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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

It takes longer than people tend to think before kids learn to infer things well at all, and so being explicit about causal chains tends to make kids more likely to take advice. E.g "put your coat on" might not lead the child to think it is cold, and even a "put your coat on, it's cold outside" might still not lead the child to realise that means they'll freeze without the coat. A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.

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Depends on the kid and their age.

Me to my 3.5-year-old boy after evening bath (winter here right now): Your feet are going to get cold, don't you want to put on your slippers to keep them warm?

Him: No!

And if I put them on he'll take them off as soon as I'm not stopping him from doing so.

For putting on warm enough jacket for school I try similar reasoning which has yet to work with any kind of consistency, still mostly lands up having a bit of a tantrum all the way until I hand him over to his teacher.

His two-year older sister was a lot less difficult at his age.

"If you don't put on your slippers, your toes will fall off and then you won't be able to walk like everybody else!"

Sometimes the old-world spook stories work.

I wouldn't recommend getting wrong things into their heads, because you (or someone else) will eventually have to teach them that it was not true, or they will discover it themselves, and that will undermine trust in the other things you said.

Sometimes you just need to let them experience that you are right first, as long they're just making themselves miserable for a bit.

Also, it works wonders to let them make a choice between two acceptable solutions instead of giving them space to say no.

"Do you want the slippers or the thick socks?"

It doesn't always work, but kids that age are learning to set boundaries, and giving them the illusion of agency often helps.

Have you tried asking your son if the slippers and/or the coat might be uncomfortable to him in some way? You seem to assume that he randomly throws tantrums just to annoy you, but maybe he has a reason.

I think tantrum comes when they are tired / disconnected from adult monologue. I have almost zero issues when I talk about interesting stuff instead of engaging in debate:

we will pick up that book about the monster, it is really scary (slippers on already) and we will sit on the sofa (already carrying the child). Are you cold? Let’s find that pink sweater…

> A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.

For that, parents would need time. But if we have to spend half of our day with work or work-related tasks (commute, lunch break)...

Society (or let's be real, capitalism) forces us to work unhealthy amounts of hours and then wonders why there aren't enough children and of the children that remain, they dumb down every year...

It saved me a lot of time when my son was little because it meant he argued less with me over the necessity of things at the cost of an extra sentence here and there.

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