Toddlers are harsh judges of moral character
digest.bps.org.uk
digest.bps.org.uk
I think we're childlike in other ways too. There was a documentary I saw once which followed some 6 year olds around a school. They got into exactly the same kind of silly drama us grownups do: love triangles, fights, lying, groupthink, etc. Exactly as grownups do. It was hilarious, frightening and enlightening.
Sometimes we can break out of these immature tendencies of course, but it definitely requires maturity and mental energy, something I don't think anyone is capable of 100% of the time.
It is certainly drama, and at least by volume, I'd say all of the above are usually silly.
I think we all have mainly the same feelings and motivations, although obviously each species, and each line of each species, have varying proportions and defaults. The primary difference, I think, is that we can use complex speech to communicate these feelings, and use complex tools to manifest what we are motivated towards.
I think this book about training dogs has a huge wealth of actionable knowledge needed to interact with humans...because while we do have other additional complexities layered on top of this, we also still have everything in this book. And the base layers (which we share with dogs) are potentially more "powerful" and fundamental to who we are than the final complex (and fragile) layers that we've evolved only very recently.
0: http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=perfect+Sophia+yin (view in the excellent SumatraPDF or your favorite .epub reader)
yah, i couch this as 'dogs are first-order humans', feeling many of the same emotions (joy, pleasure, contentment, anger, fear, hurt, etc.) but more plainly and openly, without language (standing in for our more developed frontal lobes) as an indirection layer.
that (indirectly) leads to the notion that in the best of circumstances, you don't train (or own) a dog, you develop trust (and a relationship) with them, for which they're willing to cede their independence to your judgement, much like humans and leadership. the leader has to prove their worth to the group, not the other way around.
Also you learn the importance of self-mastery, of taking care to keep yourself in your rational side where you can provide the missing pieces, of support, creativity, steadfastness or flexibility, that the group needs for happy outcomes.
Then announces, "I teach fourth graders," by way of explaining how that worked.
She immediately rocketed up the corporate ladder. Even as a middle-aged woman with zero relevant experience and no bachelor's degree, she was put in charge of ~100 people within a few short years.
She said the same thing as you: many of her learnings about how to manage a classroom of young children also happened to apply to managing a team of full-grown adults. (She was also killer at speaking in front a group because she'd been doing it for decades in the front of a classroom.)
It's like saying humans need water at an early age, but as they grow older they can sometimes resist that temptation. Therefore thirst is a sign of immaturity.
There could be very valid game-theoretical reasons for why we evolved the way we did.
Militaries recruit young adults primarily because they’re at peak physical shape but they haven’t settled into careers yet. It would be hard to build an effective military if we recruited a bunch of middle-aged men out of desk jobs and tried to get them back in young person shape.
> When they learn rules, they are binary about them. When they learn to lie, cheat, steal, they go hog wild with it.
Your post is also quite binary, without nuance. I also have kids and haven’t seen this unilateral sociopathy at a certain age. On the contrary, kids are relatively complex emotionally and are capable of empathy from a young age. That doesn’t mean they never test the limits, but they don’t (generally) turn into lie-cheat-steal machines like you’re suggesting, nor are they completely incapable of controlling their emotional impulses. Give kids a little more credit. You haven’t completely figured them out as an adult (or maybe you forgot how frustrating it was when overconfident adults assumed the worst of you and thought they had it all figured out)
The other problem with older people is that once you stop spending your workday taking orders from a capricious bureaucracy (school) it's hard to get people to voluntarily go back. Draw whatever trope-ey parallels you want with working for an employer but private industry is very different from school and military in its level of seemingly capricious micromanagement.
A bunch of 20 or 30-somethings who've been exposed to the realities of life and how dirty the world is are probably more likely to be able to deal with the more morally questionable aspects of military service but it's not worth the other tradeoffs of working with those demographics.
Nah, there's a big difference between how much an 18 and a 26 year old will tolerate, not what they can. The reason the military wants 18 year olds is the same as why unhealthy startups want kids fresh out of college. They're too stupid to know when they can get away with asserting themselves.
> A bunch of 20 or 30-somethings who've been exposed to the realities of life and how dirty the world is are probably more likely to be able to deal with the more morally questionable aspects of military service but it's not worth the other tradeoffs of working with those demographics.
To strenuously disagree while agreeing: 20 or 30 year olds are more likely to be able to deal with the morally questionable aspects of military service, and that is an absolutely undesirable characteristic for a military. Militaries want you to deal with morally questionable situations in the way they've told you to deal with morally questionable situations. Using your own moral initiative, even resulting in a good outcome, deserves punishment. If you make a mistake in applying the rules you've been given, even resulting in a horrible outcome, you will get absolutely protected by the military.
That's the contract: try your best to do what you've been told. and we'll move heaven and earth to protect you.
As for "lie-cheat-steal machines", I've personally observed it across thousands of children. It mainly happens at 11-13 years of age, middle school in the USA. When I worked for Southland Corporation (7-11), we tried everything to keep a store adjacent to a middle school operating. Finally sold it. Kids go through earlier phases of this when they first discover lying. Each kid differently, of course.
"On the contrary, kids are relatively complex emotionally and are capable of empathy from a young age."
That's not "On the contrary". Kids are, indeed. Emotionally complex and empathetic doesn't preclude naive innocence at all.
Nonesense. First, you did not personally observed thousands of 11-13 years old.
Second, 11-13 years are pretty empathetic and already have a lot of values in them. They do lie, just like most adults do, but they don't steal and don't cheat all that much. They are already building pretty nuanced value system.
> Why do you refuse it the benefit of the doubt ?
Benefit of the doubt that parent met thousands of 11-13 years old? And all of them were stealing cheating machines?
Any school is going to have a population of those kids, and those kids are indeed a problem for nearby businesses, but that 10-20% can't be generalized to biological developmental stages.
Physical strength, stamina and agility all also plays huge role.
Military does not want you angry, military wants you to obey and be easy to control. Anger makes people less controllable. They want to you to do what you are told, anger is not important.
Good faith question for you: where did you get the knowledge about the military that you used to make that comment from?
Would you please mention some titles? Thank you.
Also, children are quicker to replace. It takes only 12 years to produce a 12 year old soldier, and war-torn countries tend to have a skewed age distribution.
2. It doesn't stop. And it's why CNN and Fox are successful. But it is how we as humans want to see the world. Suprisingly to some, neither democrats or republicans are actually evil, they just have different perspectives on the world, and probably have more in common than in disagreement.
Oof. You are right about this, and it's certainly a blind spot for a lot of "adults"
But I would steer clear of generalizing, I think a lot of people have a strong preference for stories where the lines between what's moral and not are much more blurry and where you have reversal of preferences for various characters and where the main character is somehow sketchy. I think at the acclaimed Parasite for instance.
It's relatively easy to elicit a strong emotion, but that doesn't make a story, just a news.
Surely this claim requires moral relativism, right? If women have a right to an abortion, then attempting to outlaw it outright in virtually every case is surely evil, and thus (most) Republicans are evil. If it's wrong to give people welfare or health care that they can't afford to pay for, then (most) Democrats are evil. If it's wrong to mandate vaccines, then (a handful of) Democrats are evil. If it's wrong to prohibit refugees or economic immigrants from crossing your border in search of a better life, then both Democrats and Republicans are evil to the extent that they do that. Same for drone strikes on purported terrorists.
Moral relativism is not as promising a position as most ordinary (non-religious) people believe. The majority of trained ethicists (in the field of Philosophy) are moral realists: they believe that certain things are actually right and wrong.
"Evil" sometimes connotes a special level of immorality than no one can ever reach - they'd have to be demon possessed, or act against the will of God (provided one exists), etc. But I think ordinary evil is quite banal. It's just a matter of large-scale injustices being perpetrated by ordinary people who think they're in the right, when they are not. I think it's almost certain that quite a few Republicans and Democrats are evil in this sense. I have opinions about which group is more systematically evil, but those aren't relevant to this comment.
This is a poor argument because response to it is just that that is selection bias. Those who settle on moral relativism don't become ethicists (since there's nothing much to say on that, they specialize in something else) and those who do become ethicists can't settle on moral relativism (since again, there would be nothing much to say and they'd have no job.) Or take it the other way: in order to be an ethicists, you'd have to be a moral realist. Something along these lines anyway waves hands.
This is not really true. There are plenty of different forms of relativism and plenty of philosophers who have taken a stance in ethics that is consistently anti-realist and published countless papers defending various aspects of that.
It's more or less the same argument as "all climate scientists believe in climate change because they have to or they wouldn't be able to publish anything, therefore we should discount what they say about climate change". Except in this case it's even weaker, because a significant proportion (though a minority) of ethicists take this position.
No, it just requires not calling mistakes evil unless you should have known better. And not every example where you might hurt someone is one where you should have known better.
When would that be?
However, it's not all bad. I just watched The Grinch with my three year old. Despite some of the subtle adult oriented jokes aging poorly, the characters are surprisingly nuanced.
Initially my daughter was scared of the Grinch, then she decided he was naughty (like her, she added). Soon she was asking why children were mean to him when he was little etc. There was admittedly a bit of explaining (shaving cuts etc.), but by the end of it she seemed to have a pretty solid grasp that children being mean upset him, and so he did naughty things because he was upset.
Great example:
I’m curious how punishment and corrective behavior is interpreted. Theres a lot of situations I don’t know how to handle. Recently my daughter has been spitting up juice, including on me, because she thinks it’s funny. When something like this happens I give her a light thump on the head with my finger and a stern “no, that’s bad”. But she doesn’t like it and starts crying. She then runs to her mom who then hugs her and says it will be OK. I feel like this is a lose-lose situation. She needs to learn this behavior isn’t acceptable but it makes me the bad guy and mommy the nice one.
- accept that their current behavior is probably an effective way to get what they want
- identify what they want
- get them to do something else instead which is either more productive or at least more acceptable to you
- immediately reward them by giving them lots of what they want
Repeat the last two a lot and eventually the new behavior replaces the old one. The trick is that, once learned, the old behavior is never "unlearned"...it just slowly fades away and is used less and less. But even after a very long time if the new behavior stops working, eventually they'll try the old one again. Generally you'll have infinitely more success rewarding FOR behavior, rather than giving feedback AGAINST behavior.
Growing up there is always the good cop bad cop but there needs to be lines drawn. Talk to your partner about the situation and make sure she knows this needs to be corrected so when she cries to mommy, mommy backs you up and and supports you by telling your daughter "You shouldn't spit juice on daddy. Its not nice to spit juice on people." She can still comfort her, but she has to back you. If not then good luck.
I like to think "what would I do in this situation if this were an adult?" and respond accordingly. If you hit someone for spitting in your face you'd end up in jail. Is that the behavior you want to model? I don't understand why we think it's OK to treat kids that way. Violence is violence in my book.
Edit: You MUST learn to set boundaries without violence. A lot of bad parenting stems from our own upbringing where boundaries were set with violence so we don't know how to set them in other ways. Many of us just end up not setting any boundaries at all rather than use violence which can end very very badly with a boundary-pushing child. Learn to say "no" and stick to it at least some of the time (and flex when they negotiate well). I've gotten a ton of mileage out of taking away part of TV time if they act poorly or refuse to contribute to chores.
I can recommend this book series and in particular “Positive Discipline: The First Three Years”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0804141185/
For anyone reading this, don’t get caught up by the “discipline” in the book title. The authors are against punishment.
If you want to continue “thumping” her, it may be something you want to get her consent and make it more of a game. “If you spit up you get thwack from me flicking your forehead and if you swallow I pat your belly”. Kids love games and are insanely easy to trick. Boundaries should be opted into and the rules clear ahead of time. Learning the rules should not be penalized (eg if she spits up you remind her “we agreed I’d flick your forehead if you spit up - gimme your forehead”). Imagine what your reaction would be if someone randomly thumped your forehead for breaking some kind of social norm you didn’t understand.
The best approach we've found is to progressively and predictably escalate our language and tone. Starting with a friendly "now, now" and ending with time out if she hasn't fixed her behavior. At some point along the way she usually recognizes The Voice and course corrects voluntarily without needing to be reprimanded.
As with all thing parenting, YMMV ;)
What will be OK? Spitting juice on people will never be OK. Her anger will subside yes, but I do think She needs a consistent message that doubly reinforces the immorality of her action.
I'd also state, if she goes to daycare, she may be picking up and reinforcing behaviors there, so to some extent home may need a different set of rules, lest she bring back any bad habit she finds and Mom tacitly approves it. Good cop bad cop, eh, I'd say there's no good cop who would approve of juice spitting.
But, aside from that, if you’re looking for a mental model for teaching children, I think Reinforcement Learning is highly applicable. If you consider their observation space, action space, and reward signals, you start to see that you have quite a lot of levers for helping them learn and grow.
If she goes crying to her mother, her mother should back you up.
She can have her juice back once she agrees to drink it and not spit it. If she does it again take it away for a longer time and repeat.
Physical violence is not needed, you don't treat adults that way, children are people too.
1. How parents treat/behave with kids, among themselves and others are observed and adopted or disliked by kids.
2. Bullying in schools are another one.
3. How elder kids treat the younger one.
4. Beyond that, every kid has his/her own nature and character by birth. All Siblings are different despite having same parents, same upbringing, same environment at home.
But the attention varies, youngest gets the most attention in most families.
And in many parts of the world, Sex matters too. Usually male child getting more resources.
Isn't the attention equally distributed because everybody is at one time 'youngest' ?
I think none of these are the same because "everything flows". With each child the environment changes significantly. The first child doesn't have any siblings to grow around, then it exerts huge influence on the second child, the third child brings in yet another dynamic. Parents also change a lot with each new child. So, except for twins, nothing is really the same.
I guess what I'm saying is that they might become different due to the environment necessarily changing in pretty significant ways for each of them.
Sadly I can no longer edit my original comment, since it's >=2hrs old, but hopefully this can stand as a self-correction.
The way parents interact with their first child and subsequent children is significantly different, and the added interaction between the children themselves compounds these.
It's still closer than comparing to a different family with different parents.
But we don't all have the same home environment. There are generally some years between births, and things happen in those years. Good things, bad things, and things. It'll be more pronounced if there is more time between children.
I mean, just myself: I have two siblings. One is 6 years younger, the other 11 years younger. Between me and the older of the two: My dad graduated college and got a decently stable job. My parents moved away from my mom's family, who helped take care of me while my mother worked, and moved to a small town. My mother started staying at home since the finances allowed it.
We moved yet again before my younger sibling was born: My father switched careers and made more money than before (which was rich compared to their finances while I was young and my father was in college).
All this meant that we got attention from different sorts of folks while young. Our parents had different finances: While I had poverty while young, my youngest sibling had nothing of the sort. My parents were more experienced by the time my brother was born, too. We all had different sorts of challenges which definitely affected the ways my parents communicated with us - their continuing maturity did this as well: I was born before either were 25, but my siblings after.
But what OP refers to is that kids are born with their own personality which already emerges from a very young age in the first year.
I've seen it with my kids, and also other young kids in my close environment. For instance, some are just naturally extraverted, or wild, while others are careful by nature. Some of it changes when they get older, but a lot stays the same. So yeah environment matters, but most parents I talk to agree with me kids come with their own character.
I expect parents expectations of how much they can shape their children has caused more broken adults than anything else.
The extrovert we teach control and restraint, the introvert to be ongoing and more expressive.
Especially parents of identical twins.
In the case of identical twins, their (biological) nature and nurture (upbringing) are the same or very similar, yet their innate character can be very different.
If you believe in the existence of a non-physical soul/spirit, that could be an explanation.
Ignoring changing circumstances of a family, is the environment the same?
Suppose you like sports, and get your kid a ball, but your kid likes books more, are you going to persist with the ball or get a book to read together?
If your next kid likes the ball are you going to buy more books or try more sports?
Overly simplistic but a kid is probably affecting their environment.
While I'm sure plenty does come from nurture, it's actually incredible how different they can be even before books and toys come into the picture.
> In this scenario, toddlers gazed longer when the dog went on to make an unequal sharing decision, suggesting that they still expected the puppet to be fair.
> Only when the researchers ensured that the dog engaged in three sequential acts of bullying towards the rabbit did the children’s gaze patterns suggest that they no longer expected it to act fairly in the next social interaction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History
• • •
... a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that starkly differentiate humans from their closest primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities. But then, Tomasello argues, the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities—through the new forms of sociocultural interaction they enable—into uniquely human cognition and sociality.
The first step occurs around nine months, with the emergence of joint intentionality, exercised mostly with caregiving adults. The second step occurs around three years, with the emergence of collective intentionality involving both authoritative adults, who convey cultural knowledge, and coequal peers, who elicit collaboration and communication. Finally, by age six or seven, children become responsible for self-regulating their beliefs and actions so that they comport with cultural norms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tomasello
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6389704/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5461303/
[4] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674248281
Children have a strong perception of fairness. If cookies are being handled out there better be a cookie coming your way too. If you keep this mentality going into adulthood you are most likely a psychopath.
Really? If my boss came into the break room and handed out Christmas bonuses to everyone except me, I'm a psychopath if I get pissed off?
Also, psychopaths don't react to stuff like this ... that's part of being a psychopath.
But if you feel you can demand complete fairness, then everybody else on this planet can too so why don't you give a "bonus" to someone homeless who doesn't have anything – even tough you didn't get one from your boss? That is true morale because it requires strength to exclude yourself from the equation.
Never said he did.
> But if you feel you can demand complete fairness,
Never said I did.
All I'm saying is that being pissed off that my boss was unfair doesn't make me a sociopath. Maybe immature, but even then it's, clearly, a natural response. The fact that Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $200B while people are homeless is more of an issue than how much I donate a year and also pisses me off.
Demanding that I don't have an emotional response to unfairness actually seems more sociopathic.
There's this tendency (both among self-described high-functioning psychopaths and in the media) for people to think that psychopaths are highly rational and less emotional, but it's closer to the opposite - psychopaths are impulsively driven by the present emotions.
The main sense in which they are less emotional is that they react less emotionally than normal people to how other people feel and how they themselves would feel in the future. Because empathy generally acts as a check on your present impulses in most humans, this leads to more emotional, impulsive behavior, not less.
I'm not saying psychopaths have no emotions at all, I'm saying psychopaths in general don't react to this kind of thing, unless it pays to react.
I've worked with sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists in my career; psychopaths very much do not have "emotional, impulsive behaviour". At least, not at the CEO, SVP, Chief of Surgery, etc. levels. The type of behaviour you are talking about I have seen from narcissists (NPD) and sociopaths.
You make it sound like this is selfish. The toddlers aren't expecting a favorable treatment to themselves, they expect others to be fair towards everyone else.
I'd argue the real damage happens once toddlers lose their altruistic mentality and get into the selfish competitive mentality we enforce today. Keep in mind, this only happens as a form of natural selection, as those with these traits have a better chance at survival/success in this environment.
It's fundamental to remember that better fit doesn't mean better overall. As I've read once here on HN (one of those life changing sentences that I happen to read here every once in a while), if you have a stupid environment, you get a stupid fit.
Citation needed.
As we grow up we are taught to lie, to not say the truth, and and worst to say “you look fine girl!”
Of course, their judgement of moral character is often distorted if it affects themselves. Deny them anything they want to do (like, no, we can't eat candy for dinner, or no, you can't touch the hot stove), and it can be basically as bad as the end of the world!
they tend not to be very good at it though (they may lie effortlessly but not believably), so not sure how natural something is if you suck at it.
You should spend more time around parents with young kids, then!
It's true that they're not very good at it (like, "no, the dog didn't draw on the wall"). Don't get me wrong, I love kids, I'm just pushing back on the idea that they're perfect little angels until we corrupt them by teaching them to lie or anything like that.
Sure, toddler lies are laughably naive, but they learn how to tell more convincing lies all on their own (well, by judging others' reactions, but without explicit "here's how you can lie better" wisdom). And toddlers admitting guilt without prodding and overwhelming evidence is quite rare - rarer than even in adults, I would say.