Comment by swartkrans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swartkrans | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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

>> 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.

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

every child (and every parent) is different.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com