How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)
npr.org
npr.org
Her response was "bite this little bastard back."
I've spent decades untangling our Love. RIP, Mom.
The only part I wonder about is the "playful" storytelling. There are definitely better ways to communicate danger to a child than the boogeyman. It will take a lot more effort than a silly story, but you're trying to build up their mind after all.
Why do you say that?
"If you go into the water you will die." Death is pretty abstract to a toddler. Even extreme pain - they've never been hurt in any serious way.
"If you go into the water you will be grabbed by a monster and taken away." It's all concepts a toddler is very familiar with.
One of the authors, Michaeleen Doucleff, also wrote a book called Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans. It's interesting, and has some useful points to think about while parenting. However, I felt that a lot of the concepts would be difficult to apply in the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) society I live in. The author acknowledges this, of course.
Who says anger is always wrong? Or that not exposing children to it is better? Screaming at somebody can be a valid excalation in a conflict, signaling serious aggression and that worse is to come if the offending party does not cease.
Yelling can be stupid and worse than useless. People can lose their temper too often or when they do not have a chence to win an escalated conflict. But an extreme does not justify the other (never doing it).
Also kids are kids. Sometimes they will not accept any calm argumentation no matter what. And shocking them into submission with verbal aggression will. Again, this can be over used by some parents.
There are no shortcuts and no recipes. Never doing something or always doing some other thing does not work.
anger is outward frustration in response to something not yielding to your will.
before you can control, your arrows, or your rifle, or the small parts of your world, you have to control yourself, and know your place. you can be smarter than a hatchet, or a wet campfire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commi...
> In June 2015, the TRC released an executive summary of its findings along with 94 "calls to action" regarding reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous Peoples. The commission officially concluded in December 2015 with the publication of a multi-volume final report that concluded the school system amounted to cultural genocide. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which opened at the University of Manitoba in November 2015, is an archival repository home to the research, documents, and testimony collected during the course of the TRC's operation.
https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060...
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It is a LONG, deep, and dark rabbit hole to dig through those documents that takes you through places such as undocumented graveyards behind schools. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/stó-lō-natio...
Specifically regarding the Inuit resettlement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation
And, in the end, the conclusion of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission was unambiguous: “Children were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world.”
From the 1880s through the 1990s, the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 Indigenous children from their homes and sent them t o residential schools to assimilate them. Their languages and religious and cultural practices were banned, sometimes using violence. It was, the commission reported in 2015, a system of “cultural genocide.”
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Should that not be taken at face value?
Many indigenous wanted their kids to go to these schools
There was abuse in the school system everywhere and it seems like catholic schooling has been sexually abusive everywhere
Rural canada was extremely poor
Viruses like influenza ravaged everyone
The media reporting on the matter makes it seem like everything bad of the past was exclusively done to indigenous when it was a combination of life sucking for everyone and then it being a bit worse to the indigenous on top of that. But painting it as this extreme injustice to indigenous is misleading IMO. To say nothing of the extreme grifting and people looking for payouts from the government that only make the lives of the indigenous worse.
"Life sucking for everyone" is not equal to the government of the day targeting a racial group for the multiple negative policies that were enacted. What level of injustice do you ascribe to taking children away from families if not extreme?
For a bit more background, see my other reply here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39256850
But I wanted to address this idea that somehow it's alright because the parents were ok with it.
My grandparents sent their children to this school partly because they couldn't afford to feed them and partly because my grandfather (a white man) wanted them there. My mother used to tell me stories of my grandmother going out into the woods and picking berries and hunting just to feed them.
Don't mistake a family sending their children to these schools for responsibility for what happened there or condoning it.
I live in the US, but my mother went to what is known as a boarding school for native americans. They were beaten and raped, my mother got married at 15 just to get away from it all.
They would do things like lock the kids outside during the winter just for using their native language.
So while I don't know the specifics of this case, I also don't find it at all surprising.
And what makes it worse is that the man who ran that school got a humanitarian award years later. I remember it because it was announced a few weeks before one of our family reunions (I have a huge family, grandmother had 19 children) and the anger amongst all of the older family members was palpable. This man raped my mother.
I recently attended the funeral of an aunt (roughly 3 years ago) and met a woman who told me she tried to do research on the specific school my family went to. They've torn the school down and apparently you can hardly find any documentation on the school itself. The woman told me when she started trying to dig deeper into it she started getting death threats.
People who don't believe this kind of stuff happens don't live in reality (charmed life). I grew up hearing stories of them putting kids into communal showers, telling them to soap up, and then inspecting them. If they weren't white enough they'd get strapped while under the water.
I could go on and on with the stories I grew up with (not just from my mother either).
The chapter "The Big Red Apples" (Apples are not native to North America - the sweet red apples were shown as a temptation of "out east, these grow everywhere") and the section "The School Days of an Indian Girl" doesn't describe a joyous parent sending their children away to schools. The promises that were made and the reality that was experienced were very far apart from each other. Some saw it as a debt to be paid as part of the exchange for land and living it on a reservation - but that would be exacted again upon the children that went to those schools.
... And as this was intended for children, reality was likely much harsher than described (though what is described and the outcome is bad enough in its own right).
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"Mother, ask them if little girls may have all the red apples they want, when they go East," I whispered aloud, in my excitement.
The interpreter heard me, and answered: "Yes, little girl, the nice red apples are for those who pick them; and you will have a ride on the iron horse if you go with these good people."
I had never seen a train, and he knew it.
"Mother, I am going East! I like big red apples, and I want to ride on the iron horse! Mother, say yes!" I pleaded.
My mother said nothing. The missionaries waited in silence; and my eyes began to blur with tears, though I struggled to choke them back. The corners of my mouth twitched, and my mother saw me.
"I am not ready to give you any word," she said to them. "Tomorrow I shall send you my answer by my son."
With this they left us. Alone with my mother, I yielded to my tears, and cried aloud, shaking my head so as not to hear what she was saying to me. This was the first time I had ever been so unwilling to give up my own desire that I refused to hearken to my mother's voice.
There was a solemn silence in our home that night. Before I went to bed I begged the Great Spirit to make my mother willing I should go with the missionaries.
The next morning came, and my mother called me to her side. "My daughter, do you still persist in wishing to leave your mother?" she asked.
"Oh, mother, it is not that I wish to leave you, but I want to see the wonderful Eastern land," I answered.
My dear old aunt came to our house that morning, and I heard her say, "Let her try it."
I hoped that, as usual, my aunt was pleading on my side. My brother Dawée came for mother's decision. I dropped my play, and crept close to my aunt.
"Yes, Dawée, my daughter, though she does not understand what it all means, is anxious to go. She will need an education when she is grown, for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and many more palefaces. This tearing her away, so young, from her mother is necessary, if I would have her an educated woman. The palefaces, who owe us a large debt for stolen lands, have begun to pay a tardy justice in offering some education to our children. But I know my daughter must suffer keenly in this experiment. For her sake, I dread to tell you my reply to the missionaries. Go, tell them that they may take my little daughter, and that the Great Spirit shall not fail to reward them according to their hearts."
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From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitkala-Sa
> Zitkala-Ša attended the school for three years until 1887. She later wrote about this period in her work, The School Days of an Indian Girl. She described the deep misery of having her heritage stripped away when she was forced to pray as a Quaker and to cut her traditionally long hair. By contrast, she took joy in learning to read, write, and play the violin.
> In 1887, Zitkala-Ša returned to the Yankton Reservation to live with her mother. She spent three years there. She was dismayed to realize that, while she still longed for the native Yankton traditions, she no longer fully belonged to them. Besides, she thought that many on the reservation were conforming to the dominant white culture.
... and you have a first person account of the stripping away of cultural identity.
The Canadian government forced Inuit families to settle in towns primarily for administrative and political reasons. This policy, known as the High Arctic relocation, was implemented during the Cold War for sovereignty and security purposes, as well as to assert Canada's presence in the Arctic. The government believed that by relocating the Inuit, it could strengthen Canadian sovereignty in the North. However, this forced relocation had devastating consequences for the Inuit, leading to social, economic, and cultural disruptions. While the government has issued an apology and provided some compensation, the overall impact of the forced settlement on the Inuit community has been largely negative. The Inuit were separated from their traditional way of life, which had sustained them for centuries, and faced significant challenges in adapting to a more urban lifestyle. This has resulted in intergenerational trauma and loss of traditional knowledge and practices.
The Canadian government has since recognized the inherent right of Inuit to self-determination and has been working with Inuit organizations to address the impacts of the forced relocations. Various land claims agreements have been signed, granting title to certain blocks of land to the Inuit. Additionally, initiatives such as the Inuit Child First Initiative have been introduced to support Inuit communities. However, the long-term effects of the forced settlement policy continue to be felt, and efforts to address its legacy are ongoing.
In conclusion, while the forced settlement of Inuit families was driven by political and administrative motives, it has had detrimental effects on the Inuit community. The Canadian government has taken steps to acknowledge and address these impacts, but the overall outcome of the forced relocation policy has been largely negative for the Inuit. Ongoing efforts are being made to support Inuit self-determination and address the legacy of the forced relocations.
Start with a search for the phrase "Killing the indian in the child". That is a deep dive into darkness.
1) Forceful re-adoptions where the government would take kids from Inuit parents and give them to white parents.
2) Residential schools where they would forcefully take a child and send them away from their parents and not allow them to speak their native language or even dress in their native clothes. Someone else mentioned the "graveyards behind schools".
it's now rightly called cultural genocide.
How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28567973 - Sept 2021 (33 comments)
How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23927773 - July 2020 (134 comments)
How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19396563 - March 2019 (251 comments)
I vaguely recall other related threads on this if anyone can find them!
I assume as the kid is showing a good grasp on identifying his emotions.
Yet southern populations of people always have reputations for being hotheaded, but northerners (stoic scandinavians) have the opposite.
It could be this one trick you click, but it could also be rapacious evolutionary and social evolutionary pressure imposed by nature.
Sometimes I wonder if the typical Hollywood W-plot, in which the hero's best friend/significant relation is shown partying/getting the girl/otherwise living well at the top of the middle ∧ then killed by the villain at the bottom of the right ∨, after which the hero gets angry and wins the day, has been deliberately chosen to teach the proles exactly the wrong lesson, but then I remember to never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Speaking of storytelling, isn't a corollary of The Iliad that if Achilles had not been —or at least not stayed— angry, a few dozen ships worth of Achaeans would not have died (as described by Homer with lines worthy of 1975's Rollerball) in gruesome ways?
[0] is it useful for creatures that only have a limbic system? not only do we have a neocortex, but it's much more useful in these cases
[1] often simply continuing to live well oneself is far better than any revenge
The better solution is to not care why, and do what ya gotta do. Usually that's creating distance from the source of problems and you and your work.
Also, they are often connected. People who don't know something often refuse to learn it or even to hear about it. Not knowing something is stupidity, but refusing to learn is a conscious decision to be stupid in harmful ways, and that is a form of malice.
Understanding your anger and not letting it control your behaviour (ie not giving in to blind rage), is important. But there are no useless emotions, and of all the “negative” emotions, anger is among the most useful and important.
I don't think that's true. Anger, by definition, is a primal/emotional response that leads people to act abruptly without any semblance of reflection on the potential impact of their actions.
The expressions "acted in anger" does not mean "acted with courage to do what needed to be done". It actually means someone screwed up badly without thinking things through.
Getting angry is renowned for leading people to do very stupid things that they would otherwise never do, because even themselves are fully aware it's stuff only an idiot would do.
> That it is still up to the human being with a fully functional brain to figure out whether or not to use that energy (and, if yes, what exactly to do with it) doesn't change that fact.
The original claim was "do what needs to be done" and now you backtracked to claim that instead the idiot who gets angry needs to control himself to not do stupid stuff that angry people do. What point do you think you're making?
> The original claim was "do what needs to be done" and now you backtracked to claim that instead the idiot who gets angry needs to control himself to not do stupid stuff that angry people do.
The original claim (not by me, mind you) was that "When we witness injustice, when our loved ones are threatened or harmed, when someone treats us with contempt or disrespect, anger is our signal that we must take action, and it gives us the energy and courage to do what must be done."
Again, I don't know how else to tell you that this is a plain fact. This is something that anybody with even a surface-level understanding of neuroscience and psychology should know. Fear and anger are both emotions that are triggered by perceived danger/threats and that prepare a person to respond to said danger. Pointing out that it is still up to you as a person to choose when and how to use that elevated state of readiness is not "backtracking", it is basic emotional intelligence. If you aren't able to regulate your emotions - all of them, not just the ones labelled negative - then that's on you, not on the sheer existence of your limbic system.
But then again I can see how this would be a confusing concept for anyone stuck in an "anger = bad" thought-terminating loop.
(b) That an adrenaline dump provokes a significant boost in cardiovascular performance is true. We are neither fighting anachronistic saber-toothed tigers, nor are we in the wild west, we are in civilised countries in the 21st century. When should improved cardiovascular performance improve any outcomes?
And, again, if you don't have the emotional regulation to not fly off the handle at things that aren't actually dangerous or threatening, that's a you problem not a problem with the existence of your limbic system.
To be explicit: had I acted out of anger, I might've tried to fight the guy, and (especially if he had had friends), it would not have ended well. Having instead used my neocortex: his initial advantage lay in choosing the time, manner, and place; time there was nothing to be done about; manner I negated by switching first to grappling, then to grappling in a situation where I had the cardiovascular advantage; and place I negated by moving to a location where there were other people.
(in retrospect, if I'd just not tried to shortcut through an alleyway at night in a strange city, I would never even have had to make use of my normal cardiovascular capacity)
When was the last time you faced a threat of violence for which increased cardiovascular performance improved the outcome?
I agree with the other poster anger and other extreme emotions are usually negatively correlated with long term success. Extreme emotions engages our primal brain which prevents our more advanced brain from engaging.
That's simply a fancy label for a particular kind of anger, as one might be able to tell from the literal definition of outrage: an extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation.
In my opinion there are few things quite as pathetic as people who twist themselves into pretzels to avoid acknowledging their emotions for what they are. Certain emotions are "bad" (anger, jealousy, etc), and so instead of addressing it when they feel those things, they just convince themselves that they aren't actually feeling them at all and that their reactions are driven by some higher logic or nobler emotion - all while still inflicting their emotional fallout on those around them.
Just call the emotions what they are, accept them in the form of not dressing them up and putting some spin on them to make people feel better about themselves (and ultimately dance around the actual emotion, via forms of denial, bypassing, etc.). And once you accept them for the simple, unadorned, and sometimes unflattering things that they are, you can then process them, and decide via understanding the root causes, contexts, and triggers, to then map out decision trees for how to respond to those feelings and emotions as the best course of action.
And like you mentioned, if you don't address the actual emotions and try to pretty them up, you're gonna leak out the actual emotions sideways, and cause unnecessary strain to those around you, and ultimately place your burden of being responsible for your emotions on others, and most likely throw up a big stink (in the form of projection, more denial, more bypassing, etc.).
Emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and responsibility are very difficult but necessary things, and they often times are unflattering. But like also many other things, there's no shortcuts to learning how to manage and deal with them in real situations with real stakes.
I very much agree with your overall point. But it's literally the opposite of pathetic to elide one's own pathos. I'm actually a bit sad that such as useful word as "pathetic" was literally reversed in meaning to become a disparaging epithet.
All personality types have their own blindspots.
...a rather important part of the overall point is precisely that the people in question are not elid[ing their] own pathos.
That's not how that works.
Moral outrage is when I'm pissed off at someone else bc they don't fit my preconceived idea of how people ought to live or behave - it's not real anger, especially not in 2024.
Being pissed off bc of injustice to my family - that is for sure actual anger.
But historically when they did not result in negative long term success, they paid off big time.
Anger is not an extreme emotion. It's used all of the time to good purpose. You're thinking about rage. If the "other poster" failed to make this distinction then it's really important to make it now so that we don't start strawmanning or ad homineming based on a misunderstanding.
Personally Joy has been an extreme emotion that has done me bad. As when I experience Joy I start to stop paying attention. On one occasion I suffered a broken bone because of it.
A while ago I had a loved one both harmed and threatened.
I called my insurance, who gave me a lawyer, who got the facts from my loved one and combined them with the law, giving the case to a judge, who gave us a court order which allowed us to both (a) remedy the harm, and (b) get law enforcement backup. For this outcome, very little energy, and no courage (at least on our parts), was required.
How would anger —or even moral outrage— have improved the situation?
But let's suppose that the same situation unfolded, except you were Black, and the treatment you received by the legal system was rude and dismissive in ways that you were familiar with, having experienced racism many times before. In that situation you might experience much more anger, and you might rely on that anger to give you the courage and energy to deal with the injustice you were experiencing.
If at any point the chain of actions had broken down, anger would have granted the motivation to pursue through the roadblock.
You do understand that this very system implicitly disadvantages those who do not have such straightforward access to it, right?
Justice is depicted as blind in statuary for a reason.
Edit: upon reflection, even in the Old Country, where accessibility to the law is debatable, anger doesn't seem useful. Either someone has the power to gain remedy by extralegal means or they do not, and whether they are angry or not when they make that attempt has little —despite movie plots— to do with the actual state of their power.
(in fact the latter rash attempts are likely to be advantageous for one's adversary, hence the original "hollywood for proles" conspiracy theoretic hypothesis given above)
Here's a decent article on the anger spectrum: https://psychology.tips/levels-of-anger/
It uses five degrees of anger (one could easily quibble, and add or subtract, based on general or personal ideas of anger): Irritation, Frustration, Resentment, Rage, and Hatred.
Ask how anyone would be motivated to gain a legal or extralegal remedy if not feeling at the very least irritation.
It's a serious mistake to only equate anger to rage or hatred.
> Impaired Decision Making: When consumed by anger, rational thinking tends to take a backseat which could result in poor decision making.
(In fact, because my major interest is in good decision making despite high adrenaline levels, I lump Irritation, Frustration, and Resentment into a boring Dissatisfaction; I can appreciate that distinguishing these as well as linking them to the highly-limbic expressions of anger would be useful for people who are discussing non-adrenalised states, but for me the non-adrenalised/adrenalised boundary yields a clear qualitative distinction between dissatisfaction and anger)
I guess it might help if natural language agreed on emotional ranges at least to the extent that it agrees on colour names...
I'm not overly familiar with this part of psychology, but I think a good distinction is between emotions and mood states. Adrenalized anger would probably be considered a mood state. I'm probably wrong about this though, as a quick search leads to distinctions between emotions, feelings, and moods. It looks like there are also "mood disorders" which seem to be extended affective complexes of particular emotions.
> I guess it might help if natural language agreed on emotional ranges at least to the extent that it agrees on colour names...
Probably the largest reason it doesn't is because while the majority of humans experience visual sensation similarly enough (white/blue dress notwithstanding), the emotions are something else entirely. We spend so much time in certain emotions compared to other people that it's like wearing colored wraparound spectacles all of the time.
(affect and mood may be well defined within a discipline, but cursory googling seems to reveal substantial interdisciplinary inconsistency)
So I am with the Inuit with this approach:
"When they're little, it doesn't help to raise your voice," she says. "It will just make your own heart rate go up."
When you meet anger with anger, the fire only goes stronger.
Children mainly learn by observing the elders. If they resolve their conflicts with anger - they will mimic it. If they see the elders being calm, that is what they will learn. And if they learn, that they will get what they want, if they throw a tantrum - then this is what they will do more in the future. Consequence is key here.
But I am very sceptical about the bad stories. They don't help I think.
What helps is channeling the anger with martial arts for example. There you can learn to feel the anger raising, after you get a hit - but not become blinded by it. You stay cool. And in control.
edit: what works best when my children have their heads hot - literally cooling them with a bit of water
If you read the Iliad as a man losing his childhood lover, everything makes sense. Many in the classical greek period took this interpretation.
I haven't seen it but I read an article where the reviewer states something like "we've got to the point it's all right for 2 guys just to make out in a series made for the masses" he said something like he was pleased to realize that.
Your comment feels like you are seeing the forest but missing the trees. Yes, Greek masculinity seems better than modern masculinity, apparently they were far more comfortable conveying and displaying the forms of affection you identified, hence the universal acceptance of their deep friendship.
OP means they were actually f*cking tho and that does change motivation for the plot and subsequent events of the story considerably - perhaps even more adequately explaining the behavior and actions of Achilles than the traditional "best bro" interpretation.
That was the specific tree in the forest OP was referring to
Agnes Callard, https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/anger-management-agnes...
The most famous example of non violence is the Independence of India. If I squint, I guess I can see the nascent US as having provided the credible threat in that case, but there was still a decade to go between independence and suez.
Edit: modulo a few exceptions, the fall of the Soviet Union was also a stunning success for non violence, and one where the credible threat wasn't explicitly invoked and isn't immediately clear. (as far as I can tell a generation came into power who decided "you know, how the System works and how we were told it worked when we were Young Pioneers have significant differences; why should we keep doing this?" and the rest is history)
And one million people died in the subsequent partition.
Edit (addendum):
> but then I remember to never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Even though there's plenty of evidence of malice in Hollywood. For an example that everyone agrees on, there's military propaganda in almost all movies and video games made about the military.
it was a typo. why mock a comment like that?
I don't understand either.
We'll point to something like this and say, "look at what this culture does that's positive!"
But if you point out something negative of a specific culture, that's taboo.
"Study indicates better anger control in populations that club baby seals!"
> But if you point out something negative of a specific culture, that's taboo.
But surely the mistake there is in the second practice, not the first one.
What I can't do is square this with my own observations of the current generation of parents. In my particular social and geographic circle, most parents tend to let the children do whatever they please. This almost produces "feral" children that can't even eat and sit properly (and I don't mean the Victorian Properly, I mean without dumping a full plate of food on their head or throwing cuttlery against the wall) or observe the basic rules of social interation.
If the "throw me the pebble" was applied to these children they would just think it would be OK to throw pebbles at strangers on the street.
What's the missing element in our society (honest question)?
Disciplining in harsh ways ain’t without downsides. Nor not disciplining at all. Pick your preferred poison?
Easier said than done, but you need to keep things simple and direct. To be blunt about it, most parents aren't mentally mature enough to have kids.
Adolescents have a biological inclination to distance themselves from their parents. But in cultures that properly isolate and ostracize non-conformists and trouble makers, you don’t necessarily have a “rebellious” phase. (Some undoubtedly do, most don’t.)
This is not a feature of most cultures, or at least they don't remark on it.
If I were to guess, it is caused by our practice of sending kids to school.
>Jaw says Inuit parents take a pre-emptive approach and tell kids a special story about what's inside the water. "It's the sea monster," Jaw says, with a giant pouch on its back just for little kids.
>"If a child walks too close to the water, the monster will put you in his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another family," Jaw says.
i'd much rather encounter that monster than any of the sea-yokai.
There will be a transition period between realizing the story is fake, and the real reason why small people need to stay away from the water.
However, this realization will be at a point when the kids are bigger and more co-ordinated to get away from a rogue wave/whatever danger.
The other fact is that this legend is passed down from generation to generation, which is a sign that it’s effective.
Very much so. In the Pacific North West, it's sneaker waves. I got caught by one of those with my 9 or 10 year old at the time step daughter. We were walking along a rocky outcrop several feet above the wave line, and then there's just this ... surge. I found the surest footing I could, she jumped up and clung on to me, and I put one arm around her, and the other locked on to a rock so hard it made my fingers bleed. The water kept coming up, and up, and up, eventually slowing at my belt line.
That... was terrifying.
And then you have the Artic Circle. Maybe no sneaker waves, but the water temperature is around 28-29F. Immerse in that, and you're dealing with hypothermia very quickly, especially as a toddler, young child.
I'm skeptical these sorts of childhood lies cause any issues.
Why is it necessary? Why do you need to lie to your children? Teaching them that lying is "fun" is absurd, so many problems are rooted in tradition and "because I said so" or belief in mythical good and bad guys and boogiemen.
I prefer to be straight with my young kids when possible, but even I have to admit that mythical type stories carry a lot more staying power with young kids than a stern warning about real danger from their parents.
The context we have as adults about the consequences of things like death are not fully developed in young children. However, they pick up on stories and remember details of stories very clearly.
Moving important lessons into the context of stories makes them resonate more with young children. It’s as simple as that. You can also give them the real-world explanation at the same time, but the story version will almost always have better staying power in a child’s mind.
As you say, children struggle with the concept of death, as any parent who has had to explain the death of a pet to a young child will attest. Depending on age, no matter how you attempt to describe, there's always that "but they're coming back, right?"
So a good thing then?
Also, long before that, you've cultivated a tradition of believing ridiculous nonsense for which there's no easy cure or gurantee it can be remedied before it ends up creating even bigger problems
They are also not scary lies.
If you place someone who never set foot outside of a major urban center and place them in a forest, they will do a lot of stupid things that can get them killed. If you take someone who always lived in a temperate climate and place them in either subzero temperatures then they won't even know what to wear without risking at least frostbite. If you place them in a hot environment they won't even know they are risking their life with heatstroke or dehydration.
All humans, including children, live with irrational tendencies which they never become fully aware of, much less fully control.
Moreover, our hardware/software is probably many orders of magnitude better at identifying irrational patterns in others vs. ourselves.
Moreover moreover, we've all seen how nearly anyone's attempt to change those patterns in themselves happens at a glacial pace measured in decades or-- if they're lucky-- years.
So you'd better carry around a queue of recent cases where your own irrational tendencies caused you to make sizable errors in judgment. Or some kind of static analysis tools that can constantly remind you of this truism.
Otherwise, this being HN, you're going to get roped in to a discussion where the implication is that adult humans can avoid irrational tendencies by spending a few minutes reasoning our way out of them from first principles. (Well, unless the implication in the comment you're responding to is that adults should also be told and accept lies as a means to some end.)
Edit: clarification
“Inexperienced” is the wrong word. That suggests that what they lack is experiential knowledge. That’s incorrect. Instead, children and adolescents have lower capacity for acting rationally even based on the same knowledge, because the frontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...
Mixing up those two things leads you to the erroneous view that you can facilitate young people making good decisions by presenting them information to analyze and process rationally. They have lesser capacity to do that. That’s why every society has various approaches to regulating the behavior of young people, such as stories about sea monsters.
And yes, children obviously are inexperienced. It takes ALOT of sensory data to achieve general intelligence, and gathering that data (or what the kids these days call "touching grass") simply takes alot of time.
For your hypothesis even to begin to hold water, first you would have to prove that babies are fully aware of facts such diving in freezing water can cause sudden death, drowning, or hypothermia. Only then would you be in a position to even start claiming that they are not ignorant and just have poor judgement.
I bet there is a certain delicacy to telling the stories as allegories so that you can transition them from fantasy to rationality as the kid grows.
For example, the "sea monster that swallows you and brings you to another family" sounds like an allegory for "the water will drown you and bring you to the afterlife / death". If you respect your kid's intellect, I bet that you can explain that connection to them once they're getting too old to believe myths, while still holding onto the emotional connection.
I wonder if storytelling is effective due to an evolutionary pressure that leads kids who don't learn from storytelling to succumb to the dangers warned against by children's stories. I mean, there's a recurring theme in children's stories which is the character who didn't listened is also the character who falls victim and serves as a cautionary tale.
My 1 year butt checked a fireplace and got a 3rd degree burn. She understood what hot was. That heat could hurt her. Still burnt her butt when I wasn't looking and the worst part was the urgent care told me it was a common occurrence. I believe them because they guess exactly how it had happened.
My 2 year old nearly drowned. It was only a fence that stopped her from jumping into a pool when I wasn't looking. I found her right outside it after desperately wondering where she had gone. She'd been in a pool plenty of times and even knew she could sink. Didn't matter.
I can have frank discussions with my nearly 5 year old, but that was really recent. Even when she was just 4 just explaning and exposure wasn't alaays effective. It's easier to just lie for their safety.
And hell it must work because I still remember the stories my dad told me about the monster called Undertow that would carry you out to sea. I of course know it's a real thing, but I think it's telling I think of the story before the factual information and I heard the story over 25 years ago.
Thank you for pointing out a series of facts that are only obvious to those who have direct or indirect contact with children.
It boggles the mind how some naive people believe you can have nuanced conversations enumerating risks and tradeoffs with kids who are just starting to count to 10, and refuse things like changing a diaper. Some kids don't even grasp the connection between diaper rashes and not changing diapers when they are soiled, even when experiencing that multiple times.
Then it became a constant danger about them finding out the truth which we would be brutally punished if that happened because the child would throw a fit due to the abrupt change in their perception/reality and that the tried+true old control mechanism would be lost creating two stupid unnecessary new problems.
Lying lets others control you and prevents you from freely making the most sensible or appropriate decision. It gives a child control over you and handicaps your abillity to transact with them in a way that is productive and authentic.
I'm not gonna say your parent was awful for trying to protect you, I'm simply saying its trades convenience and expediency at the cost of truly dealing with issues and conflicts (assuming you have dealt with the other aspects like child-proofing as best is possible).
I fail to see how your personal anecdote refutes the facts pointed out by the OP. The only way you could possibly refute OP's point would be by proving that you can hold nuanced discussions between abstract and hypothetical risks and their tradeoffs with children who barely have any ability to express themselves.
They don't use bags, though it's always possible that that's an adaptation of the original story. It seems more likely that there is cultural variation in traditional stories.
There is no need to make it impossible for a monster to target adults. You can just say that they target children.
> At first, these stories seemed to me a bit too scary for little children. And my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them. But my opinion flipped 180 degrees after I watched my own daughter's response to similar tales — and after I learned more about humanity's intricate relationship with storytelling.
> Oral storytelling is what's known as a human universal. For tens of thousands of years, it has been a key way that parents teach children about values and how to behave.
Also, the Inuit parents don't want their little children going near the water. That the ocean is dangerous and to be avoided is the truth. The story about the sea monster is a way of communicating this truth in terms that the little children can understand.
(Calling this “lying” is like calling it lying to teach classical mechanics: to a first approximation Newton's laws of motion are true; they can be refined later. Similarly, though we can later refine the sea monster to say that it takes the form of waves and currents and depths and drowning and all that, IMO to a first approximation there is a sea monster, and in primal moments it can be useful to remember that.)
One of my favorite articles!