Comment by yessirwhatever | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yessirwhatever | Hacker News Reader

Well, discipline is nothing more really than a delayed gratification rule set. Kids refuse a bath usually not because they’re rebelling against themselves or the parents, but because they don’t get the concept of delayed gratification yet. You make little sacrifices in the present to ensure better future.

This is going to sound slightly harsh, and by no means it’s an invitation to stop thinking or pondering, I think it’s kind of good to be skeptical and think of possible major oversights in the way we live our life, but this kind of hairsplitting wordsmithing is useless, and possibly what is causing this person to neglect that discipline is just a helpful concept. Reading “an embarrassing amount” of self-help books is not a good sign either, but yes, the majority of that crap is just that; crap.

No one can teach you or force you to like exercise, until you do it and like it, then you understand, then you’ll probably fall off the wagon a couple of times, but at least you’ll know that you’re just being lazy, and that’s fine sometimes, but mostly you’ll have to gain experience in fighting laziness tendencies, and it’s probably harder for some people than others depending on many variables I can’t even list.

Biggest factor for people not having discipline (or not wanting to have it, not liking it, etc…) is that they want a quick solution that makes sense, where the answer is that it’s always difficult, you just have to learn to enjoy it and find ways to come to terms with it. Practice more and do it again.

The author is not rebelling against discipline, but really against the self help industry.

> Kids refuse a bath usually not because they’re rebelling against themselves or the parents, but because they don’t get the concept of delayed gratification yet

I'm confused by this thought because there _isn't_ any delayed gratification in kids taking a bath, as she said, kids love it once they're in there, and they're usually not even running their own bath if they're the age I think she's talking about, so where's the delay, walking to the bathroom? There's certainly less delay than going swimming, and kids love that too.

Getting kids into the bath, even though they like it once they're in there, and given, as she says in the article, that they've liked it before isn't a problem of delayed gratification. It's a problem of routine and requirement, of apathy and change. You have to stop whatever it is you're doing and go take a bath _every day_, my nephew absolutely loves going to the park, but if we did it every day there'd be so many days where he doesn't feel like it, even if he loves it every time he gets there.

This is exactly the point the author is making, discipline is about doing things that need doing, the question is whether it's still discipline if it's something you're doing only for your own enjoyment, and whether finding enjoyment out of things you need to do is enough.

You just answered the question yourself.

> there _isn't_ any delayed gratification in kids taking a bath, as she said, kids love it once they're in there

Keyword here is "once", kids love it _once_ they're there. The point is that -at the time when the parent is asking the kid to stop what they're doing and shower- they (don't want to / don't understand why they should / etc...) stop what they're doing. Take a look at the Stanford marshmallow experiment[1].

I don't see why it discipline can't be about both though, delayed gratification _and_ routine and requirement as you said. I'd add that routine can help (mainly for kids) in establishing a pattern where the value of delayed gratification can be harnessed.

> discipline is about doing things that need doing,

There's nothing inherent in what the word discipline means that signifies anything regarding doing what needs to be done. It's more about doing what you understand to be good for you later, even if you don't fully (or irrationally) don't want to do now, specifically if it's a small sacrifice now for a greater reward later.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

> Keyword here is "once", kids love it _once_ they're there. The point is that -at the time when the parent is asking the kid to stop what they're doing and shower- they (don't want to / don't understand why they should / etc...) stop what they're doing.

Yeah but that seems like a completely different concept from delaying though, they're not any _more_ gratified being in the bath than they would've been playing tag or whatever they were doing before. And again it doesn't apply if you make it not something regular they have to do, getting kids to change what they're doing like swapping games isn't anywhere near as hard as getting kids to swap games where one of them is a bath.

> Take a look at the Stanford marshmallow experiment[1].

I know all about the Stanford Marshmallow experiment, it's a miserable abortion of an experiment that everyone talks about like received wisdom when every attempt to repeat it's long term findings has like half the effect if you account for even the slightest confounding variables.

(Sorry I'm dunking on it so much, I had to write a paper on it during my degree, everything they found about the kids doing better in life because they could delay gratification completely disappears once you realise that the kids who could wait were just the kids who grew up with more money and never had to worry about food at all, and once you account for parental income and stability you find out the differences in life outcomes are entirely caused by familial wealth.)

Read the follow up studies section if you want to know what I'm talking about, some of the confounding variables they didn't account for include "early cognitive ability and behaviour, family background, and home environment" but also trust in the researcher, if the child had had a promise broken by an adult even _kind of_ recently they were far more likely to fail the test.

Also having read a lot of those studies for that paper, I can say that even the Wikipedia article feels a bit generous to it.

</rant>

> There's nothing inherent in what the word discipline means that signifies anything regarding doing what needs to be done. It's more about doing what you understand to be good for you later, even if you don't fully (or irrationally) don't want to do now, specifically if it's a small sacrifice now for a greater reward later.

Yeah that sounds right actually. I never thought of it like that, thank you.

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