251–260 of 358 posts
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Yes, but its an example of how small children think
Sometimes adults also think like this, in slightly less obvious ways.
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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?
Which is riskier? Playing Russian Roulette once? Or a dozen times? My mother gave me a spanking to impress upon me that playing with household electricity at my level of understanding was not a joke, period . 4 or 5 year olds, even precocious ones, do not have the cognitive machinery to be able to assess this kind of risk, and if they are unusually curious (which I was), well... Sorry, mom, about all the gray hairs I…
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A sign of maturity is to a) recognize when code is crazy, and b) document why it is so in a comment.
Here let me fix that for you: "document why it is so in an executable test".
The best analogy I've got is "if there is a dog that's a known chewer and I leave my shoes outside with it and my shoes end up chewed, who is it fault?". I'm the responsible adult with functioning cognitive skills, the dog simply is acting on instinct. Little children don't have developed cognitive skills, and their behaviour reflects what their environment has allowed. If you want to change behaviour you need to consider why it is occurring and work on countering the root cause.
It never ceases to amaze me how many authority figures think violence “fixes” a behaviour, rather than simply causing the issue to be hidden and breaking down trust and then later having it resurface many times worse.
Eh... I can count on a shop teacher's hand the number of times I was actually spanked or swatted when I was a kid, but after talking to my Mom about it, I think she made the right choice the times she did. To give a specific example, once was when I was about five, I had just learned about electromagnets, and was actively trying to shove bare wire into an outlet. Yes, the spanking did make me a little afraid of pokin…
Wait, so was the thing that underlined the message the physical punishment or your parent’s fear reaction? You seem to be equating them, but it's quite common for parents to demonstrate fear without physical punishment, and to administer physical punishment without showing fear. They are essentially orthogonal concerns.
I love this story. Little kid logic is so foreign to me now it makes me a little sad. Another example - we have our nephew stay over sometimes. One night, he did not, absolutely NOT want to go into the room he sleeps in. We couldn't work it out. He slept there a bunch of other times, no problem. Tried picking him up to carry him in, but no, he screamed like crazy. After a long, long time, he settled enough to tell us…
I remember, during a thunderstorm, being utterly convinced that a war was being fought outside. I was terrified ...
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This is also, as it turns out, one of the most pertinent things a developer should be considering at all times. Sometimes we may get a bit too refactor-happy, not seeing the use behind a certain fix, a line of code or a strange function. Our first instinct isn't to understand it, but to tear it down, gleefully assuming that it's useless.
This reminds me of the infamous comment block: // // 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 Edit: to improve legibility
// // 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
Honestly, this article really isn't about "the hand licking incident." It's about all the drama in the mother's life at the time; the drama in the mother's life was unrelated to the hand licking. In all honesty, this article would be much better if the author got to the point about the dry skin very close to the beginning, and then described why the drama in her family distracted her from understanding her son's problem.
(To re-iterate, the article isn't about hand-licking, it's about the mother's drama.)
As a relatively inexperienced parent of 2, the hardest lesson for me to learn is that it's not about me, it's about them. The second hardest lesson to learn is how to get my kids to explain their various aches and pains.
I 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…