My sister said her boys could not have toy guns. "Mommy guess what this stick is?" One said.
Liberals are proud of heart. They are buffoons.
Imagine if the Pope wrote a new Bible for a thousand years.
Raising a moral child
61–70 of 159 posts
Re: Raising a moral child
#62Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. 'Tricks' and 'techniques' abound, and every other article is about 'teaching' your child to achieve/empathize/compete. You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they wi…
The best thing my parents did was be consistent. Early on I learned how to behave because I could predict my parent's reactions. How can a child learn to behave when all adult figures are erratic and irrational? Even the smallest things, like telling a kid Santa Claus is real can cause them to discount the value of truth. Reading behavioral psychology studies should require a skeptics hat. I'm not calling out these s…
For comparison's sake, it's neat to look at the psychological outcomes for children of alcoholics (where the element of consistency and predictability gets thrown right out the window). I realize that I'm a single anecdotal piece of data, but the good news is that therapy can help get over it :).
Re: Raising a moral child
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the original experiment -- see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20424094 for the abstract -- the toddlers stood on one side of a slanted table, so that anything placed on the table would roll down to the other side, where the adult actresses were. Presumably, the toddlers were not able to walk around the table. One way to replicate this at home, albeit imperfectly, is to place your toddler in a high chair, so th…
I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response. Although they might be excellent actresses, being mean to a baby is probably going to make you feel pretty rotten, at a level it might be hard to control, and the baby could be picking up on that. Animals can pick up subtle cues that are not apparent to adults; I'd be amazed if babies weren't at least as good. I'm thinking of Clever Hans http://en.…
Both actions seem to qualify as "mean to a baby" to me. Assuming the actresses agreed with me, this would cancel out the variable.
Re: Raising a moral child
#64Man, I just learned to compliment actions rather than talent, and now I have to do it the other way around. I get why, though. Moral actions are choices. Being smart isn't. If you praise a kid for being smart, he won't be able to choose to be smart. Instead, he'll assume he's smart and won't have to work so hard. I suppose praising an innate tendency to work hard might be more effective.
Having worked with kids a lot (long term, I would work with the same kids for 4-5 years and get a long term image of their development), it really seems to me like praising a kid for being smart is going to be better than praising a kid for working hard. This sort of gets coupled with the idea of 'work smarter, not harder.' When a child is praised more substantially for trying hard, you get things like staying up all…
How can children "push themselves such that they can land good grades without needing to study"? I can see not needing to cram for an exam, because a child has already put the effort in, but learning seems to require some form of study.
I think the real danger with this strategy is that when kids are praised for being smart, they seek out things where they are smart, and avoid things that would require hard work. Most worthwhile things require hard work at some point.
Re: Raising a moral child
#65This is not an article I would go to NYTimes to read.
Why?
Re: Raising a moral child
#66Re: Raising a moral child
#67I would like to raise a moral child, and I aim to do so, but I'm sure they'll be less successful for it.
In today's oligarchy it seems like the great majority of successful people today are either criminals or general pieces of shit.
Now, of course, being a success is not the end all and be all, but seeing your skills greatly outdistance your results can be quite frustrating.
Re: Raising a moral child
#68Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. 'Tricks' and 'techniques' abound, and every other article is about 'teaching' your child to achieve/empathize/compete. You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they wi…
The article actually goes further to suggest it's not how you treat your child, but also how they see you treat others.
Being a decent person is a great first step, but even so your child will eventually (probably often) do something you consider bad behavior. Possible responses range from ignoring the behavior to trying to beat it out of them, and you'll find parents all along the spectrum. This is how psychologists have found is a good way to deal with those situations. It's not entirely common sense.
Re: Raising a moral child
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having worked with kids a lot (long term, I would work with the same kids for 4-5 years and get a long term image of their development), it really seems to me like praising a kid for being smart is going to be better than praising a kid for working hard. This sort of gets coupled with the idea of 'work smarter, not harder.' When a child is praised more substantially for trying hard, you get things like staying up all…
I'm sorry, but what you are saying just does not match my personal experience, nor what the empirical studies suggest, which is the exact opposite : > When a child is praised more substantially for trying hard, you get things like staying up all night studying for a test. When you emphasize being smart and not needing to study, the child is more likely to push themselves such that they can land good grades without ne…
I don't mean to de-emphasize effort, it's still important to try hard, but I've seen a lot of cases where effort was focused on as the only thing that counts. For the smartest kids, that's not usually where the parental emphasis lies.
It depends on how you emphasize being smart. If you emphasize overall smartness, the kid will be more self-conscious about their weak points, which is what I wanted to convey. If you emphasize particular moments where they are good, they will be encouraged to repeat that specifically. It's a difference between emphasizing being good at [subset like shooting hoops] vs being good at [basketball as a whole]. Academically, the emphasis should be on the grades instead of on being good at taking tests. Or if you're more high-level, the emphasis should be on learning what's going to be most useful to you later in life as opposed to specifically effort or grades.
As for procrastination, in my experience the smarter kids procrastinate substantially more. But for the most part this doesn't come back and bite them. They leave exactly as much time as they need to pull off the good grade and most of the time it works out.
Re: Raising a moral child
#70Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. 'Tricks' and 'techniques' abound, and every other article is about 'teaching' your child to achieve/empathize/compete. You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they wi…
I felt a lot of this when I was growing up. A lot of times I could feel my dad trying to mold me into the best type of person possible. Not that it was unwelcome or that he was doing the wrong thing, but in a lot of ways it felt weird and unnatural. Sometimes it felt like he was a lot more guarded around me, like he couldn't be who he really was because he was trying to set the best possible example and be the best p…
Thanks for sharing.
In the terms of the article, I wonder if the behavior your dad was displaying was more motivated by "shame" than "guilt". Shame-based responses to me seem to be much more concerned with how a social group will perceive your behavior, whereas guilt-based responses deal with the rightness or wrongness of the action itself.
It almost strikes me as a choice between a moral absolute/relativist viewpoint.