in front of the wolves, and then making every mistake you can imagine in front of everyone to see. All the while having to meet societies expectations and having to endure its judgement.

It’s not easy, and we should not be harsh on anyone who makes an effort, gives it an honest shot and tries to learn from their mistakes.

Hear, and distracting children works beautifully as any parent ought to know. Not always, of course.

Agreed. Being a parent means deflect, defend and distract for 23 hours a day…

I like to think of parenting as a never-ending improv performance where the audience will judge you harshly for every mistake and one of your fellow actors is actively trying to sabotage every scene.

forwarding this comment to my friends due in 2 months

/sarcasm

> When it was his turn, they immediately started telling him not to be afraid and that it wasn't going to hurt. He sat on his dad's lap, his dad holding him tight, while his mom desperately tried to deflect his attention by waving a teddy bear in front of him and non-stop talking to him.

"Here's a glass of water. It's definitely not poison and it won't kill you. It's not going to burn your throat when you drink it. Now let me fixate you in case you start violently thrashing around. Just drink the water and think of something else. We'll get through this together, okay?"

I think anyone would freak out at this point, even if it really is just water.

"But I told you it was just water!"

When I was a child a hairdresser cut a bit of my ear. Obviously I cried at the moment, it hurt. I may have been anxious about going to get a haircut for a couple of times afterwards. But then we found another hairdresser that was absolutely marvelous with kids, and never had any issue afterwards.

It's just about how the situations are handled. The given story being a very very poor example, despite the parents having good intentions.

Every kid is so different that it really isn't fair to judge parenting techniques from a short interaction like that. Maybe they're doing it wrong, but at least consider the possibility that they know their kid better than you.

I was at a parent's evening last night. One of the other parents had to mention that Her Daughter had, in her terms, "black-outs" during tests. A lot of the other things she mentioned hinted at her being a helicopter parent, so I'm not surprised her daughter has stress related issues with tests.

For a lot of things, you just need to chill out and trivialize things. Kids will copy their parents' emotional responses, so if you worry about exams, they will. If you worry about them being afraid of hairdressers or dentists, they will be. Self-fulfilling prophecies and self-reinforcing.

I don't quite remember where I heard this and whether or not it was a joke, but a skydiving instructor told this story where his students were supposed to land on a plain empty field. But there was one tree somewhere on this field. And whenever he cautioned his students not to land on that tree, invariably, at least one student would manage to land exactly on it. When he didn't mention it, it wouldn't happen.

With children, I find it's almost always a better strategy to focus on the positive sides of an experience. Of course, it's more difficult when they're already afraid of something (maybe through their friends, a previous experience, or the parents themselves). But there are lots of blank slates and it's one of the great parts of being a parent to let them write something positive on it instead of tainting it with fear.

I heard something similar but in relations to soccer players and the goalie when taking a penalty shot: "do not hit the goalie!"

The point made was that it's impossible to not-do something, you can only do.

So when told "do not do X", the "not" disappears and it effectively translates into "do X". And so the soccer player being told not to hit the goalie ends up doing just that.

The moral of the story was to focus on what you should do, rather on what you should not do.

This. The subconcious/animal doesn't get negation, we need to translate and try to do it with our conciousness/neocortex, which is pretty weak in comparison. Wasn't there a term like ego depletion? To many Nos over a day leaving no self discipline left at the end of the day? Same goes for should/should not, but maybe worse, if you don't/do do it (which you probably will) you feel bad afterwards.

Telling what to focus on works with kids, drunks and adults.

Sounds kind of like the advice given to new drivers: look where you want to go, not at oncoming traffic. If you fixate on something, you’ll tend towards it.

Can't remember where i read this (so certainly don't take this as an absolute truth), but all movement tend to strongly follow line of sight. If you drive and look intently at an obstacle to make sure you'll avoid it... chances are you'll hit it. Skiers hitting easy-to-miss trees are frequent.

My personal theory is that if you intently focus on something to make sure you avoid it (physically or psychologically), you're naturally aiming for a near-hit: you're trying to _closely_ avoid the thing rather than missing it by a mile when not even paying attention to it

This was something that they talked about on the show Canada's Worst Driver. One of the keys to avoiding hitting obstacles on the road was to look where you want to go, not at the obstacle.

Rings true to me. Nothing more annoying when playing golf for example than someone telling you to watch out for the ditch on the right just before you hit your teeshot!

This is one of the key things I remember from when I was first learning to drive: Don't actually think about turning the steering wheel; just look to where you want to go and let the steering happen.

I also remember being told to look ahead a few hundred feet, not at the road directly in front of you. This is because you will naturally turn in a smooth arc, instead of constantly adjusting your steering every second while hunting all over the road.

It's like learning to hit a baseball (at a little league level). You don't try to think about where you should swing. You just look at the ball and swing. Your mind unconsciously does the math for you.

That doesn't really work when the pitchers are throwing fast since you have to predict where to swing. But it really works for early levels of the game.

As for movement following line of site, I've felt that. I took an instructional (dual) hang glider ride and at one point the instructor told me to look right cause we were going to enter a right hand turn. And then told me to look straight now that we were going to level out.

And once it was done, he was like "great, good job". Turns out he had literally been hands off the whole time. What I had thought had been me just seeing where he was sending us, actually corresponded to my own movements making it happen.

This is often called "target fixation". The natural inclination is to head towards where you are looking - this can cause a fear driven feedback loop driving you right into an obstacle.

Supposedly, Adam and Eve were told they were free to do anything except one thing, we know what they ended up doing...

When learning to ride a motorcycle they taught us about target fixation [1]: looking at an object in the road and then hitting it even though you're trying to avoid it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation

I find something similar happens when mowing the lawn. When I try to mow in straight lines by pushing next to the previous row, I end up with wavy shapes. But when I fixate on a distant reference point beyond the lawn (like a rock or weed sticking up above the grass) and just walk staring at it, I end up with perfectly straight lines. It's uncanny.

This is also a trick for drawing surprisingly straight lines on paper. If you start at a point and watch where you're drawing, you'll end up with a terrible line. If, however, you start at a point, focus on your target, and move the pencil towards the target, the result is surprisingly good. Also works for circles.

It's especially a problem with motorcycles because many of your natural fear based reactions are exactly wrong for the situation.

Example: you come into a corner a little fast, see you are going a bit wide, fixate on the ditch/edge of road, get afraid and hit the brakes - which stands the bike up and drives you wide; sometimes right off the road.

The right response here is to look away from the ditch to the line you want on the other side of the lane and lean into it more. Easier said than done if you are afraid or anxious.

The effect you describe in your example is called target fixation.

> With children, I find it's almost always a better strategy to focus on the positive sides of an experience

I spent my entire childhood trying to make this clear to my parents, but I never succeeded. For a lot of people I think this is just very difficult, if not impossible.

> With children, I find it's almost always a better strategy to focus on the positive sides of an experience.

Which, according to the article, was the second step of Fred Rogers' rewriting process.

> With children, I find it's almost always a better strategy to focus on the positive sides of an experience.

I find it's a lot more complex than that. I have had that backfire where if I focus too much on the positive aspects, my kid doesn't feel that their fears are heard and understood.

Kids and emotions are complex and highly variable. There's rarely simple solutions. You kinda just have to throw your whole brain and heart at the problem and navigate it as best as you can.

So true. And not just kids, adults also can copy emotions of other people, usually of group leaders, or of those who we like. What's important is that this is happening unconsciously.

I find this incredibly mean and short-sighted. Not to mention "correlation-not-causation" etc.

Don't be that person who suggests a child developed autism because their parent was overprotective.

Some very young children just absolutely do not want to be messed with. Even brushing their hair with a soft brush can be a major struggle no matter how clever you might be at distracting, comforting, or convincing.

If you have one of these children, then you know what’s coming as soon as the hairdresser touches their hair and there isn’t much you can do about it. It’s quite reasonable to decide it’s better to let the child know what’s about to happen rather than let them be surprised. A haircut takes time. It’s not like a shot that’s over in an instant. Holding them might be the only way to prevent them from swatting the scissors away and jerking their head in an unsafe manner.

After a few unsuccessful haircut attempts, you’ll likely find yourself considering a child-bun or just allowing their vision to be impaired until they are old enough to understand better.

> They immediately started telling him not to be afraid and that it wasn't going to hurt.

Not being a parent but I can already see that they were setting themselves for a fail.

Framing!

I remember an advice I heard if you kids fall/hit themselves, laugh with them and ask them if they are ok, kiss the bobo etc. But dont act like they got hit by the car , they will cry as kids can read feeling and will adjust their reaction to your reaction.

Framing is very important when talking to anyone really, saying just 'the right' things might even have the opposite effect.

I am a parent, and honestly you just have to read the individual kid. Just like people of any age, kids react to things in their own ways. Some kids will get pissed if you downplay their getting hurt, others will react with horror if you play it up, some will just deal with it by themselves regardless of how you act. The best way to parent isn't to follow some preset rules, but to try to understand your child for who they are. And then be easy on yourself, because whatever you do, many times it'll be not quite right anyway!

The older I get and the more I observe children from an adult lens the more I see how much personality is packed into even very young people. You can get different reactions out of the same person but you have to tailor your approach for each one, and I think it must be the same with parenting children.

Has your view on nature versus nurture shifted since having kids? I've heard some people start to shift very heavily towards viewing people's personalities as part of their nature from birth after raising children of their own.

As a parent myself: that sort of framework tends to absolve parents from their responsibilities, so of course it appeals. "Nothing I could do about it, guv, he was always like that!" It can also be used to reinforce the sense of "talent" or "destiny" they want to (often selfishly) imbue in their spawn.

I've actually gone all the way to the other side. I see in my kids all the issues they've inherited from me and their mother, plus all the extra they get from a different environment from the ones we grew up in. I see where they diverge in attitudes, of course, but that has very clearly a lot to do with firstborn vs sibling and (increasingly, with age) their sex, rather than anything incredibly unique or innate.

> the more I see how much personality is packed into even very young people.

Before I had kids, I always assumed that babies were like undifferentiated blank slates and that they grew unique personalities over time and through experiences.

If anything, it's the exact opposite. My kids and the kids of my friends pop out of the womb with insanely huge personality variation. You don't see it at first because babies have so few visible outputs. But once they hit toddler age where they can walk and talk and do stuff, you realize each one is a complete batshit crazy wildcard.

It's only through years of socialization that they learn to mold their inner oddball into something stable and functional enough to participate in society.

This. Often times if you see a little kid fall, you’ll see them look around in bewilderment. Then if they see a horrified scared parent rushing towards them, start crying. Alternatively, if they see a smiling laughing one maybe whine a little then start laughing too.

I was always the type of kid that hid any kind of injury or pain out of fear that my parents would get worried or mad. Still am that way to this day.

> Not being a parent but I can already see that they were setting themselves for a fail.

Yeah... have some kids and then we'll see how confident you are. Young kids especially are irrational balls of emotion. Sometimes there is no winning move, but the hair needs to be cut.

I empathize. "Hey I bet that smarts! It'll go away in a second. Feeling better? Lets look at the scrape, see if we need to put a bandaid on it." My little nephew by that time is impatient to go back and play.

Parenting is pretty easy, until you're a parent.

The best parents are those without kids.

children are really different from one another (sometimes even siblings, born to the same parents only a year or 2 apart). What works for one child may not for another, it may be that they didn't handle it best but could also be that it's just a nervous child who has a hard time with such things while the child you saw falling asleep is a calm one that handles these situations better.

If you repeatedly tell someone it will not hurt, they shouldn’t be scared, project your anxiety onto them, hold them tightly (restraining them), it will not relax the person. All that is sensed by the person is that something terrible, scary and painful is going to happen. Of course the child starts to cry.

My girlfriend tells me similar stories of when small children are the first time at their dentist office and their parents behave the same as described in the parent comment. The parents are even informed on how to behave but some still can’t stop projecting their fear onto the children with their words and behavior.

I understand, and as I wrote above that may actually be the case (or part of the case) described above, but there could also be a background we're unaware of (the children's personality).

As a father of 2 little children I can tell you you're constantly being judged by people around you for for not doing good enough a job parenting - especially by people who aren't parents themselves but think they'd be much better at it. In these situations there's often a lot of background information the casual observer simply has no way of knowing.

Just saying we should maybe give the parents in the anecdote above a bit more benefit of the doubt before judging how wrong they handled the situation.

You're definitely right in that children are very different from another. In my experience, however, fear almost always comes from a previous bad experience or it transfers from other people. I've done the "first time at the hairdresser" with both of my children and they still love going there, ten years later. Back then, we took our time looking at all the tools and watching other people's hair being cut. With the permission of the hairdresser, I let them play a bit with the revolving chair. No talk about how it might hurt or anything.

In the story above, the only explanation I can think of is that the boy already had a previous bad experience with a hairdresser. (Didn't look like it but I can't be sure.) Even then, I'm not sure this was the best way to handle it.

>In my experience, however, fear almost always comes from a previous bad experience or it transfers from other people.

children with autism often react badly to hairdressers. There can be all sorts of reasons for some behavioral pattern.

If they can cope with / get used to the intense new sensory input, I imagine the same tricks would work (point out interesting things, make sure they understand what's going on so they know what to expect (but without making it an ominous future event), etc). That might require making the hairdressers' quieter or less crowded, though. (Timing your first time well is probably important; I'd aim for somebody else to watch first, but not large crowds, but it depends on the child.)

> In my experience, however, fear almost always comes from a previous bad experience or it transfers from other people.

One day, my nine-year-old child spontaneously developed acute anxiety of car rides. She had ridden in cars daily for years prior to that. Long road trips, everything no problem. And then, out of nowhere, it was a source of acute—we're talking screaming and crying meltdown—terror. There wasn't a single negative car experience that led to it.

Emotions are complex and kids are highly variable. I'm glad you got lucky with your kids and haircuts (mind don't mind them either), but not every emotional experience with kids has a simple narrative explanation.

I was mostly cold neutral in these situations, as if it was something normal. I usually casually chatted with the hairdresser (or MD, or whoever was about to do harm to my kids :)) and I could se that the child was closely observing.

If I behaved like it was normal and not a big deal, they would usually relax and there was no fuss.

It still happens, 14 and 17 years on. Of course they are independent, proud, not-like-their-parents and whatnot, but in new situations they like to glance at how we are handling the situation :)

I would also (with the young version of the kids) do something horrible, Calvin and Hobbes style - getting super exited by something, they would get excited as well, the excitement is at the top, tension is unbearable and then the big thing is that we are going to bed. I did that twice I think, I am ashamed of myself.

> I would also (with the young version of the kids) do something horrible, Calvin and Hobbes style - getting super exited by something, they would get excited as well, the excitement is at the top, tension is unbearable and then the big thing is that we are going to bed. I did that twice I think, I am ashamed of myself.

Not sure if you’re joking or not, but I do that all the time with my son to make the mundane exciting again and frame things in a new way. It’s not a let down if you can still deliver by making the ordinary thing interesting somehow.

I found the strip I had in mind :) https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/htipjs/oh_...

> I was mostly cold neutral in these situations, as if it was something normal. I usually casually chatted with the hairdresser (or MD, or whoever was about to do harm to my kids :)) and I could se that the child was closely observing.

> If I behaved like it was normal and not a big deal, they would usually relax and there was no fuss.

Humans are social animals, and the young ones learn their attitude about new situations from the leader of their pack. You can see the same behavior with dogs: meeting a new person, they'll often mirror the attitude their owner has to the new person (obviously with less fidelity than children).

Depending on the age and temperament of the child there was probably no winning move.

Some kids are terrified of loud noises. Leaf blowers, lawn mowers, whatever, will immediately set off tears and wailing. Even if they're four houses away. Other kids shrug it off like it's nothing.

Same with haircuts. My first kid handled the haircuts just fine at 2 years old. No big deal, hey I get to watch videos. Second kid was inconsolable the first four times we went - just had to get used to it.

As a father of a toddler, kids will always cry and be terrified for any thing they try for the first time (i.e. at the hairdressers). You can't always reason with the kids who don't understand anything. Kids don't look at experiences as "interesting things going on". And every kid is different so don't compare kids as if they are the same.

Maybe you also witnessed the parents first time taking a child for their first haircut.

The hair cutting experience is just scary no matter how you package the visit or the setting. Strangers with scissors and noisy devices and you did nothing wrong to be subjected to loosing your hair, even if you did, still it's your hair to keep, your head to protect. And who's the hair dresser anyway?

With kids there's no universal solution to spare the _parents_ some drama. At some age some kids want to be the boss, they'd rather be the hair dresser, cut the hair, use the tools to learn the experience. Others would just agree to watch how it's done to others then play it out, before agreeing to have it cut. Either way, some patience with a slow pace of kid's acceptance helps them figure out the why and find trust in it.

With the pandemic lockdown, I surprisingly got my "haircut" "done" by our budding home professional, with water spray bottle being the only real tool, but the plastic tools had the magic effect on my appearance in hands of this preschooler.

Next!

I've been on both ends of the child thinking that the haircut is completely fine and requires no advance notice, and a month later the same child being terrified and needing to be held down.

Honestly, with an adult you would be right, but kids are just a crapshoot.

Just got my daughter's first haircut a couple weeks ago. All smiles. I agree that the solution is to act like it isn't a big deal, kids pick up on your anxiety and are rightfully concerned. "If my big brave dad is scared, this must be really scary!"

I do the same for global warming, nuclear war and covid. What is a three year old going to do about those things, why burden them with concern they can't act upon?

Why would you blame the parents? Every kid is unique and has their own fears and perceptions of the world... Parenting isn't a one way interaction...

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