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Why Parents Hate Parenting

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Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#71

Post by pbhjpbhj »

dugmartin wrote: post #43

I think the parents in this article need to grow up. If you have so little emotional maturity that your kid's tantrum makes you upset you have a problem. They are the children, you are the adult. Act like one. 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 he…

>When she is in full flail I look at her and smile and say "you can do better than that if you try".

I have a friend who has 2 girls, he did this sort of playful taunting with them and it had similar effects to yours.

This sort of thing has not worked at all with my eldest (and we're just entering the tantrum zone with the youngest, hold tight!) who would simply do worse, smashing, hitting, kicking, biting in response. When they are damaging property and hurting people then IMO intervention is required.

Yes, standing back and letting him blow off some steam has helped on occasions but has not been half as effective as for my friend's girls.

Not all kids are the same.

My lad brought me to tears once because he was hurting himself having a tantrum and couldn't be calmed. I don't consider my response childish, but I'm not an objective observer.

Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#72

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sethg wrote: post #34

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…

>If you expect that you can ever get an eight-year-old to walk away from a video and do his homework by persuading him, you’re setting yourself up for unhappiness.

So you let your kids walk all over you?

Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#73

Post by zephyrfalcon »

nollidge wrote: post #70
zephyrfalcon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, and I'm sorry that some of the commenters immediately play the "child abuse" card. Teaching your kid that there are boundaries is a good thing, or you will end up with, well, the current generation of teenagers and college-aged kids in the US, who have a whole arsenal of excuses why there aren't doing what they should be doing, a sense of entitlement the size of Montana, and zero sense of responsibility. B…

Yes, you're right. It's millenial's own damn fault that unemployment in their demographic has reached nearly Depression-era levels.

Where did I mention unemployment?

Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#74

Post by jimbokun »

ergo98 wrote: post #45

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…

"What's important in life?" has always been one of the important underlying questions in the Hacker News community.

Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#75

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Robin_Message wrote: post #13
ja30278 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is contradicted elsewhere in the article by the observation that families who could afford more childcare were _not_ necessarily happier.

But things like paternity leave, maternity leave, requiring employers to consider flexible working -- these kind of things Europe is doing are far more family friendly than the republican party. The family values line of "mothers should stay at home" espoused by Pat Robertson et al. probably is better than both parents working, however much childcare you can afford. No reason it has to be the mother though. And the a…

>No reason it has to be the mother though.

Breastfeeding.

I don't lactate.

Now that our youngest is >1yo (as with his elder brother) then we're back to sharing labour and child care + chores 50-50 (in a way that's probably not open to most people). We've chosen this lifestyle and are below the official poverty line in our country because of it.

However, the little one is still not completely weaned and so needs contact with his mother at times during normal working hours.

Yes it's possible to pump and bottle-feed but breastfeeding is more than just nourishment.

Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#76

Post by btilly »

dasil003 wrote: post #56
bobbin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This societal moralizing about every single aspect of how one should raise their children is a big part of the problem described in the article. Well, you are trying to add unearned emphasis with "every single aspect". It's not about "every single aspect", although it is moralizing about compulsion and pain. > For the record, spanking is not necessarily abuse. depends of the definition. > For you to cite unequivoca…

Well, you are trying to add unearned emphasis with No, it's fully earned. I am a parent. I have witnessed first hand the moralizing, judgement and mutually contradictory universal expectations that random people have about how childrearing should be done. You don't know how much though I have put into the subject and calling it political correctness is incorrect... Fair enough, you may have put substantial thought in…

Hello. I am a parent. I am quite familiar with how schizophrenic you will quickly become if you try to do what everyone else tells you to do. I have put considerable thought into corporal punishment. And in my case the thought is both theoretical and practical.

While I grant that there are lots of people who are against corporal punishment as a matter of political correctness, there are also very good reasons not to use corporal punishment that have absolutely nothing to do with political correctness.

The first, and simplest, is that children model their behavior on ours. If you hit your kid, your kid will try hitting other kids. And, according to statistics, they are also more likely to hit other people in their lives, including spouses and their own kids. If you don't want to encourage that behavior, you need to not model it.

The second is that children who experience corporal punishment become more focused on avoiding the punishment than on internalizing the lesson they were supposed to learn. The classic example is the kid running out on a street looking around to be sure that mom isn't watching, and not looking for the car that is coming. Other forms of discipline have much less of this problem.

Corporal punishment also toughens the child's response to punishment. This makes them much less likely to respect alternate forms of punishment. Which makes them less likely to respect attempts at discipline in other child care settings, such as detentions at school.

Now you can try to solve problem 3 by supplementing others' punishment with your own corporal punishment. But only at the cost of worsening problems 1 and 2.

All of this wouldn't matter much if it weren't for the fact that other forms of discipline have been observed to be just as effective in altering children's behavior, and do not have the same drawbacks. Luckily those forms of discipline (and in many cases alternatives to discipline!) exist. And therefore there is no good reason to use corporal punishment.

Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#77

Post by Oxryly »

I'd say that becoming a parent will definitely come between you and your idea of happiness. You'll have to re-evaluate your relationship to happiness and satisfaction (and sleep and pain) and that in itself is difficult and not fun.

In the end you may be able to develop the skill of redefining happiness to suit the state you find yourself in, which everyone can benefit from.

Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#78

Post by dasil003 »

btilly wrote: post #76
dasil003 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you are trying to add unearned emphasis with No, it's fully earned. I am a parent. I have witnessed first hand the moralizing, judgement and mutually contradictory universal expectations that random people have about how childrearing should be done. You don't know how much though I have put into the subject and calling it political correctness is incorrect... Fair enough, you may have put substantial thought in…

Hello. I am a parent. I am quite familiar with how schizophrenic you will quickly become if you try to do what everyone else tells you to do. I have put considerable thought into corporal punishment. And in my case the thought is both theoretical and practical. While I grant that there are lots of people who are against corporal punishment as a matter of political correctness, there are also very good reasons not to…

Thank you for your response.

Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#79

Post by jpdugan »

In my experience, parenthood is often challenging because we are given so little good information in advance concerning what is actually challenging about parenting.

When we talk about the difficulties of parenthood, we normally talk about sleepless nights and tantrums and expense. We do this, I think, because these are safe topics. They allow us to have ritualized conversations about parenthood. We know what we are supposed to say and we say those things, even though we often don't think they're true or important.

But the real crisis isn't something we talk about. Raising children requires a huge commitment of time and energy--time and energy we can no longer give to ourselves or our spouse. And while almost all new parents try to keep their pre-baby lives intact for some period of time, eventually the futility becomes so obvious that they relent and cull many activities out of their lives to make space for the baby. The real crisis is one of identity. We fear that by cutting so many of the things we care(d) about out of our lives, we risk not being ourselves anymore. Am I the same person now? Is my wife the same? We don't talk about these questions because many of us don't like the answers.

For me personally, any such fears were unwarranted. I love my new life. Having children improved an already wonderful marriage--my wife and I are now an unstoppable team. My toddler has become one of my best friends. The infant just looks like a new buddy in waiting. But I'm a fundamentally happy person. I suspect it's like winning the lottery. If you're happy beforehand, you'll be happy afterward; if you're unhappy beforehand, you'll be unhappy afterward.

Re: Why Parents Hate Parenting

#80

Post by kenjackson »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #68
jasonlotito wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as hard as it seems. Patience is key, but it all comes naturally. Really. I was nervous, but honestly, it's rather easy. Yes, having the relatives close by helped. The best way to look at the situation is to remember that people have been having babies for thousands of years under much more difficult situations. Just love the child. Everything else comes naturally. Edit: Oh, and, of course, Congratulations!…

>Just love the child. Everything else comes naturally. I disagree. I agree with your encouraging sentiment but I don't agree that simply loving your child is enough - parenting doesn't come naturally to those who haven't grown up around it. Most people nowadays appear to only have their parents model of parenting to rely on and this appears to lead them to polarise away from how their parents treated them. Watched Ch…

Regarding your 15mo there's a good book called The Hungry Monkey. It's about a food critic who is trying to get his child to eat well. The upshot of the story, and from talking to various chefs in the story is that kids eat what kids eat.

It seems that the palettes of people continuously evolves, so even if he devours ice cream and doritos now, he may end up being the food writer for the Times when he grows up.

The key seems to be to present good foods to him. Let him see you eat it. But have something he'll eat too that you can bring out if he doesn't eat. It's more important for his development to eat any food, and humans are ridiculously resiliant to diets lacking in diversity (just use a multivitamin for deficiencies in key vitamins and minerals). Probably the only thing to watch out for is a LOT of sodium. But I'd be less concerned about things like fat and sugars than I would be for an adult.

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