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The Hand Licking Incident

raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com

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Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#271

Post by gugagore »

Faark wrote: post #176
warent wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It might be interesting to collate a compendium of strange child behaviors with simple explanations, and other problems to watch out for." I couldn't disagree more. This seems like a step in the wrong direction. The last thing we need to do is label even more human behaviors than we already do into the bucket of "strange." Actually, even saying that parents need to "debug" these problems may be going too far. Huma…

> The last thing we need to do is label even more human behaviors than we already do into the bucket of "strange." I couldn't disagree more. Having had a proper manual for my human body would have been amazing. I had a less intense but somewhat similar issue to OP's child. I was licking my lips and therefor got bullied for using "lipstick". Both stopped only after on one of those occasions a kid in their mentioned li…

I don't believe you replied to the spirit of the parent comment, since having red lips, and having messy bowel movements are not human behaviors, but are symptoms.

I bet what the parent has in mind is, for example, behaviors such as stimming.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#272

Post by dominotw »

zaroth wrote: post #220

This is a great anecdote to describe a formal approach which is called positive discipline . We assume as adults that children who do things that are not what we want or against our instructions need “discipline” in order to learn they should have made a better choice. This fails on the most basic point. Young children are, in most cases, not making a conscious choice at all in these cases. They are not thinking in t…

> Young children are, in most cases, not making a conscious choice at all in these cases

> children are straight up desperate for attention and affection of their parents

Does it mean that children have a motive but don't have the logical aptitude to get to the goal ?

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#273

Post by pathsjs »

benj111 wrote: post #148
rukuu001 wrote: post #141

I love this story. Little kid logic is so foreign to me now it makes me a little sad. Another example - we have our nephew stay over sometimes. One night, he did not, absolutely NOT want to go into the room he sleeps in. We couldn't work it out. He slept there a bunch of other times, no problem. Tried picking him up to carry him in, but no, he screamed like crazy. After a long, long time, he settled enough to tell us…

>Little kid logic My favourite is when you ask a crying child where they hurt them selves, and they point to the table they just walked into. Edit: Or have a paddy because they can't join the banana they've just cut in half, back together again.

As a non native speaker, I could not understand what was wrong in your child's answer, until I read the replies to your message. Even now, it still sounds a perfectly reasonable answer (and question too - maybe you want to put protections on that table or whatever)

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#274

Post by scott_s »

gwbas1c wrote: post #259

When I was almost 11, I started sucking on my knuckles because they were dry and cracking. My mother immediately knew what the problem was and showed me the hand cream. She didn't need to scold me or make a big fuss. Honestly, this article really isn't about "the hand licking incident." It's about all the drama in the mother's life at the time; the drama in the mother's life was unrelated to the hand licking. In all…

Structured in the way it is, the reader is lead along the same path of discovery as the author. That path of discovery is one of the main points of the essay, as the author clearly generalizes that experience to broader situations. It's easier for a reader to see more applications if they felt that discovery instead of just being told about it. Guiding readers along a discovery path is an effective rhetorical technique.

(It is also the structure of a lot of comedy and mysteries. Which should indicate that we tend to like the technique in what we read, watch and hear.)

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#275

Post by gugagore »

falcor84 wrote: post #238

A great story which really resonated with me from the operations / reliability engineering perspective. It is very common for junior engineers to jump into an action in case of a big outage before really trying to understand the problem. One example I've seen multiple times was to deal with a repeatedly crashing process by restarting yet another process. In some cases, this may help, but in others it can make the sit…

I think when something is very uncertain (because it's hard and/or the engineer is inexperienced), it's not possible to develop a mental model that lets you plan a course of action. However, taking a slightly directed, non-destructive action can sometimes reveal more information to you.

The idealization of this is coming up with some hypothesis, and testing it, which I think is covered by your approach. But what if you don't know enough to even know the right questions to ask. You may be dead in the water if you don't allow an unplanned action.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#276

Post by Timpy »

gwbas1c wrote: post #259

When I was almost 11, I started sucking on my knuckles because they were dry and cracking. My mother immediately knew what the problem was and showed me the hand cream. She didn't need to scold me or make a big fuss. Honestly, this article really isn't about "the hand licking incident." It's about all the drama in the mother's life at the time; the drama in the mother's life was unrelated to the hand licking. In all…

She talks about not feeling respected as a stay at home mom, her sister had a premature baby, they moved to Washington. Who is the target audience for this? The author realized her mistake, uses the article to absolve her guilty feelings, and talk about her own drama. It really is a valuable lesson, but everyone in the comment section here managed to share their "oh, kids are just kids, be more empathetic" epiphanies without the purple prose.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#277

Post by ateng »

tragic wrote: post #150
rukuu001 wrote: post #141

I love this story. Little kid logic is so foreign to me now it makes me a little sad. Another example - we have our nephew stay over sometimes. One night, he did not, absolutely NOT want to go into the room he sleeps in. We couldn't work it out. He slept there a bunch of other times, no problem. Tried picking him up to carry him in, but no, he screamed like crazy. After a long, long time, he settled enough to tell us…

I remember, during a thunderstorm, being utterly convinced that a war was being fought outside. I was terrified ...

Dry thunderstorm. I thought it was a building collapsing.

On a separate incident, I was about 10. TV signal dropped during a thunderstorm, and shortly after a thunder strike right outside the window. Truly terrifying experience. Luckily I knew enough basic science at that point to know that wasn’t some act of god!

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#278

Post by logfromblammo »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #257
xondono wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the infamous comment block: // // Dear maintainer: // // Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine, // and have realized what a terrible mistake that was, // please increment the following counter as a warning // to the next guy // total_hours_wasted_here = 42 Edit: to improve legibility

Indent 4 spaces to format as a code block instead of flowing together or separating with blank lines as paragraphs: // // Dear maintainer: // // Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine, // and have realized what a terrible mistake that was, // please increment the following counter as a warning // to the next guy // total_hours_wasted_here = 42 Note that on narrow windows or mobile screens this doesn't wr…

If a viewport cannot handle gracefully lines of 80 characters, it is not the fault of the person writing the 80-character lines. If a code block is the right answer, I would hope that people use it, rather than attempt a workaround just to avoid a flood of gripes from people on mobile who don't want to scroll right. Fix your scrolling issue by fixing your scrolling issue, not by trying to retrain everyone that posts on HN to cater to mobile viewers, in lieu of just marking the text that requires differentiation of newlines from other whitespace.

Also, you only need to indent 2 spaces:

  Everyone- use code blocks whenever you need them.
  Mobile users- don't complain about code blocks.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#279

Post by pbhjpbhj »

syllogism wrote: post #202
benj111 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Little kid logic My favourite is when you ask a crying child where they hurt them selves, and they point to the table they just walked into. Edit: Or have a paddy because they can't join the banana they've just cut in half, back together again.

The first one's just ambiguity isn't it? "Where did you hurt yourself? At Timmy's place"

I had this exact situation yesterday with a 3yo child, "where did you bump yourself?" "[points to shelf] there".

After asking twice I reworded and he got it eventually "where on your head did you get hurt" or something.

Re: The Hand Licking Incident

#280

Post by gowld »

zaroth wrote: post #220

This is a great anecdote to describe a formal approach which is called positive discipline . We assume as adults that children who do things that are not what we want or against our instructions need “discipline” in order to learn they should have made a better choice. This fails on the most basic point. Young children are, in most cases, not making a conscious choice at all in these cases. They are not thinking in t…

You're right that you can punish a child (or an adult) into understanding something they can't yet understand, but you can punish a child (or an adult) into refraining from a behavior, unless the person is incapable of understanding cause and effect. Billions of people (and animals) have learned to restrain their impulses out of fear of punishment. It's fundamental to how mammal brains work.
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