Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

I would argue young kids are very good at logic and reasoning, but they lack self moderation controls and the context of The Real World.

For example:

Parent: "We're not going to have ice cream today."

3yo: "If we don't have ice cream today, can we have ice cream tomorrow?"

Or, more commonly:

3yo: "What if we have ice cream today and no ice cream tomorrow?"

View on HN

Or, even more commonly:

3yo: "What if we have ice cream today and ice cream tomorrow too?". Because small children know better than to constrain themselves to artificially restricted choices offered by parents.

Source: experience from navigating such negotiations for the past 1.5 year with my now almost-5 daughter.

I wish I could find the source, but I'll relay it less eloquently. Children have a remarkable ability to ask for things they know they can't have. Their innocence gives them the audacity to ask for the impossible.

This always stuck with me. I sometimes catch myself when I self-curate questions to eliminate what I "know" will be impossible.

It also has led me to sometimes just say "yes" when I get those questions, just to impart a bit of expanded possibility into their life.

I wonder if it's because the average parent is not a very sophisticated bureaucrat. We get tired and just say yes because we need to survive. As children get older and interface with more institutions that have teams of people to tell you no (or no process to even ask), we enter a learned helplessness: a no today is almost certainly a no tomorrow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com