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Ask HN: What's your approach to raising kids?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your approach to raising kids?

#11

Post by iExploder »

rsj_hn wrote: post #6
thiago_fm wrote: post #4

All those "school of thought" are just trends. Good parenthood is about being present and giving them attention, helping them understand the world and so on. Preventing them to completely use technology is BS. Let them use them, but going back to what I've said before, you need to be present in their lives. This means if they are spending too much time with it, it's up to you to enforce limits. But don't be a rude or…

Parenting strategies, like war plans, rarely survive first contact with the enemy.

every parent has a plan until their child has a nuclear melt down demanding chocolate and cake at 3 am in the morning

Re: Ask HN: What's your approach to raising kids?

#12

Post by lawgimenez »

As a father of an autistic kid, the only thing I can say is that be present and spend quality time as much as you can. Even if it is just an hour of you and your kid doing nothing, staring at nothing, playing at the same old toy. That hour of play will mean the world to your children. The more present you are as a parent, the less fussy as the kid grows up.

Re: Ask HN: What's your approach to raising kids?

#13

Post by TamDenholm »

The one thing you need to keep in mind is that ALL parents screw up their kids in some way or another, its impossible to be a perfect parent as humans are not perfect. You just gotta try to do your best, educate yourself as much as you can and use your own judgement. Don't worry too much, you'll become a better parent the longer you do it as you'll have more experience.

Try to talk to parents of older children and ask for their advice, try to also talk to parents that are outwith your own friends/culture circle too. Even if they've raised their kids in a wildly different way to how you have, their knowledge helps you decide how you want to parent, even if its the opposite of them.

Re: Ask HN: What's your approach to raising kids?

#14

Post by benj111 »

What works for you basically.

My general approach is to try and remember that you're bringing up a future (hopefully) functioning adult.

Sometimes it can get annoying when they keep asking why, but if you keep the above in mind it helps keep it rewarding for both of you.

Only tech for mine is a bit of TV before bed. BBC so no ads. The eldest has started school so he's doing a bit of computing. I'll keep them away from YouTube as long as I can.

Re: Ask HN: What's your approach to raising kids?

#17

Post by shrikant »

> - Did you think about what makes a good kid and work backwards?

Others have made some great points, so I'll just address this one.

I would not necessarily recommend doing this, unless you're able to have a high degree of confidence in the causality of your parents' approach/behaviours/ to raising you. Otherwise it leads a lot to the "my parents beat me and I turned out fine"-type thinking which is -- IMHO -- flawed and illogical.

I'd like to think I turned out mostly fine, but my current life circumstances are so wildly different from my childhood that it's basically impossible to isolate confounding factors, and therefore use that as any sort of sound basis on which to raise my kid.

Edit: I just realised I answered the question "Did you think about what makes [YOU] a good kid and work backwards?" instead of what you actually asked. My apologies for misreading, but I'll leave my soapbox up!

Re: Ask HN: What's your approach to raising kids?

#18

Post by protoman3000 »

I’m no parent, yet, but I can say that when comparing different parenting styles I witnessed over the years, parents who put more attention to develop and nourish the competency to self-accept, to steer with rational insight, to not use shame and blame to nudge behavior (while also working on to empower their children to withstand shaming and bullying by the outside world), to feel their emotions to develop competency in emotional regulation, to make them feel safe and playful while never losing the sight for the bigger goals, to give and show unconditional love, to not bind rewards to soothing of emotionally pressured/stressed states, produced much more content and successful children.

Of course, these concepts are very difficult to teach in the very early years, but it is the very first years that are very formative for all the schemas that will haunt your child throughout the rest of their lives.

But again, I don’t have children and I’m no expert on this so please don’t follow my advice.

Re: Ask HN: What's your approach to raising kids?

#19

Post by inductive_magic »

I don’t have kids yet, but I’ve given the topic some thought.

My approach is basically “don’t repeat the mistakes of my parents, but don’t oversteer in the other direction either”.

Goals: - foster curiosity while providing stability - don’t shove down my understanding as absolute truth, but discover conclusions together with them to a) align (which I think is very critical) and b) set them on a path of robust autonomy. I don’t want my kids to become dogmatic, because I don’t believe in dogmatic people.

I don’t think of technology as an important tool wrt parenting. Parenting, to me, is about trust and alignment, while technology is an extension of the self. Accordingly, kids should only have access to tech as a means to help them grow.

When the time comes, I would read into the topic of dopamine and make sure not to be irresponsible wrt fast media exposure for early-stage developing brains.

I would not subscribe to predefined styles of parenting. Advice of the past has rarely proven useful in environments subject to immense change, and I think that parenting is such an environment.

Re: Ask HN: What's your approach to raising kids?

#20

Post by The_Colonel »

Every child is different, so planning to stick with some specific strategy won't survive the contact with reality. You try many different things and see what works.

> How did you use technology to help you?

Brushing teeth at first didn't work at all. My daughter just screamed all the time, every day. TV with some pop music sort of hypnotized her and finally brushing was possible. That was one early success with technology.

> Did you keep your kids away from technology (like watching TV) for the first couple of years or just go for it?

Our 3-year-old is allowed to watch TV in the evening. A big thing was to define the specific time - she knows she can watch only in the evening, so she doesn't nag us at other times. Before defining this time for watching, she kept nagging all day long, in a way it was a torture for both us and her.

She prefers youtube (on a tablet), but it's sort of like TikTok for kids. A lot of short, stupid dopamine spikes. So we try to limit that and play actual cartoons with stories on Netflix.

We also try to introduce her into some games on the tablet so that the entertainment isn't passive watching only.

One perhaps controversial things I try to teach my daughter is to make sure she knows that we parents are the decision makers and what we say is also what will happen. That doesn't mean a lack of empathy, we try to explain our decisions as much as possible and we do yield sometimes when the situation warrants it.

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