How to get kids to pay attention • Hacker News Board

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#131

Post by baxtr » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 8:46 PM UTC

Be aware that the conclusion is not rock solid:

So maybe the Maya children are more attentive in the origami/toy experiment — not because they have better attention spans — but because they are more motivated to pay attention. Their parents have somehow motivated them to pay attention even without being told.

They say maybe... I can think of other reasons why Maya children seem to be more interested in anything happening in a western lab, than western kids. I don’t know the details because I haven’t read the original paper, but reading the article I’m not sure this effect has been ruled out.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#132

Post by woodandsteel » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

unit91 wrote: post #109

I have 6 kids, and I've found it's pretty simple to get kids to pay attention (or anything else). Be consistent, and willing to discipline if necessary. Here's the order I follow: 1. Polite request 2. Polite command 3. Stern command 4. Warning 5. Push-ups 6. Spanking They know I love them and because of that love obedience is required. Situations rarely escalate past step 2, and step 6 is memorable. ETA: for anything…

Ok, but in the Mayan method, the kids figure out for themselves what needs to be done, so you rarely have to do even step 1. The fact that you don't seem to have gotten that makes me think you didn't actually read the article.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#133

Post by johnchristopher » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 8:49 PM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #100

mos_basik wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a cultural vibe of individualism [where?] preventing overwatch of kids [whose kids?] by adults which has led, in part, to the prohibitive [prohibiting what?] autonomy that I had as a kid. I don't quite understand what you're saying here, but I'm genuinely interested. Could you clarify? Active listening: What I thought you said is that in, say, the Philippines, there is a culture of individualism that prevent…

My interpreta is that in many other countries there is a sense of collectivism in that everyone takes care of children and collaborates a little bit. If you see a kid, you don’t think something must be wrong, you lend assistance to their parents by being an impromptu guardian and help the kid achieve their means. Whereas in the US the modus operandi is “Well it’s not my kid what do I care? Their parents must be terri…

Anecdote: in Belgium, everything changed after the Marc Dutroux case. Teenage girl friends of mine who worked summer jobs as youth camp workers told me they were anxious to bear children in arms or being seen too close to them. Same reasoning with letting children walking alone to school.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#134

Post by c22 » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 8:52 PM UTC

unit91 wrote: post #109

I have 6 kids, and I've found it's pretty simple to get kids to pay attention (or anything else). Be consistent, and willing to discipline if necessary. Here's the order I follow: 1. Polite request 2. Polite command 3. Stern command 4. Warning 5. Push-ups 6. Spanking They know I love them and because of that love obedience is required. Situations rarely escalate past step 2, and step 6 is memorable. ETA: for anything…

I've never been past step 3 with my kids. A stern request will often invoke tears, but is usually effective. If not, I'll modify the environment, either by removing the thing that's the focus of the problem or by removing the child to another location. When my oldest was very young she used to unfurl the toilet paper in all the bathrooms, so we kept it on a shelf she couldn't reach. When she started potty training we put it back and the unfurling started happening again. Someone would always stop her pretty quickly, but it was frustrating having to be constantly vigilant. I understand how satisfying it must be to watch the paper fly off the roll at speed and pile up on the floor and after all, you only live once, so one day I made a deal with her: I'd let her unfurl an entire brand new roll all the way down to the cardboard and then we'd never do it again. After that the rolls lived happily ever after on their dispensers.

I'm also hyper conscious about the media they consume. The girl began consistently saying please and thank you after watching The Busy World of Richard Scarry and we never prompted her or even explicitly taught her those words.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#135

Post by johnchristopher » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 8:54 PM UTC

wrycoder wrote: post #123

herrokan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why do pilots and cleaners need different wages supply and demand

"The last few years I cleaned toilets for a living, but I decided that sucked, so this year I'm a project lead at Google." I'll bet there are trash collectors that earn more than commercial pilots on second tier carriers.

Wasn't that myth debunked since it essentially happened to only a bunch of guys in NY ?

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#136

Post by pnathan » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

It's very hard to compare a hunter gatherer / traditional village society to the modern urban & educated society and have meaningful takeaways.

The crux of the matter is the requirement for responsibility. Rather than have this goofy teenagehood that runs from 13-25, forcing the matter of responsibility at an earlier age and accepting the failures is a critical difference.

Protecting children and ensuring they are not morally damaged runs exactly counter this reality. There's a good deal of cognitive dissonance and parental self-delusion going on here as well.

I have generally grown to have a dislike of child labor laws that prohibit or limit working after 14. It's doing a great disservice to the young adults who could be doing something constructive in character.

Same goes for chores: children should be doing a full set of chores in household rota as soon as they are physically able. Vacuuming, dishes, pet litter, etc.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#137

Post by s-shellfish » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

maltalex wrote: post #4

> For starters, he says, ask your kid this question: 'What would you do if you didn't have to do anything else?' In the western world the answer to that question is often some addictive activity such as playing video games, or watching videos on youtube.

Do we have to call it an addiction?

A video game is an immersive experience that allows an individual to effectively sync into a state of flow detached from reality.

If reality is chaotic and stressful and reinforces that sentiment from all directions to yield those internal feelings of agony, it seems obvious that anything that can alleviate such agony would be immediately ran to.

Better to be addicted to video games than heroin, right? At least video games can teach modular reasoning. And yes, extreme cases of video game addiction have led to death, but a kid having a daily hobby of playing video games after school is not the same thing.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#138

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 8:59 PM UTC

2trill2spill wrote: post #21

projectramo wrote: post #6

I guess my follow up is: which is better? Is it better not to pay attention to tasks and imagine other stuff or is it better to focus on the task no matter how trivial? In other words, should the Maya kids be learning from the Americans?

Interesting question. I certainly have had many great ideas while not paying attention and being bored out of my mind in school.

I agree. Personally, I don't remember what boredom is. I stop paying attention whenever I can get away with it, happy that I just reclaimed some time from a bullshit situation - time which I can use to think about problems that interest me.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#139

Post by s-shellfish » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

eezurr wrote: post #2

TL;DR: Autonomy; which holds true for adults and children.

Adults don't have to be any different from children in terms of autonomy.

We get these weird ideas of what gives us personal security, what keeps our lives from devolving into chaos, what we are able to do and what we were never good at. Those ideas are what take away autonomy for adults, because the opposite is often demoted to a triviality like 'the innocence of children', brain plasticity (mind like sponge), etc.

Re: How to get kids to pay attention

#140

Post by fb03 » Sun, Jul 01, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #136

It's very hard to compare a hunter gatherer / traditional village society to the modern urban & educated society and have meaningful takeaways. The crux of the matter is the requirement for responsibility. Rather than have this goofy teenagehood that runs from 13-25, forcing the matter of responsibility at an earlier age and accepting the failures is a critical difference. Protecting children and ensuring they are no…

> Same goes for chores: children should be doing a full set of chores in household rota as soon as they are physically able. Vacuuming, dishes, pet litter, etc.

It is insane that some parents I know would like to reply to this part of your answer like this: "Kids should be kids you shouldn't force them to be adults too soon or you might steal their childhood". I've literally heard that.