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American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

1843magazine.com

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Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#131

Post by roel_v »

BeetleB wrote: post #111
roel_v wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising the children is supporting them, and helping them get over the fear of performing publicly (or whatever). It's not their job to be the technical coach of whatever they want to learn.

>Raising the children is supporting them, and helping them get over the fear of performing publicly (or whatever). It's not their job to be the technical coach of whatever they want to learn. Would you apply the same to, say, mathematics? Or chemistry? Or programming? Do you think the parents should not give their kids feedback on these subjects, and instead leave it to the teacher (aka technical coach)?

Largely, yes. There can be only a very small amount of subjects of which I would know more than a professional anyway. So no, a part of the job of being a parent is to show self-restraint when you feel that impulse to hyper-correct your child on every small mistake they make.

Look at it this way: you're starting a new job. A very stressful one, where you have to learn a bunch of new things, long days, and not just learning one thing - you're learning dozens of subject every day. There are a bunch of others in your cohort who are also learning and you're all compared and graded against each other.

Then you come home at night and you vent to your wife about your day and how this one guy is an ass-kisser and this other colleague is full of himself, with an example of something he said. And then your wife, who maybe took a college course on one of the topics you used as an example, says "yeah honey that sucks. BTW that example you just used, you're wrong, it's actually xyz". What would that accomplish? Would you think "oh thank you, now I didn't learn 50 new things today, but 51! Great!"? No, you'd think she massively missed the point, and is massively missing the point about you, and she would be.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#132

Post by roel_v »

forgetsusername wrote: post #116
roel_v wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising the children is supporting them, and helping them get over the fear of performing publicly (or whatever). It's not their job to be the technical coach of whatever they want to learn.

> It's not their job to be the technical coach of whatever they want to learn. That's insane. Of course it is! Until their skill in a subject surpasses yours, you're the only technical coach.

"Until their skill in a subject surpasses yours"

Which for all but one or two subjects, it will.

Look I'm not saying parents can't ever teach their children anything. What I'm saying is that parents need to know their place and role, and they can do much more good by being emotionally supportive and in general creating an environment in which children can and want to learn, than by being yet another instructor who's trying to cram ever more things into the child's head (much of which will be different from what their school or team coach is teaching them anyway).

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#133

Post by zanny »

6stringmerc wrote: post #30

> At the heart of the problem is an educational ethos that prizes building self-esteem over academic attainment. I'm not going to argue this assertion, because I think it's a valid one, but I would like to give it context that the author is seemingly lacking: As a generalization spanning several decades, parents aren't interested in being parents and in turn the provenance of their responsibilities at home - discipli…

This touches on something nobody wants to acutally acknowledge or talk about. There is some subconscious shifts taking place - marriage later or not at all, fewer kids per household, etc - but fundamentally raising children is a ton of work. It is its own job, possibly in a class of its own in difficulty or at least rivaled by almost any other profession.

But society and culture just expects the job of you. Do it, don't be trained to do it, and probably worse of all do not organize society around promoting those who are best at it. In any other disciple if you are amazing at it you should expect gainful employment carrying it out. And there is a dramatic difference between parenting and caretaking or teaching. And even those have really bad real world metrics to gauge success, given by how often sitters or teachers can perform poorly.

But you don't solve this problem when you shove down every adults throat how not having children means they are a failure as a person, combined with the expectation that they should both be good parents and have an independent second (or first) career.

Being a parent is its own job. Throughout history, humans have consistently dedicated tremendous amounts of absolute hours of its adult population to the raising of children. Societies often organized around the subjugation of an entire sex to do the job. It is crucial for the wellbeing and long term prosperity of current and future generations people accept that reality.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#134

Post by smsm42 »

gaur wrote: post #106
dwaltrip wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the underlying issue is that you don't like ads or tracking, you could try installing uBlock origin instead of disabling javascript. There are some other useful extensions in this area but uBlock origin is the only one I have experience with. It's been great for me. Usage of javascript as a tool for building web properties is only going to keep increasing, and grumbling about it doesn't solve anything.

> building web properties This phrase gave me pause (why not just say "making wesbites"?), but I think I have a handle on what it implies. "Making websites" is what you do when your main deliverable is content. Maybe you throw in some javascript for a little aesthetic kick or some nice features, but if a user comes to your website with javascript disabled, your goal is to still get the content to them. "Building web…

Regular people build websites. Enterprises create (or, more frequently, acquire) web properties. Buying a website for 100M dollars sounds insane, buying a "web property" sounds distinguished.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#135

Post by dwaltrip »

bumblebeard wrote: post #99
dwaltrip wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the underlying issue is that you don't like ads or tracking, you could try installing uBlock origin instead of disabling javascript. There are some other useful extensions in this area but uBlock origin is the only one I have experience with. It's been great for me. Usage of javascript as a tool for building web properties is only going to keep increasing, and grumbling about it doesn't solve anything.

This annoyed me too. I think it's fair to expect to be able to see something without JavaScript, even if it's not formatted correctly or missing fonts or whatever. I disable JS by default for performance reasons, not just because of tracking.

Why is it fair to expect this? On what grounds is the universe obligated to provide this?

I fully agree the world would be a better place if websites that primarily deliver text did do so. But I'm not convinced it is reasonable to expect it.

As a demographic, javascript disablers are a small minority. Additionally, they have other options for meeting many of their needs (ad blockers, privacy extensions, etc).

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#136

Post by kazinator »

NTDF9 wrote: post #22

What I've noticed common among a lot of Americans is a fear/inhibition of speaking the truth, mostly to not have a confrontation. I witnessed an example of this in a music performance of a teen rock band. In this performance, the band sucked overall. The guitarist didn't know what he was doing. But everybody (guardians, parents, teachers, friends) just keep saying, "Great performance brah, awesome shit, good going gu…

> Who's going to tell them, "Hey, your timing on the G-C chord switch sucked"

Why, 90 comments under their shitty YT video, 7 of them heavily upvoted.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#137

Post by squeaky-clean »

sheepmullet wrote: post #109
squeaky-clean wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your friend was learning to code, and wrote a tetris clone, would you congratulate them on their first major project, or would you critique their sloppy code? They had to develop and live with that codebase, maybe for several days or more. They're probably aware of some things that suck about it, but had to stick with it (otherwise you never finish). Having someone criticize your code, variable names, lack of patt…

In reality it depends so much on the context. People are primed for learning right after finishing a task. Is my friend just giving coding a go or are they trying to get a dev job? Is my friend trying to show me what they have built or asking for help improving the quality of their code? Etc etc. Likewise is this a 14 year old athlete trying to compete at the state level? Or a 14 year old trying out football because…

Great points. I imagined the friend learning as a hobby, but didn't mention it in the post. If they were learning for a job or homework I would definitely be more eager to offer criticism and criticize more heavily.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#138

Post by quadrangle »

dwaltrip wrote: post #128
quadrangle wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are you actually suggesting the complaint itself is invalid? That it makes sense for a website to fail to show plain text unless it can run some client-side JavaScript program???

It obviously isn't the optimal solution, but there are many factors at play here. A few I can think of: * The available tech stacks and tools for building and iterating on an online magazine with a rich UX that works on a variety of devices * The skillsets of the development team * The trends in app development (such as single page apps, which do offer certain advantages) * The propoprtion of people who disable javas…

Yeah, it's obvious that there are trends in large picture stuff that drive this stupidity. I get that. It's still stupid. If you find yourself in a position where it's expensive to make sure text can display without JavaScript, then I'd agree that the situation is not your fault. Whoever finds themselves in that situation could rightly complain about how stupid other people are for letting it come to this.

Sure, have a long discussion about all the complex challenges and even acknowledge (when it's true) that some stupid shit can get locked-in. Just don't try to deny that it's stupid.

There's tons of examples of things in computers that are fundamentally tragically stupid but got locked in and we have to just accept them. We're not yet at that point with Javascript-lock-in, but maybe we're on that path. But even if the situation is hopeless, it's still stupid. It only makes it harder for people to make sense of things if you use excuses to try to deny the stupidity of stupid situations.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#139

Post by dwaltrip »

quadrangle wrote: post #138
dwaltrip wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It obviously isn't the optimal solution, but there are many factors at play here. A few I can think of: * The available tech stacks and tools for building and iterating on an online magazine with a rich UX that works on a variety of devices * The skillsets of the development team * The trends in app development (such as single page apps, which do offer certain advantages) * The propoprtion of people who disable javas…

Yeah, it's obvious that there are trends in large picture stuff that drive this stupidity. I get that. It's still stupid. If you find yourself in a position where it's expensive to make sure text can display without JavaScript, then I'd agree that the situation is not your fault. Whoever finds themselves in that situation could rightly complain about how stupid other people are for letting it come to this. Sure, have…

You haven't addressed the core argument:

The vast majority of people (more than 99%) don't disable javascript, so from the perspective of the key decision makers (project leads, managers, CTOs, etc), it's a complete non-issue. They consider the usage/non-usage of javascript to be largely irrelevant.

Re: American Children Are Drowning in Self-Esteem

#140

Post by ryanmarsh »

rimantas wrote: post #77
gluggymug wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't teach kids I assume. I do. I am a judo coach of kids. I think the point is : It is not really up to the parents to be so critical of their kids. They should be supportive and positive. It is really up to the coach to provide the technical feedback and it is more beneficial to assess performance at the next practice when the kids are back in a learning mode. At that point they are mentally ready to practice…

Yeah, it's really not up to the parents to raise their kids. It's scarry how we get to this point where people write this kind of shit with a straight face.

Judo teacher is right. Having mom and dad be supportive while the instructor is tough can be the right balance. Most kids can't objectively separate their performance from their parents love and acceptance.
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