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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

> Parents are supposed to teach their children the skills they need to navigate the world. This already feels somewhat obsolete - where are the Google programmers who were taught Python by their fathers, or the Instagram influencers who learned content creation on their mother’s knee? Soon it will be completely hopeless. Where we’re going there are no roads.

This was a clear presentation of a thought that has bothered me a lot. It's easy for me to get engaged and keep teaching my children specific techniques, so I have to occasionally stop and remind myself to teach them things like falsification, self-monitoring, incorporating feedback, noise filtering, pattern recognition, and other meta-skills that they can use to build far more skills than I could ever teach them.

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The skills I try to instill in my kids are things like: empathy, self-regulation, effective communication, personal boundaries, autonomous decision making, high-level planning, and the basics of adulting. The biggest one I think is adapting to change, because their world will be even more mercurial than the one we are navigating now.

I’m an expert software developer but have not spent time teaching these skills to my 10 year old son. He can get that from literally a hundred other places, and while I am a decent teacher, I’d rather spend our time together focusing on the things I place value on that I don’t think he is likely to get through other sources. I sometimes feel like a full-time therapist for my 12 year old daughter, what good is another A on her middle school report card when she is doing herself in trying to mold herself to meet others’ expectations? She needs an advocate more than a trade skill.

Great point! I guess I haven't thought of some of those things as teaching, but you're right about their importance.

Communication and emotional awareness in particular are two areas where I have had to grow immensely myself first in order to be a useful guide to my children.

I disagree with the premise of the quote. Parents are tasked with instilling the VALUES needed to successfully navigating the world. Knowing when to persist and when to quit an endeavor is a values-based calculation, not a skill. Yet it is incredibly important to know.

Instill values. The skills will come naturally.

Thank you for this comment. I very much appreciate your and flatline’s take on parenting

You don't have to teach them any of those things, you just have to live them. They're smart, they'll figure it out.

Looking at many of the adults around me, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that these are things that don't come naturally to most people.

When it comes to influencing, that stuff really does get passed from parent to child in the form of family blogging. Especially because there’s no legality around it yet, you’re free to teach your child from infancy to attract attention in front of the camera from anonymous strangers.

Well that's my point. People learn character and wisdom by being shown, not being taught, and nobody was showing them.

I see your point and disagree a little less. I still think (and the Oxford Handbook of Expertise backs me up here) most people benefit from active instruction. If nothing else because it gives them a language in which they can discuss the skill with other people. Very helpful when one desires feedback.

I guess I think that that's true for skills, but not for aspects of character, and at some level skills like "incorporating feedback"... are really more like "virtues" than "skills"? And things like "noise filtering" and "pattern recognition" are sorta in a grey area between the two. Like, yes, at some level, pattern-recognition is a skill, but to actually learn to do it comes from (a) seeing somebody else do it well and realizing what's possible and (b) being corrected when you mess it up. In either case it's more of something that a good teacher shows instead of teaches. An academic lecture on pattern recognition wouldn't do much; one learns it from going out and engaging with the world and learning from their initially-naive mistakes.

Somewhat related example from my life: you can take as many piano lessons as you want, but there's really no substitute for hearing someone play music that moves you and trying to figure out how to recreate that feeling. Many students of piano have never had that experience and as a result piano lessons will simply never work on them.

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