Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not visually obvious like braces; it's on the roof of the mouth and behind the teeth. You'd have to be looking upwards into my open mouth to see it, and if you're an adult—taller than a child—you wouldn't usually be in a position to do so. Here's a reasonable approximation to what I remember it being: http://www.gregjorgensen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08... I'll ask my mom what they were all thinking. Inc…
According to my mom, I had been mispronouncing R and L as far back as age 2, and there wasn't any period before the expander was removed when I did pronounce it correctly. So my experience exactly matches that of the above internet citation regarding pronunciation, speech therapy, and expander removal.
The Hand Licking Incident
321–330 of 358 posts
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#322I 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…
>people have treated me poorly because I was a dad with his kids. That's interesting. Honestly, I've found that I get passes for many mistakes, because the bar to being a good dad is set so low in most peoples' minds. If I'm not hitting them and basically know their initials, I seem to be a success. What has your experience been? If you don't mind me asking.
* Being asked by a doctor "where's the mum?" as the first question when I've taken to the children to the doctor.
* Getting a lot of offers for help because of an assumption of my incompetence. i.e. during kindergarten induction for my daughter, I was asked if I needed help with some of the jobs like covering books. I was the only man in the room.
* Getting glared at while playing with my kids at the playground. If you're actually playing with your kids and not sitting on your phone then suddenly you'll find ALL the little kids near you wanting to play. Mums don't like adult men playing near their kids, even if it's with their own kids.
* While Christmas shopping with two kids in tow I've received comments like "giving mum a day off huh?".
I feel I'm doing an amazing job as a parent so the constant assumptions just do my head in.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great solution! Now I just have to figure out how to disconnect my gas range and put it in my car every day :)
Point an IR-sensitive webcam at the range. Now I just have to figure out how to remember that I locked the front door when I forget to do the verbal "door locked, check" drill
Or just get a lock that closes itself...
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#324Am I the only one who thinks the parent is to blame for this because she didn't have the common sense to give gloves to her kid in the cold weather... To me that's unacceptable.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are arguing that the spanking AFTER you tampered with a wire saved you. First, you could have died before the spanking. Punishment after the fact never rights a done wrong. Second, at the age of 4, if your parents had just sat down with you and told you that you can die from electric shock, don't you think that would have made a lasting impression either?
I wouldn't trust a four year old to understand what death means.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#327Am I the only one who thinks the parent is to blame for this because she didn't have the common sense to give gloves to her kid in the cold weather... To me that's unacceptable.
I just want to comment in a constructive way on this. Do you have kids? If so, have you thought about, sorted out and covered all the things that would be unacceptable? What about what other people might think unacceptable, but you don't? If you however don't have kids, imho you are hardly entitled to criticise. There are many legit reasons that could cause the mother to not necessarily provide gloves. Then again yes…
You are overcomplicating things, while I keep them concrete: gloves in cold weather is common sense. I do not have kids (so points for you I guess), but it's a strawman argument: are you saying people cannot comment on situations that are not directly applicable to them? This is too weak. A more robust/practical approach is that I act the way I speak: when I have kids, I will make 100% sure they always wear gloves in cold weather :)
> There are many legit reasons that could cause the mother to not necessarily provide gloves.
There are exactly 0 reasons, especially since she later was telling the kid to wear them. Children need to wear gloves in cold weather otherwise they are cold. It's also recommended for adults.
> Then again yes, maybe she wasn't paying attention.
That's my point.
> That's not even the point.
Agreed: her point is completely different, and to me the gloves are the signal in the story, the rest is noise
> It's very easy for us here to voice our opinion and openly criticise
It is. If you put out your opinion in the public domain, you should expect support and/or criticism. People will attack your ideas, even if they are good. You are criticising me, yet I am not feeling sad at all.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!) No, the mother did ask: "I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution." The article doesn't imply that she asked him only after spanking him, and it seems unlikely that she did. Edit: fixed the quote from the article.
Looks like something went wrong with your copy/paste there, since you copied the same twice. But I assume you meant: "I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution. He couldn't explain it and the terror in his eyes was disturbing." That doesn't really sound like asking to me, but more like telling him off while also asking a question somewhere in between.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is that teaching people to restrain their impulses using a fear of punishment is totally different from getting them to change their behavior because they understand why the behavior is bad. When you simply punish someone without teaching them to understand you create a system of unwritten rules where the person is unsure whether any particular action will result in a punishment or not. But if you can cre…
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#330I tend to think that almost every time someone is doing something you don't understand or don't like, you're better off understanding the reason for the behaviour than trying to quash it. Even if you desperately want it to stop, they're clearly doing the thing as a means to address something so if you want to stop them using the current solution you should have a better solution to hand or the problem will once again…
There was a window in the beginning when she still had the kid's trust and could have dug deeper, but if/once you are not a trusted party, understanding the reason because exponentially difficult.
To your point, it applies to everyone. I remember social courses at the uni about how some classes of workers would obfuscate key parts of their jobs to protect themselves from having client/managers get their nose into it.
In that sense getting to understand the core reason might often be the biggest chalenge. A bit like how finding why a bug occurs is more than half of the solution already.