301–310 of 358 posts
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/769016.How_to_Talk_So_Ki... [2]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-talk-to-human-beings/
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…
If we define positive discipline as addressing the behavior and trying to compliment them stopping it, or "encouragingly" and "nicely" enforcing some kind of positive or negative punishment, then it's just kind of making the child more self-conscious and stressing them out for something they can't control. This prolongs the tic.
It's really what it sounds like to me here. It's quite common and nothing to worry about, at least for the first few months. Although in some cases it can lead to more serious long term issues and require intervention, in most cases it's temporary and goes away all on its own. The best thing in most cases is to ignore it. Calling attention to it just stresses out the child and makes it worse.[1]
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/transient-tic-disorder
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My 2 year old announces that the oven is hot, then goes up to touch it to confirm, regardless of me explaining it to him. I've never spanked him, I wouldn't be confident of him understanding a danger I had explained to him though.
While I agree with the comment saying the only thing you can do with a two year old is prevent them from accessing it, your 2 year olds reasoning also demonstrates why spanking them does not work reliably in that kind of instance either. Kids that age are in some respect smarter than we often think, but in other respects they're totally helpless. So he's understood that the oven is hot, but not that it being hot mean…
On the one hand it isn't far from smacking, on the other, it isn't a punishment as such.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 techniq…
> Structured in the way it is, the reader is lead along the same path of discovery as the author. I almost stopped reading. To put it quite bluntly, if she had put "the point" one line further, I was going to close the browser. The drama in the author's life was so unrelated to the problem that it really distracted from the point. Without the preemie and the move, it could have easily been, "the school year ended, my…
It seems the article wasn't for you.
> fundamentally unrelated to the point
The point (I got) was that life became overwhelmingly busy in other ways, freeing the author from obsessing over the hand-licking behavior, which sometime during this period went away on its own, almost unnoticed.
Generally, when an author includes a ton of irrelevant details, it's possible that they need advice on writing well, and it's possible that the details are actually relevant to a point which you may have overlooked.
It's so easy for parents (and teachers) to misdiagnose strange child behaviors. TFA is a wonderful example. Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar problems, autism (e.g., failure to make eye contact), skin problems, mild food allergies (why does the kid not like _fill in the blank_, maybe it's because it tastes "spicy" to them), and much else. Young children will not figure these things out by themselves.…
> "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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me, the point of the essay was the opposite of what you just said, instead: listen to and trust your child.
I think you're both right. By listening and trusting your child, you'll be able to successfully and properly debug. That's what happened in the blog post.
The point of a compendium would be -more than anything- to teach parents that things are not always what they seem. The hand-licking behavior might seem like misbehavior, but if you stop and think about why it happens, you might understand that there may be a much better explanation.
Eh, this article was a bit "Reader's Digest". Parent tries to solve problem, gives up and lets fate have its way, problem goes away when parent wasn't looking, parent-child have a moment of trust which reveals that the problem was something simple all along. Life lesson learned. How about when it's not a simple underlying problem ("hands get dry in cold climate")? A speech impediment which is cute in a small kid but…
> How about when it's not a simple underlying problem? Then applying brute force instead of empathy is still not going to work? I am not sure exactly what nit you are picking.
It's so easy for parents (and teachers) to misdiagnose strange child behaviors. TFA is a wonderful example. Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar problems, autism (e.g., failure to make eye contact), skin problems, mild food allergies (why does the kid not like _fill in the blank_, maybe it's because it tastes "spicy" to them), and much else. Young children will not figure these things out by themselves.…
> Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar problems, autism (e.g., failure to make eye contact), skin problems, mild food allergies (why does the kid not like _fill in the blank_, maybe it's because it tastes "spicy" to them), and much else. But this attitude is precisely the issue! Most of those problems are mild and fairly benign, and not all that common. We've gotten ourselves into this terrible mindset t…
For example, as a young child I hated meat, and it wasn't until years later that I figured out that it was because my jaw got sore very quickly when having to chew a lot. My parents tried very hard to get me to eat meat back then, but if they had not pushed me, but instead let me be and listened to me, they might have figured it out. This one sounds a lot like the hand-licking case in TFA.
For another example, as a child I sugar-lowed very often. More than once I went to my parents feeling very sick and my dad just took my temperature and said "you're fine" when in fact the temp. was rather low and a sign of sugar lowing. It would have been very nice to have figured this out years earlier than I eventually did. The worst sugar low I remember happened while I was 16 and driving home from a movie theater (where I'd had a huge candy bar and soda), and I had no idea what was up. At one point I was driving on a long, windy, hilly, busy two-way street, with a passenger, and I felt like I was going to die at any moment. I could have killed someone because of something trivial that no one stopped to think about.
Here's another: I used have episodes of losing eyesight for a few seconds. My dad actually took me to an ophtalmologist's office where they did a battery of tests on me and never found the issue. Eventually I figured it out one time when I passed out after a blood draw: I was having low blood pressure episodes. This one is a case where doctors were unable to figure out something rather trivial.
Here's another: as a kid my mom used to be punished for what turned out to be bad eyesight. What the heck!
Books like "What to Expect While Expecting" and "What to Expect the First Year" are fantastic and very useful to parents. Imagine a "Debugging for Parents" book that taught, among other things, not to see every odd behavior as misbehavior. Wouldn't that be fantastic?! I think it would be.
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 y…
I don't get why people find it so hard to empathise with a child. I've solved a bunch of my youngish children's problems by taking the time to try to figure out their reasoning and talk to them about it. I've had a huge chip on my shoulder about parenting for years. I'm a single parent of a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old and it's been this way since the youngest was a baby. I've had so many bad experiences, especially w…
>>To your comment about people not empathizing with a child. What I have observed is that people just get worn down. They just can't muster up the energy to see the child's perspective. They aren't bad people or parents, but being a parent is much harder than advertised. No one tells you it is an endurance sport. I am not sure how to give people more energy, but I suspect one of the reasons we organized ourselves in…
Along with all the other advice they would receive, if I were giving a new parent advice, I would say, "Be predictable". Have routines that children can follow. Always be telling them the next few things that are about to happen; don't just say, "Let's go, we're getting in the car." Tell them where you're going. Tell them what to expect when you get there. Tell them when they'll be coming home. We foster and once we get the children into routines and once they realize we tell them what's going to happen and when, most tantrums and bad behaviors go away. The rest is easier to handle because there's usually a specific reason for them. Children can't communicate as easily as we do, but they generally aren't that different from us. Routines help us to keep from getting worn down.