41–50 of 119 posts
A time out in his crib? No wonder she hates parenting. If I threw shit at my parents it would have gotten me the mother of all whoopings.
I don't think using pain to control a child's behaviour is good parenting. I'm sorry you where abused.
The lens through which parenting is viewed here is too narrow. Parenting isn't about being happier. It is about being a bigger and better person. Children make your life BIGGER. You feel moments of happiness like you've never felt before. You also feel moments of anger like you've never felt before. It really is indescribable and not for the faint of heart or the selfish. The beautiful thing about parenting is that i…
I have two kids, 3 and 6. My 3 year old is at a stage where she throws epic tantrums, mostly when she is tired but this heat wave we are in on the east coast doesn't help. When she is in full flail I look at her and smile and say "you can do better than that if you try". I don't feel bad as a parent that she is having a tantrum, she doesn't have the emotional control yet. She will - my 6 year old went through the same thing and when the 3 year old starts up my 6 year old now rolls her eyes and smiles.
Maybe there's hope for modern rich societies. I've read that in the French culture decisions that are made as much or more for the benefit of the parents. The family goes on vacations that the parents are interested in, enjoying art museums, sophisticated cities, etc, instead of what the kids want: a theme park in the suburbs. Maybe this derives from an attitude that children are born barbarians, that their natural tastes and desires are stupid, and they need to have civilization pounded into them in order. Whereas we in the Anglo-Saxon derived culture put more value on the natural impulses of children.
I think the situation can be improved.
Is Hacker News turning into Reddit (minus the convenience of subreddits)? I visit both because HN was always just solid tech links and news, but several completely non-hacker stories (outside of the fact that we are humans, might have families, may see someone possibly drown, and might be a white ninja) have made the top in the past couple of days.
The HN mission is diluting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I so agree with this. The whole "does it make my life happier" is such a shallow consumer thing. When I was younger I led an interesting life in many ways but I have never had the intensity of experience I have with and about my children. Another really surprising thing was finding out how much I connect back with society - I want to be part of society and change it and make it better - I get what it is for. Children…
Really? Happiness is shallow and consumeristic?
'When I mention this to Daniel Gilbert, he hardly disputes that meaning is important. But he does wonder how prominently it should figure into people’s decisions to have kids. “When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good,” he says. “The problem is, 95 percent of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the one you experience rarely?”'
I mean, why let a little thing like "meaning" affect the decisions you make in life, right?
We all know how well focusing on immediate pleasure works in areas such as dieting, exercise, finance, career, etc. Why not apply the same logic to having kids, right?
The article has these little asides describing a videotaped interaction between a mother and her son... “I have to get it to the part and then pause it,” says the boy. “No,” says his mother. “You do that after you do your homework.” Not that I haven’t been guilty of the same misparenting myself, but.... If you expect that you can ever get an eight-year-old to walk away from a video and do his homework by persuading h…
Like everything in life, the thought of doing it, trumps the actual doing it. Finishing the basement, writing a novel, building the next great web app, raising kids all seem like great projects to embark on. But it's the dark night of the soul, when you're up for the 10 night in a row (or you have writer's block or you realize you shouldn't have cut that pipe, etc, etc). Life isn't all rainbows and unicorns. Speaking…
I thought having kids would be cool. Turned out to be awesomely cool beyond compare. They are, and always will be the things I am most proud of. Pretty much every day my kids do stuff that brings me happiness. Yeah I guess sometimes it's hard work, but so is everything :/ If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain...
I'd be totally and utterly lost without my kids (literally sometimes).
Have only been a HN reader for a short time (though I've been linked from here quite a few times), so please pardon my pollution of this story to ask a question: Does this belong on Hacker News? Is Hacker News turning into Reddit (minus the convenience of subreddits)? I visit both because HN was always just solid tech links and news, but several completely non-hacker stories (outside of the fact that we are humans, m…