Raising a moral child
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Here's another cool experiment related to social/moral development, which you can perform on your own kid:
Have two grown-up friends each show your baby a toy. The first friend should offer the toy to your kid but then retract the offer and keep the toy to himself. The second friend should offer the toy to your kid but "accidentally" drop it out of reach.
Now, give your baby a different toy, and then prompt her to share it with one of the friends.
Your baby is very likely to share it with the friend who dropped the toy, rather than the one who withdrew the toy.
The above experiment is based on a 2010 study involving 21-month-olds. It found that two-thirds of the kids shared with the person who dropped the toy -- and the other third kept the toy to themselves. Not a single one shared with the person who offered the toy then retracted the offer. (I talk about this more in "Experimenting With Babies" http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com)
Not only is this fascinating because it shows that babies act preferentially toward people who are kind to them ... but it holds true EVEN IF the person who initiates a kind act is unable to complete it, but demonstrates the proper intent. Think about the complexity of the cognitive processes that are going on in that evaluation. It's amazing!
Example, quoted from the website:
""" The babies in the unjustified group spent more time looking at the adult's discordant expression and exhibited more checking behavior. Additionally, the babies' facial expressions only displayed empathy for the adult when a negative emotional response fit the scenario.
The takeaway:
Parents, take note: Your toddler can see through your "stiff upper lip" routine.
"""
The "takeaway" is completely unsupported. In no way does the experiment suggest that hiding pain is useless.
For one thing, "stiff upper lip" (aka "faked neutrality") is different from faked happiness.
For two, the experimental methodology only applies to cases where the baby knows that the experience's standard emotional response. That applies to hammer strikes on a finger, but not something like divorce or losing a job.
For three, "spent more time looking at the adult's discordant expression" shows that the babies learn from their parents reactions, as they expend effort to understand counterintuitive behavior. "Counterintuitive" is not the same as "fake" or "wrong".
So the "takeway" may in fact be the opposite of what the data suggests!
Coming from a machine learning background, I am often shocked at the quality of experiments in psychology and even economics.
I think the reason may be because in machine learning, you describe your algorithm and experiment exactly. If someone can use the same algorithm and devise an experiment to disprove your results, you look like a fool. With softer sciences, maybe people just say, "then you obviously didn't do it right!" and there is no code to point at.
I like to think that in medicine they know how to do things properly, since there is so much regulation and money on the line.
Studies of humans (medical, psychological, economic, etc) are attempting to discover unknown algorithms on unknown, extremely complex systems. The quality will always seem lower than engineering studies because scientists don't know what they don't know.
One way to replicate this at home, albeit imperfectly, is to place your toddler in a high chair, so that if you drop the toy on the floor, she is unable to reach it.
Animals can pick up subtle cues that are not apparent to adults; I'd be amazed if babies weren't at least as good.
I'm thinking of Clever Hans http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
This of course all depends on the actresses having a particular model of the baby's ability to model them.
On a related note. HN gets pretty obnoxious nit picking about experiments. Guaranteed half the posts about a social science experiment come from novices whining about some flaw only they can see in the experiment yet a hard science paper gets posted and surprisingly no one has any complaints about the experimental design.
The issue is not a quality of the individual person, but of their action - and the relationship between their action and the baby's later response to that person is very thing being tested.
BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse.
Using many actresses would allow the investigators to see if an individual receives a different response compared to the overall group. But it looks like you actually meant say the babies knew the testers felt bad so refused to share, not because the baby had been slighted. I think you need to read more on what the study tested.
>BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse.
Reread your comment:
>I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response.
The level of disrespect you show is amazing. It would be one thing if you actually read the study and realized that "Hey, they used the baby's mom and a drug addict in withdrawal as the two testers! Clearly the study is flawed." Nope, your first comment is essentially "I wonder if these professionals are incompetent."
From the abstract on the first expt (and from the story linked here on HN), it seems unambiguous. My understanding is: one actress offered then refused the toy (intentional); a second actress offered but accidently dropped the toy (unintentional). Later, the baby treated the two actresses differently.
My thinking was that it would be impossible to control for the effect I described (i.e. the Clever Hans Effect), given the social nature of what they were investigating. You probably already know about Clever Hans and so didn't read the wikipedia article I linked, but it's pretty entertaining/interesting, and addresses the problems of controlling for the effect in some social experiments (EDIT: what I'm referring to is that it says in some social experiments they can't control for it just have to accept the effect may be there).
It would be really cool if they had a clever way of controlling for it (I've come across a few very clever experimental designs in Psych studies), so I was wondering if they did or not, and if so how.
I didn't think the conductors of the experiment were incompetent.
Thanks for rereading my comment.
I thought my wife was stealing all the chocolates for days until I caught the toddler doing it.
I fear the dog may have been the mastermind in this plan.
Hint: its true even if babies haven't figured it out yet.
If you take the deontological view then this is still a fairly complex behavior to execute. To consider whether this sort of judgement is one that should be fairly placed on the 21mo if it did the same is a challenging mental task.
So, perhaps babies are predisposed to heuristics which favor the categorical imperative. That'd be interesting and certainly worth surprise.
You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they will learn.
Your kids are way smarter than you think. They know what you're doing, they know you're trying to encourage certain behaviors, and they eventually know how to manipulate you much more effectively than you know how to manipulate them.
Quit treating five-year-olds like they're some kind of resistant clay, and you have to cleverly shape them into the person they're going to be. That kid is already a person. Treating him like a puppy to be trained will certainly affect his personality and behavior, but the largest impact will not be the one you intended. You're teaching them how you want them to be, and you're also teaching them that the way to get what you want is to manipulate people into giving it to you.
That's not accurate. Kids are little people. Ignorant of many things, but they're little people. My wife reads these 'how to raise your kids' posts and books and crap, and all it does is make her feel as if she is a terrible parent because he wasn't signing at 10 months and isn't using full sentences at 12. She feels guilt that he may be behind other kids already, because he's not doing things that these posts and books suggest (and are mostly ridiculous).
Let kids be kids, let them climb trees and ride bikes and be alone. But, spend a lot of time with them and have them watch how you treat people, what you say about people and how you interact with the world. Take him/her with you when you work on the yard, just have them help by carrying rocks around. Take him/her to the store to get the fuel filter you're fighting right now. Talk to them as if they're capable and they'll be capable. Have boundaries that are firm, but reasonable.
And always, always remember that you can say whatever you want about their character being great, or their traits being great, but if you show malice and spite, they'll be malicious and spiteful as well.
And yet I feel like a bad parent because we don't have the resources to enroll him for all the activities his friends do. One event particularly stands out from my own childhood. I tried out for the wrestling team and when I brought the paperwork home my mom said I couldn't, we didn't have health insurance.
I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Being good at something and then being told you can't because you don't have the right paperwork.
Children are not identical to adults, and treating them like they should be free to make all of their own decisions at 5 years of age would be negligent.
But they are like adults in many ways that we tend to ignore - they may not have a great conception of which things can hurt them how badly, but they have a sense of dignity, and they have a sense of independence. They want to make decisions for themselves, and they need to interact with adults that treat them as a rational peer to whatever degree that is possible.
Give them what freedoms you can, and respect them enough to explain the real reasons for the rules you impose. Sometimes you may find that they aren't very good ones at all, when you try to explain them - when that happens, admit that it wasn't a good rule, and work out a better one with them.
In hindsight, I think that left me unprepared for a lot of challenges I faced in college. A lot of times, I would ask him a question and get only half of a response, because answering truthfully would involve revealing less-than-ideal character. I wish that there had been more heart-to-heart and less 'raising your kid the right way'
In the terms of the article, I wonder if the behavior your dad was displaying was more motivated by "shame" than "guilt". Shame-based responses to me seem to be much more concerned with how a social group will perceive your behavior, whereas guilt-based responses deal with the rightness or wrongness of the action itself.
It almost strikes me as a choice between a moral absolute/relativist viewpoint.
I don't know what would have been best, but especially as I got older I would have preferred complete transparency. He was a good man, but I wish I had known more about his flaws. It would have given me more insight into my own.
We were having a debate about it one time, and I asked my dad how it was that we disagreed on these topics. He replied that he raised my sister and I to have what he felt were more ethical viewpoints on various issues than what his own perspectives were.
I was astounded when he told me this. He doesn't hide what his real thoughts are, but he recognizes that some of them aren't the most kind or moral and has actually raised me to have different views than himself.
Being a decent person is a great first step, but even so your child will eventually (probably often) do something you consider bad behavior. Possible responses range from ignoring the behavior to trying to beat it out of them, and you'll find parents all along the spectrum. This is how psychologists have found is a good way to deal with those situations. It's not entirely common sense.
If you respect your kid as an autonomous individual, your disapproval will matter to them, and a rational explanation is the only way they can internalize a rule that will persist without the presence of an enforcing authority.
It won't work out of the blue, of course. Children that have not been treated as rational entities won't respond as such, and children that are very young have a limited understanding of the world. But explaining things to them even before they understand the explanation has a lot of value - they may not understand your reasoning, but they will definitely understand that you're trying to explain, even before they can talk.
Sometimes you may find that the 'bad behavior' you perceive isn't actually a problem at all. I instinctively tried to stop my child from stomping through puddles and getting her feet wet; in reality that's only important if she's about to walk a long way, or if she'll have no chance to change her shoes for hours.
Reading behavioral psychology studies should require a skeptics hat. I'm not calling out these specific studies, but when it comes to miniscule sample sizes, unreproducible and sometimes out right made up results, this area is very suspect due to ease of fudging results. (Diederik Stapel comes to mind as an extreme case.)
The article actually covers this, note. The entire last section is about how children watch adults and decide based on their actions how they should act, paying comparatively little attention to their words.
;)
(think of it this way: how many athletics coaches tell their athletes 'just run as fast as I do'?)
Well yeah obviously, I was talking about the second-order effect of the parenting. Like a control signal being modulated onto the main signal (with the main signal being a child's endogenous drives, interests and character), or one-dimensional Perlin noise, the parenting needs to follow the primary amplitude.
If you're an athletics coach that tells your athletes to run as fast as they can, and you personally half-ass it around the track and have a bit of a beer gut, then you're doing a bad job.
That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold.
Even your own example does this by assigning a direction to your actions based on how it will impact the child.
Try Emile from Rousseau. In general, what you are describing is the difference between the sciences of pedagogy an psychology. In one sentence, (since the enlightenment) pedagogy tries to find the optimal conditions for humans to develop their true self, while psychology usually observes a misguided development and tries to find a treatment. Psychology therefore has to have some model of what constitutes normality to compare against. These specific studies and treatments are easy to write about as a scientific journalist or parenting literature author. It's telling that practically none of the parenting books I've skimmed through are based on pedagogy.
(that's no dismissal of psychology at all, but you have to use the right tool for the job).
"True self" is not a real thing - it's mystical psychobabble. In reality you are a product of your genetics and experiences, the ratios of which are still contested, however as of now the latter is much easier to influence than the former and as a result is really the only medium we have to work with if we want to influence outcomes.
>"True self" is not a real thing - it's mystical psychobabble.
Yep you are right, but I don't speak English natively and did not have much time :) A better phrasing probably would have been the true potential of the species, not of an individual. But true potential sounds too elitist... I'll try more verbosely: Mostly since the enlightenment (let's say the second half of the 18th century, one landmark was Emile by Rousseau), most central-european theory of pedagogy has a specific vision of an ideal of a developed human being (or species) to strive for. It's centered around development of practical, cultural and emotional skills, reasoning, the ability to assess the own actions relative to the state and necessities of society as a whole. Something like the living according to the categorical imperative of Kant while not feeling deprived of the own needs.
If you think 'treat people with respect and dignity' is about manipulating other people to behave as you want them to, then you're doing it wrong.
That's a big pile of self-contradiction. Both survival skills and religious rules are specific qualities.
Seems to me that all of them, when they describe anything that is objectively meaningful, refer to patterns of action adopted in particular circumstances. The only thing that changes over time seems to be the name applied to the patterns of action that parenting seeks to impose on children, not the actual substance that parenting is about creating desired patterns of action.
A skill is a capability learned through experience which is wielded with intention.
A behavior is simply a way of acting - it could be conscious or unconscious, it could be enforced or intentional.
A habit is an unintentional behavior.
A personality characteristic and a character attribute are basically the same thing: unconscious ways of perceiving value and making decisions.
There are of course dozens of ways to define each of those terms, and I'm not interested in debating which of them is 'correct' - I am here primarily focusing on the distinction between instilling value-judgments via rituals and enforcement and attempting to control the self-perception or decision-making styles by behaving in artificial ways.
Describing them all as 'patterns of acting' is like calling all matter 'arrangements of chemicals'. It is of course accurate, and even in some cases useful, but you muddy very important distinctions by generalizing to that degree. In the case in point, the distinction lost is between valuations and perceptions.
An other common sense thing: you don't magically get the child at 5, there's this long long process from the baby that can't feed himself and is pretty close to resistive clay on the moral point of view, to the 2 years old that becomes pretty good at understanding what's going around, the 3 years old that can do and think so much more by himself, to the 5 years old who's quite socialized etc.
There's many many stages, the kid has limited abilities, and and you actually have go teach a lot of things, not just sit you kid on some watch tower and wait for him to understand. For a long time he just won't get it if you don't make an effort to teach him. This is where you'll want advices on what ways you can teach him, what 'works' and what doesn't.
You never have to 'teach them things', they need to learn things from you. There's an enormous world of difference there.
Of course you should help him accomplish his objectives, and you should certainly do so with an eye toward the techniques or approaches he'll need to use to accomplish them on his own. There's a lot he doesn't know yet. But teaching technique and suggesting approaches is fundamentally different from attempting to impart characteristics and habits.
Cognitively, little kids are not people, at least not the way we typically think of what a person is. The analogy of a delicate and hard to work piece of clay is not a bad analogy for the reality of the situation.
What you dismiss as "tricks" is actually highly valuable technical knowledge. We would laugh at someone who said that all it takes to program a computer is to just "act smart." Well when you are raising a kid you are helping to program the most complex computer ever created.
I get the basic idea of what you're saying, but that sounds like a lovely way to raise a serial murderer. Sometimes, engineering doesn't translate well to other parts of life.
If ignorance is no virtue for preschool staff, why would it be a virtue for parents?
(implied insult redacted - sorry about that.)
You're trying really hard to claim some sort of moral high ground here, but there is nothing immoral or harmful about knowledge.
You've set up a false dichotomy between parents who are "good people" and parents who are interested in scientific knowledge about how children develop. Any parent can be both. In fact I would argue that parents who seek to learn more about child development will arm themselves with better tools for being good parents.
I don't know why you perceive scientific studies of child development as a threat, but you obviously do.
All humans are mechanisms in the physical sense, certainly. But unlike most mechanisms you might be accustomed to dealing with, they have self-will and can perceive differences in stimuli beyond your ability to control.
I have certainly set up no 'dichotomy' between goodness and knowledge - I have no issues with parents seeking to understand anything under the sun. (I do think that human nature causes parents to read correlative trends as consistent facts, which means that such studies are doomed to be misinterpreted by nearly all who read it).
I also don't specifically conflate 'goodness' (in whatever definition you choose to accept it) with any particular set of actions. I (for example) have no reason to believe that you are a bad person, I just rationally consider the techniques you are defending to produce harmful effects on the individuals to whom they are applied. I have claimed no 'moral high ground', I am engaged in rational debate about the effects of certain types of behavior.
Hop down off that very tall horse, Defender Of Science.
Edit: the article does use the word "tricks", although I would argue as shorthand for technique rather than deceive. Nevertheless to be fair I replaced it above with "manipulate".
It's exactly the kind of junk I invariably see when a good journalist attempts to write about any kind of science - they try to draw conclusions from the study that the study does not draw, because the conclusions drawn from a real study are never interesting to a normal readership.
The study most likely does not prescribe behaviors or approaches on the parts of parents when raising their children. The study ought to be purely about how individuals react to controlled and described stimuli - the study will draw reasonable conclusions, make appropriate cautions about the mapping between reality and experiment, and be very careful about inferring any real-world implications. I haven't purchased a copy of this particular study, so I can't judge it on its own merits, but it's from a reputable source, and the abstract makes reasonable claims.
Absolutely. And be consistent, that's the one main important result of developmental psychology for parents. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory and grep for Bowlby.
> Your kids are way smarter than you think. They know what you're doing, they know you're trying to encourage certain behaviors, and they eventually know how to manipulate you much more effectively than you know how to manipulate them.
They are smart as in emotionally smart. And that heavily depends on trust in the social environment they are able to build from experience. A child having made consistend experiences of trust will have it easier to develop a model of self-efficiacy, and that in turn is fundamental for learning other things about the world. The emotional experiences are fundamental - but harder to see than a kid talking early or similar.
I think we mean the same thing, but to be sure: I tried to exclude the following authenticity with my phrasing:
If I am relaxed on a saturday afternoon and my child spills it's cornflakes over the print outs I left on the desk, it's no big deal. Me or both of us clean up the mess and I just print them out again. If the same thing happens on a stressfull thursday evening, I am angered and let that anger out.
In that example I am authentic, but from the view of the child my response to the same action of the child is not consistent. The child has to have reached a certain age to grasp that my anger is mostly about my stress and not about the actions of the kid (specificially the ability to empathize has to be developed).
tl;dr: What I meant with consistency is mostly the parents having a certain amount of affect control. That's probably what you meant with 'a stable individual'.
We also do whatever we can to enable her to participate in what we are doing (sadly computers are a big problem in that regard, much more than say chopping with a knife). Our kid is very well-behaved and cautious (except for tired/hungry breakdowns, of course).
I am also a big believer in the see-what happens school of action. Other parents are always encouraging (yelling at) their kids to share, particularly in support of aggressive children trying to take from their child. We believe in letting children experiment and realize that sharing leads to fun, greediness not so much. We demonstrate the power of choosing not to play others which is really the best way of handling unpleasant people/situations.
But at the heart of it all is simply being, authentically, the kind of person you want your child to be. They are programmed to learn actual behavior from their parents who 1) have been successful enough to reproduce and 2) have a similar genetic makeup meaning their behaviors are likely to be compatible with the kid's abilities.
So be a better person and relax. Oh, and look into Sudbury education for your kids which really teaches them how to be moral in a community.
Hey, I'm open to using a child's own interests to help them learn ... but Sudbury takes a good thing way too far.
You say that Sudbury teaches kids how to be moral in a community. Maybe ... if that community is "Lord of the Flies."
They pretty much all learn how to read, write, do arithmetic. Those who want to go to college (about 80%) do so without difficulty, learning what they need in a few months. They are serious, engaged students in college because they know why they are there. They find college kids goofing off to be quite a mystery. They are free to become themselves when they are supposed to -- puberty. That's what that stage is for. Most schools prevent the self-exploration that is necessary to allow for that. So then it gets delayed until people's 20s.
--
Visit such a school and you will see that they are much less nasty than those in a public school. Bullying is virtually unheard of. They work together as a community and take responsibility for it. They are collectively responsible for all the policing and judgement of others as well as themselves. They adjudicate quite fairly.
I saw 8 year olds wrestling with determining an appropriate punishment for their friend vs. their own desire to help their friend. They really struggled to find a balance. 8 year olds. This is an issue that a lot of adults struggle with.
They also write themselves up when they break a rule. They all buy into building a community. The school I visited was full of energy and respect.
So you can either choose to believe the fiction of "Lord of the Flies" or believe the results of forty years of actual experience with the model.
They do have experience with "troubled" kids doing just fine and thriving, but these are a small number injected into an otherwise pleasant environment.
They also do occasionally expel students. But I also remember a story from the Jerusalem Sudbury school in which one of their students left and fell into drugs, etc. Later, the founder of the school asked the kid if they had failed him. He said "failed me? You were the only ones that didn't fail me. You are the reason I sought rehabilitation instead of dying on the streets. I always carried you and the school with me, voices of support." Take from that what you will.
The most important thing is to have a good environment for students to come into. People adapt to their environments, for better or worse. If you were to take a single gang member away and put them in a strongly functioning Sudbury school, I would give them great odds of succeeding. But if you plopped a number of gang members into such a community, I bet that would be a major problem.
The hardest part for a Sudbury school is starting and dealing with huge influx of students. It takes time to assimilate to such an environment.
There is also another big question along these lines. The students at Sudbury learn the R's quite well on their own. But their parents are generally well-educated, demonstrating the value of those skills. Would kids from homes without those values do so well? Again, injecting a single kid from such an environment into a Sudbury school would be much more likely to succeed than having a majority of the school from such an environment.
But, as far as I know, no one has attempted it. Perhaps someone should.
I get why, though. Moral actions are choices. Being smart isn't. If you praise a kid for being smart, he won't be able to choose to be smart. Instead, he'll assume he's smart and won't have to work so hard. I suppose praising an innate tendency to work hard might be more effective.
After some thought though I can see it as consistent since when they do something well you can praise them for being hard-working (character).
The interesting part of the article was the quantitative analysis of experimental evidence, not so much that evolution seems to have produced a species that's pretty good at tribal-scale interpersonal dynamics and learning everything by copying superiors. The qualitative analysis seems obvious given the model, so good experimental numbers indicates the popular qualitative model is likely correct.
This sort of gets coupled with the idea of 'work smarter, not harder.' When a child is praised more substantially for trying hard, you get things like staying up all night studying for a test. When you emphasize being smart and not needing to study, the child is more likely to push themselves such that they can land good grades without needing to study.
And this usually manifests as greater attentiveness in class, greater emphasis on figuring out exactly what's going to be on the test, etc. But you also see behaviours like emphasizing getting the right teachers.
And the same thing applies to sports. If you emphasize effort, you might get a child practicing repeatedly something that they are already good at. When they are really bad at passing, you get thought patterns like 'at least I'm trying.' When you emphasize being good, the child is more devastated by the idea that they are bad at passing, and they focus their energy on being not bad.
The point is that things like being 'smart' and being 'good' are things that you can actually learn, and a lot times, working on what's important is much more important than the overall volume of effort.
> When a child is praised more substantially for trying hard, you get things like staying up all night studying for a test. When you emphasize being smart and not needing to study, the child is more likely to push themselves such that they can land good grades without needing to study.
The way I've heard and personally experienced it, kids who get praised for being smart are more likely to procrastinate ("eh, I already get that anyway"), then try to cram everything in in the last minute.
> And the same thing applies to sports. If you emphasize effort, you might get a child practicing repeatedly something that they are already good at.
Similarly, studies suggest that by praising talent, you teach kids to stick to what they are good at immediately ("that's what I'm talented at"), instead of putting in the effort to learn stuff that they don't get immediately.
EDIT: Perhaps it depends on whether you praise below-average, average and smarter-than-average kids?
It depends on how you emphasize being smart. If you emphasize overall smartness, the kid will be more self-conscious about their weak points, which is what I wanted to convey. If you emphasize particular moments where they are good, they will be encouraged to repeat that specifically. It's a difference between emphasizing being good at [subset like shooting hoops] vs being good at [basketball as a whole]. Academically, the emphasis should be on the grades instead of on being good at taking tests. Or if you're more high-level, the emphasis should be on learning what's going to be most useful to you later in life as opposed to specifically effort or grades.
As for procrastination, in my experience the smarter kids procrastinate substantially more. But for the most part this doesn't come back and bite them. They leave exactly as much time as they need to pull off the good grade and most of the time it works out.
I think the real danger with this strategy is that when kids are praised for being smart, they seek out things where they are smart, and avoid things that would require hard work. Most worthwhile things require hard work at some point.
This does not line up with research in the matter.
>This sort of gets coupled with the idea of 'work smarter, not harder.' When a child is praised more substantially for trying hard, you get things like staying up all night studying for a test.
No. Not if you teach balance.
>When you emphasize being smart and not needing to study, the child is more likely to push themselves such that they can land good grades without needing to study.
This is just so ridiculous I can't even comment.
i had a roommate who didn't pay rent. i couldn't bring myself to confront the roommate because i felt like i "made of lot of money" and they didn't make much money and they had problems. i imagined them arguing with me and was scared and hurt by this image; i have no way to tell someone 'i deserve what i have and you don't' because i know i was born into a loving family that raised me and took care of me and pushed me to succeed. i can't take credit for those things.
i finally had to tell myself "it's not just ok to put yourself first. you have to insist on it; if you don't get rent from your roommate, you're letting them take from the people you love took; when your roommate doesn't pay rent, they are ruining your mood which hurts your friends and family."
it's hard. i finally said 'fuck being a good person, i'll do what i want and what benefits me and those i love.' this doesn't mean i go around being an ass to people all the time; i'm still generous when i tip and i try to look out for people.
but now i'm different. if i sense someone is trying to abuse or push me around at all, i see them as a predator. when homeless people asking for money used to make me feel like a bad person for being successful, now i see them as predators who use negative emotions to try and take my positive feelings away. yes, they're suffering. but i can't help them, and giving them money doesn't help them either.
show your kids how to be good, sure. but for god's sake teach them to say no to people who make unreasonable requests, and give them practice asking for things they are owed.
Your story is the topic of one of the most famous West End /Broadway songs of recent years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6h1eBEmY6U
Even if you find that life's not fair, it
Doesn't mean that you just have to grin and bear it
If you always take it on the chin and wear it
Nothing will change
Even if you're little you can do a lot, you
Mustn't let a little thing like little stop you
If you sit around and let them get on top, you
Might as well be saying you think that it's OK
Or they are asking for money who using asking for money as a way to get money. Your "predator" description fits panhandlers with manipulative stories, but not all "homeless people asking for money". Also, it's worth considering , if someone is telling you a story that upsets you, but is a true story, maybe the negative feelins you feel are appropriate, and there is something wrong with economic inequality.
The genuinely needful have long been run out of the public spaces/territories that have the most pay-out. The 'predators' in traffic making more than working at 7-11 don't abide threats to their income and will defend it unscrupulously. Stop and walk on that center median sometime and see what response you get.
Edit: I'm referring to occupied PH zones, I'm also half kidding. Be prepared for a confrontation if you do that.
You hold the cognitive distortion that your wants and needs are less important than others because you grew up in a more healthy manner. This is incorrect.
You can make a request and say "no" to one and still be a kind, caring, and moral person.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2014/03/new-par...
>So guess what I think about these studies.
My guess is that you think your experience alone is not statistically relevant.
But you want a kid to self-identify as a "good" person, and do what good people do. For most folks, this stuff either happens pretty naturally, or the parents adapt as their kid learns how to game them.
(1) If your child does something good,
DO tell them that they are showing traits of a person who does good things (praise character).
DON'T let them think that they're merely a person who did a good thing (praise behavior).
(2) If your child does something bad,
DON'T tell them that they are showing traits of a person who does bad things (shame).
DO tell them that they did a bad thing (guilt).
The situation is vaguely reminiscent of that old social psychology favorite, "fundamental attribution error", which is about how when other people do bad things, we blame internal traits, but when we do bad things, we blame external factors.
When you tell your child "don't be a cheater," the focus is on character. You don't want them to do things that a person with bad character does.
When your child cheats, on the other hand, you say, "I'm disappointed, because I know you have a good character, but your action didn't reflect that." So, the focus is on the bad action, rather than the character.
Is some of this mere semantics? Possibly. If a person who does bad things can be a person of good character, and a person who does bad things can be a person of bad character, then how do we tell the difference between a person of good character and a person of bad character except by their actions?
But, if we're merely talking about what strategy is effective, then we can indeed say to focus on character when praising and on the action when admonishing.
If, on the other hand, the child had already cheated, you would express disappointment in that the supposedly good child had displayed uncharacteristic behavior.
It's a great read: http://www.amazon.com/How-Children-Succeed-Curiosity-Charact...
Act according to that maxim whereby you might
will that it should become universal law.
By Bernard Williams's standard, the amoralist cannot even conceivably have an intermittent feeling of sympathy[0]. The person is at minimum embedded within and embodied by sympathetic behavior (to self or to other), but this is not a necessary condition to morality.
At the same time, the kinds of experiments we run, and the types of questions we ask, potentially distill or deauthenticate the model with the widest representation of moral truth — however the narrative of science may belie institutional refactors at meta-ethical descriptions.
–
[0]: http://bobnoxiousthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/08/challenging-b...
The Southern Poverty Law Center has a file on him: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/pro...
While that doesn't invalidate all the findings outlined in the op-ed, it's not exactly confidence inspiring either, as this essay persuasively argues: http://africasacountry.com/the-racesciencefiles-the-new-york...
"The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time." -- Jiddu Krishnamurti
[Think on These Things, Chapter 1](http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/think-on-these-things/1...)
[Some info from UNSECO Bureau of Education on Krishnamurti](http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/krishnamu...)
Probably true, but there's an alternate explanation I think. Praising their character invokes a feel-good, I'm a good person, pride response. Praising their action doesn't nearly as much. People like the reward of the 'I'm a great person' feeling and thus are more likely to be nice if this is the result.
I draw parallels to the way we treat criminals in our society. We cast them out and question their character and distance them from ourselves. This dumps a lot of shame on them, and might produce the same results as seen with the children; rather than feel guilt and make amends, they feel shame and withdraw.
Looking inward it feels like I still struggle with this pattern of thinking sometimes, as I suspect many people do (the feeling of "that project failed" vs. "I'm a failure, this project is evidence of this fact" is worlds apart).
In an Israeli study of nearly 600 families,
parents who valued kindness and compassion
frequently failed to raise children who shared those
values.
An analogy would be valuing wealth while being poor. Or innumerable examples of reportedly valuing a certain religion's beliefs, yet ridiculously bad, often opposite, implementation of those beliefs.
In today's oligarchy it seems like the great majority of successful people today are either criminals or general pieces of shit.
Now, of course, being a success is not the end all and be all, but seeing your skills greatly outdistance your results can be quite frustrating.
I'd prefer to define success differently. If I had all the worlds goods/power and treated others like dirt I'd chalk myself up as a total loss.
Let us take a simple thought experiment. Let me ask you to choose a book. Let us make it simple, let us remove all the books that you do not know about, and just consider the books that you are aware of being great. If you have already chosen one, drop it as it is wrong, don't ask me how, but I know, and this time be sensitive to the process of choosing a book. This is the most freest of choice that you ever will get to make, so free will better be here or else it is no where. Do you observe that there is a certain gap from the time I ask you to pick a book, and then there is certain gap and then suddenly there are a list of books in your mind. There is no way you can explain why you didn't think of The Godfather even though you know it is a great book. Let us say you thought about Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, Surely You're Joking Mr.Feynman and Seven years in Tibet. You have just finished one book in the series of Harry Potter and you are not interested in reading fiction again, so eliminate that, then you are only left with Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman and Seven years in Tibet, say you like reading biographies so you chose Seven years in Tibet and Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, now when you have only these two options and there is no coherent opposition that is present in the system, only then comes the free aspect. There is still no way you can explain why you did not think otherwise, of choosing another book in the series of Harry Potter and reading more fiction. So where is the free will here? All of this still does not eradicate the feeling of love and compassion we feel and does not make everyone guilty by reason of insanity.
All of this is much more well articulated by Sam Harris who holds a Ph.D in neurobiology and graduate in Philosophy. He talks about the delusion of free will at The Festival of Dangerous Ideas. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FanhvXO9Pk
Here is another piece of his work where he promotes scientific thinking and argues that moral questions are best pursued using, not just philosophy, but methods of science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Landscape
(And, having just spent a year in academia and seen "methods of science" firsthand, I can only assume the suggestion they be applied to questions of morality represents a blatant grab for funding on the part of Dr. Harris, who no doubt envisions himself as a PI presiding over such investigations. On the other hand, if he were all that good a grant writer, I doubt he'd have gone to the trouble of publishing in the popular press.)
I believe that parents (/guardians) have responsibility for the children and that responsibility logically extends to giving consent for choices like this. My mother performed "experiments" on me in conjunction with her master's degree work in education; I was probably 8-10. It was clearly her call; I couldn't give fully informed consent, but there wasn't any risk of physical harm and vanishingly small risk of any possible harm, so I believe her consent by proxy was appropriate.