Toddlers regulate behavior to avoid making adults angry | Hacker News Reader

Toddlers regulate behavior to avoid making adults angry

washington.edu

62 pointsamaks50 comments

Ad is standard, the headline grossly misrepresents the story. What The research actually observed is that in the presence of an observing angry/disapproving person, the kids were cowed, hestitant to play. Kids not stated down by the angry person played more freely. That suggests that kids are scared of angry people, not that kids tried to avoid making the person angry. Ad is common for psych studies, they read far too much into one behavior delta, and don't try multiole configurations to tease apart the many possible interpretations.

"“Ultimately, we want kids who are well regulated, who can use multiple cues from others to help decide what they should and shouldn’t do,” Repacholi said."

Is that what we really want? Ultimately I´d hope that we raise kids that can listen to themselves as much as others, so they have some hope of guarding themselves from whatever neuroses the adults around them have picked up.

Being able to observe behavior and predict results is clearly good. At a young age, avoiding angering strangers is probably good too. At any age, it's probably best to know in advance when you are likely to anger strangers, even if you choose to anger them.

What you're talking about is emotional intelligence, what I'm talking about is self-reliance. There's some overlap, but they aren't the same thing.

Self-reliance of toddlers? I guess you mean that they learn self-reliance faster by being less obedient? Not sure I follow the reasoning.

I think he's talking about the premise of the original post, that children must depend on adults to get angry at them (and ostensibly, parents that don't get angry enough will have obnoxious children who don't know right from wrong.)

Self-reliance, they can judge whether their actions are good or not without trying every bad action once and needing some adult to get angry at them in order to know which ones are bad. (you know, like our government. rimshot)

Yes, you understood what I meant. It's also true that people can sometimes show anger for no good reason, so it's about recognising this as well. It's about developing a balance between "sometimes I'm right" and "sometimes they're right".

With anything (IMHO), you should first learn to play by the rules. Later on you can learn/discover when to break them. But that takes experience and judgement, which little kids may not yet have.

> Ultimately I´d hope that we raise kids that can listen to themselves as much as others

This is about toddlers, not angsty youths fighting for independence from adults. Toddlers are entirely dependent on adults for their survival and require 24/7 supervision so being capable of listening to adults can be essential for their health and well being. Like staying away from pets, dangerous things on the ground and around the house. Most people have few if any memories of being a toddler. If you think a toddler should listen to themselves or disregard adults you haven't been around many toddlers. They eat dirt. They pull cat tails. They hit other kids in the head with toys. They have to have child locks in cars. They aren't making good decisions yet.

> guarding themselves from whatever neuroses the adults around them have picked up.

Yes adults are all horrible and flawed in some way, terrors to children everywhere. Always ruining their kids' lives. Forget about all those many years they spend laughing, worrying, working and working to ensure the well being of their child. All adults do is inflict emotional harm and poison the child's natural state of innocence, wonder and internal happiness that would last for eternity if only their parents weren't such terrible people.

Not every toddler needs 24/7 supervision. At age of 15-18 months they understand consequences of basic behavior, and once they identify harming things, they avoid them by themselves. My 2 year child does not touch cup with hot tea for 6 months now, and warns us that it is hot. She recognizes spicy and avoids it. And much more similar behavior. I strongly believe that toddlers need not so much supervision and more free time/will. It will help them to become more self-sufficient person in future.

Edit: I'm not saying parent should not spend time with toddler teaching him/her. I'm saying toddler does not need 24/7 supervision. You don't want to grow a person who can't live without supervision.

Or scalded and illiterate. It's a tossup. :)

> Not every toddler needs 24/7 supervision

Yes, every toddler needs 24/7 supervision.

> and once they identify harming things

Some of those harming things are really bad, even life threatening.

> I strongly believe that toddlers need not so much supervision and more free time/will. It will help them to become more self-sufficient person in future.

I doubt any of this is true, and I worry for the safety of your child.

> and more free time/will.

When my daughter was a toddler, she didn't want to be alone, she wanted to be, and she still always wants to be with someone. I have never heard of a toddler that wants free time. More like parents want free time and don't get any. Children at that young age need a lot of attention, caring and love, they should not be alone, like ever only nowadays many parents are too busy staring at their phones to notice.

I wonder what kind of supervision, you, me, my parents, your parents had in our/their toddler days?

>I doubt any of this is true, and I worry for the safety of your child.

> When my daughter was a toddler, she didn't want to be alone, she wanted to be, and she still always wants to be with someone. I have never heard of a toddler that wants free time. More like parents want free time and don't get any. Children at that young age need a lot of attention, caring and love, they should not be alone, like ever.

I have same experience with my older one. That does not make me happy not because of I need free time. I can sleep less and have free time. It worries me because of him being afraid of being by himself. BTW, me and my wife did supervise him 24/7 till 3 years.

All in all, I understand being obsessive with supervision in parenting is trend these days and anybody with other view will be considered as dangerous parent. At the end of day, one can create safe environment for kid, hence won't need to be worried every second. But I guess, this is part of evolution in parenting and we have to ride it out.

Both my toddlers needed free time. When they did not had possibility to play independently, they became very irritable.

I've used to play without parent supervision in front of out block of flats since I was 2 years old. AFAICT it was not unusual back then (Eastern Europe, cca 1975).

every child (and every parent) is different.

I'm told that as a toddler, even as a baby, I loved nothing more than spend time by myself. My mum would put me to bed as a baby and instead of falling asleep I'd just stare at the ceiling for hours on end absorbed in my own mind.

This behaviour continued when I was older. I would spend most of my time running around the backyard and getting into all sorts of trouble without much supervision. The only thing I remember from those times are that I was deadly afraid of the very big steep hill that formed a natural border on one side of the yard, the upstairs balcony that had no railings, and the wooden stairs that lead upstairs.

I imagine those fears were instilled by my parents to keep me safe. Those areas were dangerous to visit on my own, so naturally they made me so afraid of them, that I wouldn't dare even get close.

It worked out pretty well. I have never had a broken bone in my life and I learned to be fairly independent early on (for instance, I would walk to school every morning for about 1km on a road without sidewalks when I was 7 years old)

There are different definitions of "alone" and "supervised", but regardless you might find this interesting:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21537988

>> I worry for the safety of your child.

Was that necessary? It's an internet message board post. It's not like we're watching video of the guy's house as he declares his refusal to clean up the broken glass bottle of lemonade in the kitchen because "the kid'll learn him quick!"

Maybe too harsh. But I've known many cases of toddlers dying in which parents left them alone "just a second": jumping through windows, drowned in the bathtub, etc.

What children want is doing (specially discovering and learning) things by themselves, but that's not the same as being alone.

And every child I've seen wants more attention from their parents. There's an age for everything and that's not the one for unsupervised independence.

You witnessed these cases of toddlers dying personally? Or did you watch them on TV?

A friend's nephew, some acquitances' son... at that time, ten to twenty years ago, domestic tragedies didn't appear in the media.

Edit: I live in Spain. I don't know how it is in your country. Now here these accidents are increasingly in tv.

FFS! I never said anything about ignoring your kid, and yet somehow my words have been twisted to mean this.

Hopefully if I explain my beliefs further you'll see what I mean. Yes, I believe that kids should be encouraged to be self-reliant from a young age, because I believe ultimately every individual only grows off their own impulses, and the job of an adult is to give a safe and loving environment for this process to unfold.

But a toddler might not have developed ideas of right and wrong, right? Isn't what I'm saying irresponsible? Again, no, because you can teach self-reliance. By talking through ideas with a kid, asking for their opinion, asking them to consider alternative points of view, you help teaching them how to make sense of their options. This process still requires attentiveness, but changes the parent-child relationship.

Perhaps the best example I know of in the real world was the way Feynmann's dad taught Feynmann to explore his curiosity... The Importance of a Father: http://youtu.be/695Flhmjmg4

Going back to the original article, imagine the kid in the video is a younger version of yourself. If you could go back in time to pass on a message to this younger you, what would you tell him? Personally I'd tell him it's okay to play, but he'd only truly understand why if he could reason for himself.

Finally, I realise that parenting is a big responsibility, and consequently people worry about whether they're doing it right, so let me be clear... I am not criticising you, I don't even know you, all I am saying is what I would prefer to do, your decisions are yours to own.

You must always have infants within eyesight. You don't need to be guiding them. But you need to watch them to make sure they do not discover a danger that you were not aware of.

English parents will spend time and money on plug guards - this is pretty much pointless because all English mains voltage plug sockets have in-built guards. An infant would need to insert something into the earth socket (to raise the guard) and then insert something into the live or neutral sockets. However, many parents with a flatscreen TV don't think to bolt it to a wall, and some children die from pulling the screen over on top of them.

"Heuristic Play" is a relatively modern concept where you give an infant a wide range of everyday objects (different textures, colours, sounds, etc) and then you just monitor for safety and let the infant explore.

There are very few occasions where it's safe to let a two year old be out of sight.

> This is about toddlers

I agree with the parent comment on this. Toddlers need to be given room to explore who they are even at a very young age. And yes, even at 2 you can see personality shining through.

For anyone who has not experienced it, watching a child born and then staying with them in the first few hours is mind expanding. His/her core personality will jump out at you. Then all you have to do is try not to crush it based on what you want them to be.

> They aren't making good decisions yet.

Yes and no. The key is not to make decisions for your toddler, but to help them learn how to make decisions. It's a process to be sure. As they get older, a parent simply helps them improve their decision making skills.

> Yes adults ... flawed in some way

I get the sarcasm, but yes adults are flawed. I think the parent comments point on this is that your problems/issues/worries should not rub off on the child. This is a perfectly valid point.

From his birth, I tried very hard to let my son criticize and challenge me and also other adults. I tried to teach him to negotiate for what he wants and that things should be quid pro quo. This has greatly frustrated many adults (and me at times). But, I have always thought it an awesome thing to challenge authority.

Along with this, I also tried to teach him to understand how fortunate he is and to be generous and truly empathetic to others.

Now, he's almost a teenager and still a wonderful, caring kid.

We'll see how this experiment turns out.

> Ultimately I´d hope that we raise kids that can listen to themselves as much as others, so they have some hope of guarding themselves from whatever neuroses the adults around them have picked up.

Yes, but these inside voices don't just appear out of nowhere. They are shaped by how children are raised from the time they are toddlers.

We want kids who know right from wrong and are not afraid to act rightly instead of wrongly, even in the face of peer pressure. Most of these qualities are teachable.

"We want kids who know right from wrong and are not afraid to act rightly instead of wrongly, even in the face of peer pressure. Most of these qualities are teachable."

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, except I recognise pressure isn't just from peers. I'm advocating teaching self-reliance on order to guard against undeserved pressure, no matter the source.

Really? It seems just the opposite with mine :)

Same observation here (3 kids).

My own children are a very clever at this. My kids make me angry quite often (it is so much fun to wind dad up), but they are pretty good at not crossing the line that will make me totally furious (like poking objects into power points).

Reminds me of a fictional conversation involving a kid who has locked himself in a bathroom:

> "Mm, but kids only dare defy those whom they really trust. The fact that I'm still mostly a stranger to him gives me an advantage, which I invite you to use."

Is that from Komarr? (Bujold often has interesting things to say about parenthood.)

Yeee-ep.

Not really. The headline is a poor summary.

Mine too, but note that this study shows the kids regulating their behavior to avoid making an adult stranger (the 'emoter') angry.

My two-year-old delights in testing the limits and seeing how mad he can make me, but I've noticed he shows a lot more caution when interacting with most other adults, especially unfamiliar ones.

Strategic provocation =P

I'd love to see a study testing the hypothesis that exposure to lots of anger in early childhood leads a person to poor impulse control or greater susceptibility to addiction. Im not sure how you actually would test this hypothesis without actually measuring something else like the correlation with certain state child welfare laws.

I agree that this would be very difficult to test in children, but it should be possible to test in animals.

You would collect a cross-sample of infants from a wide variety of backgrounds and arrange for cameras to be put in their homes. This isn't unethical given certain constraints, and people have agreed to it before. Interactions with the child in the frame are coded by blinded coders as to whether it's an "angry" interaction or not. Every two to five years, you check in with the children and test them on impulse control and addictive behavior. If you have assloads of funding, follow them until they're 50 or 70 or however old you can afford.

Of course, nobody has assloads of funding like this, because science has basically reduced itself to clickbait.

No, even that wouldn't work. "Angry parenting" is going to be massively correlated with many other factors that will affect how parents raise children and with the children's impulse control in general. That's likely to be true even after trying to get a wide variety of backgrounds, etc.

Generally you can control for this statistically; the study yields information of the sort you need, but you're correct that it's not totally causal.

But there aren't experiments for most things we'd like to know anyway. Experiments are a nice thing to have, but they're not necessary to gather information and update your beliefs rationally.

I would say sometimes you can control for this statistically. When the selection problem is exactly along the dimension you want to measure, (i.e., measure the impulse-control of children of parents with poor impulse-control, but only the part caused by angry yelling) statistical correction is less plausible.

Have you tried Googling various combinations of these phrases? How early childhood stress affects later development has been a hot area of research for at least a decade now. One quick example I found:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/9955892/A...

I find these type of studies so fascinating! By studying infants and toddlers we can truly get a sense of how truly "social" we are as animals and how we adapted to that fact by developing these subtle learning mechanism.

I dunno. It's not surprising to me that any form of animal tries to restrict anger in animals 4 or 5 times larger than it :-P

If you look at the study (which is hidden behind a paywall :/) only 150 infants were studied. That's quite a small number to make any definitive claim, given there are probably hundreds of millions of toddlers on the planet. The researchers probably mention it in the article, but the press release doesn't.

The number of toddlers on the planet is completely irrelevant for whether 150 is a large enough sample size.

I see where you're coming from, and they distinct, but I would not say 'completely irrelevant'. The number of toddlers on the planet relates to possible variations (in environment and genetics) and therefore possible discrepancies to the behaviour studied.

Yes, what matters is indeed those variations, not the amount of toddlers. If you randomly removed 99% of the toddler population the variations wouldn't be significantly reduced. Hence the sample size you'd need in that situation would still be roughly the same as now. Yes sure, if you removed 99.999999% of the toddler population it would get so small that you'd have appreciably fewer variations in the remaining population, so the population size is not completely irrelevant, but it's still overwhelmingly irrelevant in practice.

You do need a representative sample obviously, but that's a different issue.

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