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Comment by burntoutfire | Hacker News Reader

> First one is that a major part of this learning experience is emotional, not just technical. You’re not just teaching your child to wash the dishes, you’re also teaching them how to feel about washing the dishes. If you act like chores are something to be avoided, your kids will learn that from you. If you resent your kids not helping, they’ll learn that too.

That really works! When my friend was a kid, his older sister pretended that vacuuming the apartment (something she was made to do by the parents) was the coolest thing in the world. As a result, my friend was dying to take the vacuum from her and do the job himself.

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When my daughters were young I introduced sardines as desert. When we would go out to the swimming pool and friends' parents would suggest ice cream, by daughters would ask if I brought sardines.

Think about how much of our preferences, be them food, politics, or religion, are learned. We absolutely could have a peaceful, productive society, if we just started teaching it properly at a young age. I do believe that the popular media has a large part to play in that.

When I was a child, I was allergic to a whole bunch of things, one of them being sweets. But I wasn't allergic to apples, carrots and blackberries, so those were given to me in place of sweets. Now in adulthood blackberries are my favourite snack, followed by apples, and I'm not a huge fan of sweets.

Were you really allergic to sweets or did your parents tell you that to control your behavior? in the context of this thread, that sounds like what some parents would do, and your last sentence implies that you can actually eat them.

I was really allergic. I was born with a sick gastrointestinal tract. After 7 years it was cured with a short relapse some years later.

What ingredient in sweets were you allergic to?

Depended on the sweets. There was a whole bunch of allergies I don't even remember now. My whole gastrointestinal tract was perpetually sick (since birth), I would visit the hospital basically everyday. Most notably, I couldn't eat chocolate, because I was lactose- and gluten-intolerant. So I couldn't eat any sweets which had any chocolate in them, no sweets which were pastry-based etc.

Tangentially, in those times avoiding gluten wasn't as fashionable as it is today, and so there wasn't really any gluten-free bread to buy. My mum would bake bread herself for that purpose, because otherwise I wouldn't even be able to eat bread.

> I couldn't eat chocolate, because I was lactose- and gluten-intolerant

I have to call you out on this, I eat a lot of dark chocolate - it has absolutely no lactose nor gluten.

Yes, milk chocolate has lactose, that's kind of in the name. For chocolate to contain gluten it'd have to contain cookies, pretzels, crispy things.

Yes. I was talking about milk chocolate. I didn't even know there was something like "dark chocolate" at that age. Incidentally, now I prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate by and large.

I mentioned gluten not in relation to chocolate, but to other sweets that do contain gluten, but also have chocolate.

Ok fair, I also didn't know there were other types of chocolate when I was little :)

My parents called green beens "green french fries" when I was younger. To this day they are still one of my favorite vegetables.

I used to hate green beans. Then one day my parents said "you'll like these, they're barbecued beans." After I allowed that they were actually pretty good, they revealed they were just regular green beans but they'd accidentally burned them. Next time we had green beans I had to admit they tasted a lot like the barbecue version.

> That suppressed smile worries me.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/05/06/

The Tom Sawyer method?

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