We assume as adults that children who do things that are not what we want or against our instructions need “discipline” in order to learn they should have made a better choice.

This fails on the most basic point. Young children are, in most cases, not making a conscious choice at all in these cases. They are not thinking in their brains, the same way we adults imagine a conscious decision making process occurs, weighing the concequences and choosing a certain path. They are not deciding to be bad because it is easier/more fun/worth it at that age.

Positive discipline is not actually discipline at all. It is fundamentally a realization that children make “mistakes” because they weren’t actually capable of doing what was asked of them.

The essence of positive discipline is the search for the underlying reason a child is not capable of following your direction at that point in time / for the task at hand.

Barring an exceptional case, (younger in particular) children are straight up desperate for attention and affection of their parents.

Sometimes this is the hardest thing in the world, as a fully functioning adult, when your child is doing something [annoying/destructive/insulting/dangerous/disgusting] after the n-th time you’ve told them not to. Adults respond to punishment / negative reinforcement very differently than [young] children.

In particular keep in mind this is primarily a learning experience for a child to develop coping skills and the ability to regulate their emotions. The skills don’t develop very well from a basis of fear of reprisal in my opinion.

I’m not always able to practice positive discipline with my kids, but I can’t count the number of occasions where I’ve pulled out that tool in response to some stressful situation and watched the sheer relief/release on my kid’s face when they manage to actually communicate outloud to someone that will listen that thing that had them so upset or feeling sad/mad/lousy.

She learned to sweep a floor, and I learned that often, when kids aren't meeting your expectations it because they honestly don't understand how to do it. I didn't have a child for a long time after this, but I think of this vignette often.

Even at work with junior colleagues, often they have no earthly idea what the expectations are or how to fulfill them. They need to be taught and just expressing your disapproval isn't going to help.

If we define positive discipline as addressing the behavior and trying to compliment them stopping it, or "encouragingly" and "nicely" enforcing some kind of positive or negative punishment, then it's just kind of making the child more self-conscious and stressing them out for something they can't control. This prolongs the tic.

It's really what it sounds like to me here. It's quite common and nothing to worry about, at least for the first few months. Although in some cases it can lead to more serious long term issues and require intervention, in most cases it's temporary and goes away all on its own. The best thing in most cases is to ignore it. Calling attention to it just stresses out the child and makes it worse.[1]

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/transient-tic-disorder

But if you can create an understanding of why the action was bad then you can give the person a toolset to understand whether their future actions will be bad. And hopefully you can create a society of people whose behavior is determined by their understanding of right and wrong and not by whether or not they think they will be punished for something.

I think you're grossly oversimplifying the way people work if you don't see the difference here.

Out in the real world, when someone tells you to obey because they are stronger, you tell them to stuff it. It is widely agreed that in society, people need better reasons to be obeyed than that (even if the strong do tend to get their way more often...).

I think what you said about understanding future actions and disconnecting them from punishment is spot on.

Now even a lower mammal can learn instinctively through positive and negative reinforcement. I think the problem is significantly more complex in young humans because the capacity for complex reasoning is there but just not firing on all neurons properly. So your negative reinforcement is more likely at that age to just confound the situation than a simple Skinner box with a rat experiment suggests.

It’s certainly not the case that punishment (or we can say “negative consequences”) are never appropriate. A negative consequence should make sense in the context of the behavior.

Yesterday at the airport, a woman with a young child was waiting in a long line at the airport food court in front of me. She was scolding her child for wandering off. The child had a small backpack of toys which he was dropping on the ground and then was walking off (a few feet) and peering around things playing hide-and-seek. The mother would get angry and scold the child to pick up his bag, and stop wandering off. A few times she chased after the boy and he gleefully ran away from her.

The child was clearly not mentally capable of waiting in the line. The mother was agitated because the line was long, she was afraid of losing her place, and didn’t want to lose sight of her child in a crowded space. So she told the boy if he walked off again she was going to throw away his toys. When he did that, she changed tactics threatening that she would “spank him in front of all these people”. At that point I asked if I could hold her spot for her, and she was able to focus on her child until her turn came.

Now that’s a glaringly obvious example of a child being totally “outmatched” by the difficulty of standing in an airport line. I can barely handle it myself sometimes. But there’s a wide spectrum of misbehavior which ultimately boils down to just being beyond a child’s mental capability, which may be diminished because of lack of sleep, hunger, or something challenging that happened earlier in the day (which could be seemingly insignificant, like a friend wanting to play a different game at recess). Until you stop to ask, it’s just so much so simpler to assume they “just aren’t listening”. It can actually be exhausting sometimes to give the benefit of the doubt. More than once I’ve felt like an ass after jumping to a threat or knee-jerk punishment only to shake my head when my wife steps in and gets to the root cause. Luckily every once in a while the situation is reversed and I get a few of my own saves too.

It never ceases to amaze me how hard parenting is, and how unprepared we go into it. I like to say that kids take an infinite amount of effort to raise.

> children are straight up desperate for attention and affection of their parents

Does it mean that children have a motive but don't have the logical aptitude to get to the goal ?

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 there was a "BIG FROG" (said with wide eyes, mouth turned down) in his room.

Turns out that over the traffic noise he could hear a frog croaking outside his window. It was a noise we'd all just dismissed.

Opened and closed the window to show him it was outside.

Asked him how big he thought the frog was. Held his arms out as far as they would go. I showed him a video of a tiny croaking frog on my phone. Not the same as the outside frog, but close.

He was ok after we showed him the window was locked, and the frog wouldn't be able to get in.

Well, you have to admit that your nephew logic was flawless.

As him, you wouldn't go into your room if you though there is a one meter frog waiting for you.

His priors were weird, but that's to be expected with little experience of the world.

...and the adults, thinking themselves smart, reach right in, touch the glowing chunk of pure evil, and evaporate in a puff of smoke.

To this DAY I am so angry at those parents...

My favourite is when you ask a crying child where they hurt them selves, and they point to the table they just walked into.

Edit: Or have a paddy because they can't join the banana they've just cut in half, back together again.

It's a fine answer, though. Not to the question I asked, but it's something I can work with.

After asking twice I reworded and he got it eventually "where on your head did you get hurt" or something.

"He wants to have sex in a really uncomfortable place"

"Like in the back of a Volkswagon?"

On a separate incident, I was about 10. TV signal dropped during a thunderstorm, and shortly after a thunder strike right outside the window. Truly terrifying experience. Luckily I knew enough basic science at that point to know that wasn’t some act of god!

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.

What I have observed is that people just get worn down. They just can't muster up the energy to see the child's perspective. They aren't bad people or parents, but being a parent is much harder than advertised. No one tells you it is an endurance sport.

I am not sure how to give people more energy, but I suspect one of the reasons we organized ourselves in small closely knit families in the past was to help with this very problem. Contrast that with today in most wealthy countries...

Totally agree with your overall point of kids being kids.

Along with all the other advice they would receive, if I were giving a new parent advice, I would say, "Be predictable". Have routines that children can follow. Always be telling them the next few things that are about to happen; don't just say, "Let's go, we're getting in the car." Tell them where you're going. Tell them what to expect when you get there. Tell them when they'll be coming home. We foster and once we get the children into routines and once they realize we tell them what's going to happen and when, most tantrums and bad behaviors go away. The rest is easier to handle because there's usually a specific reason for them. Children can't communicate as easily as we do, but they generally aren't that different from us. Routines help us to keep from getting worn down.

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.

What I learn from your comments is that in your area mums usually take their kids to the doctors, single dads are viewed as more incompetent, mostly women play with kids at the playground, and men Christmas shopping with two kids are more likely to be married than single.

You are the anomaly and therefore are being wrongly categorized. This is not a personal thing at all! Quite the opposite, it's a manifestation of how your peer group is perceived by the general public. I bet that people that get to know you change this perception and adapt it to you, personally.

Perhaps it might be interesting to picture instead a female engineer, repeatedly being dismissed as a receptionist. Or a black male engineer, repeatedly assumed a janitor or intruder and getting grief. And then see if you're still happy with those comments?

For whatever it's worth, I'll just share how I made my own peace with something somewhat similar. I think to myself something like "Aaaannnd, welcome yet again to the long fight against prejudice and discrimination. That I once thought <bemused head shake> I was somehow insulated from it burning me, that my participation in the fight was somehow optional, was the obliviousness of male white professional privilege. Thank you person/institution/life for the reminder. And the reminder that so many face so worse." Works for me. As frequency increases, that might need a different form.

I wonder if some occurrences might be teachable moments for some? Leaving people better than you found them.

Sometimes one can dodge prejudice with subgroup membership signalling, as people seem to do a lot of profile matching. I remember baby throw-up stains having that effect. And sometimes "unrelated" prejudices can be leveraged - when doing child care, I tended to button-downs and not T shirts, if only for potentially improving response time in an emergency, as they seem to toggle many between "how may I help you sir; yes sir" and "what'da you want bud; well, let's see". You might find professional-class signalling might alter peoples' male-threat profiling?

I expect there's how-to literature about all this. Both on coping with discrimination in its various forms, and for male primary caregivers in particular.

I'm not gp, but I'm assuming both your experiences are rooted in the same incorrect idea: that dads are lesser/"assistant" parents, real parenting is done by (and expected of) moms.

No doubt gp probably experienced the automatic suspicion heaped on any man with small children without a plausible mother-figure around.

// // 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

Also, you only need to indent 2 spaces:

  Everyone- use code blocks whenever you need them.
  Mobile users- don't complain about code blocks.

I'd argue the first example illustrates my point quite well (but forgive me if this gets too ivory tower). It would seem highly unlikely that the wrapping bug is intimately coupled with whatever else the component is doing. It will likely come up again in some other situation, in this project or another. After all, some users will be on this browser forever.

All this suggests we would like to factor it out, in the name of the single responsibility principle and don't repeat yourself. And the extracted component should then be thoroughly tested to it's own why. That component's why, in particular, is to work around the browser bug, so a test specification that describes precisely which versions of Windows and IE are required to be worked around is actually exactly what you want.

As to good robot control and screen geometry, I don't think that's really science fiction anymore, unless your requirements are more exacting than mine.

An executable test is good for documenting what a piece of code should do, but not always entirely sufficient for documenting why.

Sure, a unit test might just document what code is doing, because that's really the only why. But most testing effort should go into describing the why more carefully, which must be done at a higher level, as close as possible to how a user will interact with the thing.

Writing tests at the user's level and not getting bogged down in minutia requires careful factoring of the what and why. The what changes frequently, so if most of your tests are overly focused on the what, you will constantly need to update them as the code changes. The why changes much more slowly, so if your tests are written to exercise the why rather than the how, they will be resilient to changes in the implementation.

Of course, the what has to be somewhere, and when it changes there will need to be corresponding test updates, but these shouldn't require updating each individual test. The what can be kept cleanly factored out into helpers, leaving the why to remain as the essence of each test.

There will always be a pathological case. The question is what approach will increase your chances of success, what's least likely to lead to problems, what's the cost-risk-benefit tradeoff etc.

Comments detailing the intent of a non-obvious function are valuable for maintainers wanting to figure out what's happening in the code. They are written in human-oriented business-oriented language, so they don't take effort to read. The intent of the code should not change that often. If they diverge from the code, the effort of changing them should be small enough to be worth it. Ideally they should be treated as important and if they are wrong it should be picked up in the code-review.

Comments detailing just the description of what a function does, by contrast, are not valuable, since that information can be deduced from the code itself. Every time the function changes, the comment will change. Reading them is as much effort as reading the code, so if they diverge it won't be picked up as easily.

There are always exceptions to these kinds of guidelines, of course, but this at least gives motivation for why I think comments should be used in this way.

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.

Young children will not figure these things out by themselves. Parents need to "debug" these problems. Doctors may not be able to help until you have some idea.

It might be interesting to collate a compendium of strange child behaviors with simple explanations, and other problems to watch out for.

I couldn't disagree more. This seems like a step in the wrong direction. The last thing we need to do is label even more human behaviors than we already do into the bucket of "strange." Actually, even saying that parents need to "debug" these problems may be going too far. Humans are much more complicated than a machine that must work "just so."

I couldn't disagree more. Having had a proper manual for my human body would have been amazing.

I had a less intense but somewhat similar issue to OP's child. I was licking my lips and therefor got bullied for using "lipstick". Both stopped only after on one of those occasions a kid in their mentioned licking can cause it, while i pretended to ignore them. I'm quite thankful to him and wish i could help others just like that.

Another is being lactose-intolerant. No idea when I became that, must have happened quite late. But it took me embarrassingly long (mid twenties) to figure out, change my diet and thus get rid of those messy bowel movements.

I see little value in not having those kind of knowledge available and instead having to find out yourself. And parenting would hardly be possible without understanding your child's behavior. If you have a problem with calling it "strange" or "debug", I'm fine with calling it something else. But i doub't many here care about (those) labels.

I bet what the parent has in mind is, for example, behaviors such as stimming.

I didn't know that word (but knew the sorts of [repititive] behaviours -- like rocking, hand waving -- as an indicator for ASD.

But this attitude is precisely the issue! Most of those problems are mild and fairly benign, and not all that common. We've gotten ourselves into this terrible mindset that allowing children to experience any little discomfort is a sign of bad parenting, while ignoring the damage our overbearing vigilance is causing — both physical, as with auto-immune diseases that seem to be linked to excessive hygiene, and psychological (in all sort of fun and destructive ways).

For example, as a young child I hated meat, and it wasn't until years later that I figured out that it was because my jaw got sore very quickly when having to chew a lot. My parents tried very hard to get me to eat meat back then, but if they had not pushed me, but instead let me be and listened to me, they might have figured it out. This one sounds a lot like the hand-licking case in TFA.

For another example, as a child I sugar-lowed very often. More than once I went to my parents feeling very sick and my dad just took my temperature and said "you're fine" when in fact the temp. was rather low and a sign of sugar lowing. It would have been very nice to have figured this out years earlier than I eventually did. The worst sugar low I remember happened while I was 16 and driving home from a movie theater (where I'd had a huge candy bar and soda), and I had no idea what was up. At one point I was driving on a long, windy, hilly, busy two-way street, with a passenger, and I felt like I was going to die at any moment. I could have killed someone because of something trivial that no one stopped to think about.

Here's another: I used have episodes of losing eyesight for a few seconds. My dad actually took me to an ophtalmologist's office where they did a battery of tests on me and never found the issue. Eventually I figured it out one time when I passed out after a blood draw: I was having low blood pressure episodes. This one is a case where doctors were unable to figure out something rather trivial.

Here's another: as a kid my mom used to be punished for what turned out to be bad eyesight. What the heck!

Books like "What to Expect While Expecting" and "What to Expect the First Year" are fantastic and very useful to parents. Imagine a "Debugging for Parents" book that taught, among other things, not to see every odd behavior as misbehavior. Wouldn't that be fantastic?! I think it would be.

The point of a compendium would be -more than anything- to teach parents that things are not always what they seem. The hand-licking behavior might seem like misbehavior, but if you stop and think about why it happens, you might understand that there may be a much better explanation.

Of course, when a child is very upset, they're also often unintelligible, so one of the most important things is to (at very least) remain calm so they have the chance calm down enough to communicate with you.

(One of my children has a speech impediment... it's not easy for everyone, but it is sooo helpful when communication can happen.)

> The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.

> Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.

> It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.

> So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”

> And it worked.

> She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.

It's a great essay overall. Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

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...

The techie's fix would be to install a 10-minute timer on the outlet so she can be sure it doesn't keep running.

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.

(It is also the structure of a lot of comedy and mysteries. Which should indicate that we tend to like the technique in what we read, watch and hear.)

I almost stopped reading. To put it quite bluntly, if she had put "the point" one line further, I was going to close the browser. The drama in the author's life was so unrelated to the problem that it really distracted from the point.

Without the preemie and the move, it could have easily been, "the school year ended, my son went to camp, we went on vacation, and sometime during the summer I noticed that my son stopped licking his hands." Or, it could have been, "my son spent the summer in the hospital and stopped licking his hands while he was in treatment."

My point is that the whole incident with the move and the premie is so fundamentally unrelated to the point, that it detracts from the strength of the article itself. Her son didn't stop licking his hands because of the stress of the situation, he stopped licking his hands because it was summer and the heat wasn't running.

It seems the article wasn't for you.

> fundamentally unrelated to the point

The point (I got) was that life became overwhelmingly busy in other ways, freeing the author from obsessing over the hand-licking behavior, which sometime during this period went away on its own, almost unnoticed.

Generally, when an author includes a ton of irrelevant details, it's possible that they need advice on writing well, and it's possible that the details are actually relevant to a point which you may have overlooked.

"The Convention [on the Rights of the Child] provides a universal set of standards to be adhered to by all countries. It reflects a new vision of the child. Children are neither the property of their parents nor are they helpless objects of charity. They are human beings and are the subject of their own rights. The Convention offers a vision of the child as an individual and a member of a family and a community, with rights and responsibilities appropriate to his or her age and stage of development. Recognizing children's rights in this way firmly sets a focus on the whole child. Previously seen as negotiable, the child's needs have become legally binding rights. No longer the passive recipient of benefits, the child has become the subject or holder of rights."

[1] https://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30225.html

Their philosophy has definitely changed my views on management and software process. In my head there's a bar graph for "controlling <-----> supportive", and I evaluate changes on how they affect that position.

Sometimes we as parents, colleagues, and partners forget that people sometimes have reasons (even if ones we don't understand) for doing things that don't line up with our own. We think people ought to act like us—after all we are the most reasonable people we know. :)

I've found in both my parenting and my professional life that remembering to ask the question "Why are you doing X?" or "What led you to take action X...": "Whether "X" is a commit or a strange habit, or even a destructive action more often leads to productive discussion. Sometimes, the other person's perspective can be interesting and informative.

A "I'm working as fast as I can. These interruptions are not helping. You can help get it sorted faster by keeping people off my back - I promise to update you as soon as I know anything" can be enough. Carry through, and give them enough to go back to their boss with to keep them away, and show them it actually lets you fix the problem, and thank them for helping afterwards, and they'll soon learn to prefer shielding you.

As for why the child said it was because his hands were dry: I hate to say it but maybe the poor kid just wanted to stop their maybe-a-bit-intense parent from "grilling" them about it again.

- Are your hands tasty? No - Are your hands dirty? No - Are your hands dry? Yes!

Problem solved. Plus a quick visual inspection will usually confirm dry hands. It’s not like an insidious disease with no visible symptoms.

Visual inspection revealed a lot of small wounds that were cause of the itching.

I tried washing them thoroughly and drying (no effect beyond temporary pleasure of hot water similar to scratching).

I put on them some cream with steroids that supposedly helps with wound healing. This helped for few days. Then the problem reoccured. I applied the cream again. This happened few times.

In about a year the problem came back. I didn't want to abuse steroids so I thought if I just wash hands and seal the wounds with any hand cream they will heal quicker. Worked just as good as steroids stuff. Only then I realized that my skin is probably just cracking because it's dry from vold weather and dry air.

At no point before my skin looked or felt dry. I never had this problem before in my 30 years of life. It was a new problem for me and lacking knowledge it was very hard for me to debug. The fact that I hate to have anything oily on my hands didn't help. Even now I put cream only on the side of hands that crack and only after they crack first time this season.

I would very much like to have a troubleshooting guide for the human body, right from the start.

I got something like that but limited in scope to pains caused by damaged muscles. The book is organized so that you can go from knowing where it hurts to knowing which muscle is damaged and what movement you need to do to gently excercise and stretch this muscle. Both things were surprisingly counterintuitive when my pain was caused by small muscles around the spine.

There is a little kid obsessively licking his hands in winter? They must have become very red and inflamed after only two or three days. Therefore, first thing a parent does seeing them red, is to put some cream on. End of the story.

https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

How would putting some cream on prevent the licking?

Cream doesn't last forever.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent...

> Criticism focuses on what’s wrong. Feedback focuses on how to improve.

> Criticism implies the worst about the other’s personality. Feedback is about behavior, not personality.

> Criticism devalues. Feedback encourages.

> Criticism implies blame. Feedback focuses on the future.

> Criticism attempts to control. Feedback respects autonomy.

> Criticism is coercive. Feedback is not at all coercive.

Children are people too, sometimes it's okay to talk to them.

I did this for about two weeks before the teacher finally grabbed my legs and shoved them into the cross legged position . From then on I learned how to cross my legs.

This passage really resonated with me. I fall into the same cognitive trap as that kid on a fairly regular basis. It happened between me and my parents until well after I left home, and it still happens between me and my wife and close friends. I've been aware of it for a while but have never seen it so clearly articulated. This has motivated me to redouble my efforts to take a more mature approach internally.

Humans are not perfectly rational and they are not always able to even understand let alone communicate their problems or motives. This is especially true if they're under stress or suffering from mental illness, addiction, or abuse.

One example I've seen multiple times was to deal with a repeatedly crashing process by restarting yet another process. In some cases, this may help, but in others it can make the situation much much worse. Instead, the advice I took to heart is to delay action until you have a mental model of the problem, and how the planned action would resolve it (and if possible, sense check it with another engineer).

In the best case scenario, you would have a trusted (well-tested) mitigation procedure that would provide you with enough time to recreate the issue and test the proposed solution in a staging environment.

The idealization of this is coming up with some hypothesis, and testing it, which I think is covered by your approach. But what if you don't know enough to even know the right questions to ask. You may be dead in the water if you don't allow an unplanned action.

To this effect only, I have started a journal to keep my behavior in check while dealing with kids. Needless to say it has helped me a lot and often times I have caught myself in the act instead of taking things personally just because it's socially unacceptable. Earlier my default mode if thinking was to treat a kid as an adamant adult ready to shoot you down is just a not worth it.

If only it were that simple.

Or "explain that it's for their own good". Sure, logic should work.

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, maybe she wasn't paying attention. Who knows. That's not even the point.

It's very easy for us here to voice our opinion and openly criticise. But it would be sad if that's what someone gets for being open about mistakes they made and how they finally worked it out.

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 <unpopular opinion> to me the gloves are the signal in the story, the rest is noise</unpopular opinion>

> 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.

> 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 :)

Which is very commendable, but bear in mind you might be forgetting things, or deciding different on things that are obvious for other people and not for you.

> 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.

Totally agreed. I just think that the tone and the intention behind the criticism is quite important.

Anyway, I understand your point better know, and realise that maybe I did to you exactly the same thing I'm (constructively I hope) criticising you for.

Nobody said that the hand licking was "Bad Behavior [and] Absolutely Must Stop At Any Cost". They looked at you like you didnt know how to teach your child how to be polite in public, and you chose that you must do whatever it takes to stop yourself appearing that way.

The fact that you were trying to solve a problem without knowing the cause was silly, and I'm genuinely happy for you that you've learned from that experience, but the worst part is that you attribute the blame to outside forces.

Sentences like "They made me make the problem worse by telling me to fix it" and "It's their fault I failed because I didn't know how to solve the problem and guessed" come to mind.

"It might result in worse things happening to my relationship to my child than him being mad at me about this one thing. So I tried to comply with this expectation that my child needed to stop and I needed to be the one to make that happen."

There is more shifting blame in this paragraph. Somewhere you missed the part where "to comply" is to achieve the outcome of your child no longer licking his hands, not to assault him.

Society views parents who hit their kids worse than parents whose kids lick their hands, so I have no idea where you got the idea of compliance being to hit your child.

It's nice that you learned one lesson, maybe you could learn something from how you wrote the article, and if you can remember, how you felt when you wrote it.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/769016.How_to_Talk_So_Ki... [2]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-talk-to-human-beings/

The other part of this is that it seemed like the real solution only came when the child was able to communicate better. So this reminds me of many technical problems I have had in a way. Most technical problems cannot talk of course. But they were similar in that the solution only came when the true cause of the problem came to light. Anyway maybe there is some commonality between a pre-speech child with a behavior problem and a thorny technical issue.

I guess I am lucky in a way that I only need to deal with technical issues because systems usually operate on a totally logical basis and it seems much less stressful than dealing with children.

Also, in this case the undesirable behaviour had a perfectly benign and easily fixable root cause, but that's not always (or even mostly?) true. In many cases my kids will be misbehaving because they're not getting what they want, eg. icecream for dinner or to not go to bed on time. In cases like these, it's the parents' job to say no. Of course it's very important to understand the child's real motivations but often it's going to come down them just wanting something they can't have.

I have no doubt that she asked him repeatedly why he was doing it but either he couldn’t answer or by that point the shame and pressure from himself teacher created a mental block that prevented him from answering.

Taking the pressure off is absolutely the right thing to do.

This reminded me of a UI Design principle, that users themselves often don't understand why they dislike a user interface, so their complaints and requests need to be explored, rather than taken at face value. Otherwise, when the first request is implemented, it may then replaced by another, and again, until the root cause is uncovered and addressed.

A very fuzzily remembered example was something like puzzling requests for data-entry form tooling, and the root cause turned out to be a multiple-page form lacking a "I can see it all, and see that it's right" confidence property, which was resolved not with tooling, but by simply making the form a single page.

One strategy I've found that can sometimes work is to engage with them in problem solving. Asking them what they think would help or if you have a guess, an action that corresponds with that guess. I've found its usually a more reliable source of information.

The internet is a boon for these things too. I know the author didn't have Google 23 years ago, but now there are a lot more resources to get on the right track with many strange kid behaviors, so it's like parenting in easy mode now.

Cnservatives (e.g. Kevin Williamson) sometimes say: "Don't just do something, stand there!" The lesson is that not all problems can be solved quickly or well or through active attention. In general this is an underrated response, IMO.

(Bumi in Avatar season 2 makes the same point: "I'm going to do...nothing!"Neutral jing FTW.)

Also even though the article the mother seems to think that they have gotten to root cause.. there may be more of a cause.

Dry hands is often because of the compulsive action of washing ones hands too much. So now there are 2 compulsions washing hands and licking hands to keep them dry.. By replacing licking hands with moisturizer you will still have 2 compulsions.. cleaning hands and moisturizing too much..

A 2 second google search will also bring up thousands of pages about kids licking hands.

Google did not exist 24 years ago when my now 31 year old son was 7 years old. The company was founded Sep 04, 1998, just over 20 years ago.

Note to self: Work on more clearly signalling context and time frame to my readers.

Also even though the article the mother seems to think that they have gotten to root cause.. there may be more of a cause.

The article mentions in brief that he has health issues. He got a proper diagnosis a few years later when he was fourteen. That helped enormously with a long list of complicated issues.

So his hand licking was likely rooted at least in part in the fact that he has a condition that significantly impacts his epithelial tissues, which includes but is not limited to skin.

The google hits (in a quick skim) are all ADD and autism type stories although adding ‘dry’ gets this HN thread, so that’s good.

I get that being a parent is hard and try to hold off my judgements on stuff like this over the internet, but ... I am not wildly impressed by this teacher or their parenting.

I'm glad that at least the mother came to her senses later on and decided to treat her child like a human being.

It sounds more like an infantile behavior, like thumb-sucking, that persists in some children well into school age much to the disappointment of their parents.

That said, the correct way to handle thumb-sucking is not to make it into a daily battle, just like the author discovered. It goes away by itself with little-to-no intervention required.

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.

"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.

Oops, you're right, thanks! Fixed.

> That doesn't really sound like asking to me, but more like telling him off while also asking a question somewhere in between.

After re-reading that part, I'm willing to concede that your interpretation is probably closer to the mark than mine.

Instead of having a judging/shaming/punishing reaction toward the author, read the article generously, and try to understand what may have made the author behave in the way she behaved. She gives plenty of fodder for that. And that is exactly what you think she should have done with her child (and which she eventually did do).

And based on what she wrote in the article and on her comments elsewhere in this thread, I don't think she's saying her actions with her child were justified - she is instead embarassed by her actions, and is giving people very valuable advice for things to look out for in your life that may make you behave in that judging/shaming/punishing manner, even when you don't believe you're the sort of person who might make these mistakes.

Perhaps take some time for self-reflection - you said that you were trying to hold off on judgement of their parenting - so why did you ultimately feel that judgement was necessary? As you note, the author did figure things out - are you saying that writing about a mistake, and the solution to that mistake, is "not wildly impressive" in general? If that's case, would you argue that post-mortems of tech problems are not wildly impressive?

How about when it's not a simple underlying problem ("hands get dry in cold climate")? A speech impediment which is cute in a small kid but weird in middle school and socially+career-limiting in an adult. Or an aggression issue. Or one of the many spectrum issues, which won't go away by moving to a warmer climate.

I agree with the article on not getting angry, but I'm not going to get a new life lesson from "if your kid trusts you they will open up."

I think expecting life lessons from everything on HN is counterproductive -- we don't need to get something life-changing from every single thing here for anything to be worthwhile. I think there were a lot of takeaways about communication and relationships -- not just parent-child relationships -- that could be useful to almost anyone here.

For me, "Investing energy into fighting with someone because no one knows the solution is just an exercise in undermining trust." was worth the entire read. Someone could just come out and say that, but it was made more meaningful and memorable to me because of the story. I'd always been aware of this concept but had never seen it verbalized until now, and that was valuable to me.

Shortly after that is another line: "I had caved to pressure because I felt threatened."

This is another concept that I thought was really important in conjunction with the first and it was nice to have them verbalized together; together they probably explain a lot of conflicts within a team.

Just considering them is useful for me, since it brings up related thoughts, like "don't threaten people, they may cave to pressure instead of reacting reasonably."

Sure, these are all simple concepts, but I appreciate the stimulus that made me sit down and recall/consider them. :)

Author here.

I had all of those issues. Both my sons are Twice Exceptional. One has a bad temper and is prone to violence. They both likely qualify as ASD. One had a serious speech impediment. He still has a speech impediment, but most people don't realize it.

All of those were easier to deal with because my kids trusted me. Trust was absolutely critical for resolving the hardest problems.

It's one post, so it's not going to answer everything. Hopefully, things will get fleshed out over time in a useful way for parents with such concerns, assuming I can get engagement and also find time to do this kind of writing instead of freelance writing to keep the lights on and food on the table.

I've never heard of this before -- what does it mean?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional

I believe public schools were much slower to adopt such concepts.

Amusingly enough, I had such a thing in elementary and middle school: I couldn't pronounce "r" or "l", but was convinced I was pronouncing them fine. (No one showed me a recording of my speech.) I was sent to speech therapy and learned some alternate way of pronouncing "r", which I almost never carried out because it wasn't what I'd originally learned and seemed weird and wrong.

Eventually, I had a dental appliance (a "butterfly expander") removed from my mouth, and I resumed correct pronunciation of "r" and "l" sounds immediately (while still in the dentist's office, I think). The expander sat just below the roof of my mouth, blocking a certain range of my tongue's movement that is indeed involved in making "r" and "l" sounds.

I wonder if the speech therapists knew about such things.

That just sounds like some sort of oversight.

http://www.gregjorgensen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08...

I'll ask my mom what they were all thinking.

Incidentally, I find one other case on the internet that bears some resemblance: "I had a narrow jaw, and I had a palate expander when I was 11. Basically, my mouth was way too small for my tongue in a way that pulling five teeth and doing spacers couldn't fix (we had to do that too, in addition to the palate expander). I had a pretty severe speech impediment (largely -R and -L sounds), and the expander cleared that up (after four years of speech therapy that did nothing). It was amazing! When they took it out, I could just TALK. I used to come home from speech crying because the teacher would tell me I wasn't practicing and wasn't getting better, and I WAS practicing so, so frequently. I just physically could not make certain sounds." https://community.babycenter.com/post/a51272845/narrow_upper...

Then applying brute force instead of empathy is still not going to work?

I am not sure exactly what nit you are picking.

Edit: Spelling

A perfect example for thrashing.

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 poking around outlets again. No, it did not make me resentful, and more dedicated to wirepokery than before; my parents were consistently trustworthy, so I took their fear reaction as something I should genuinely respect. And that very small amount of added fear in my life quite possibly saved it. If I got spanked for every little thing, I could easily see that shifting to resentment. But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me.

No, you can't. Maybe it did, but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead. It's easy to think we can untangle how a given event shaped us, but we really are horribly bad at it.

It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets). You can't tell if they are right about how it affected their behaviour either. In either situation we're guessing based on how it made us feel.

I don't think the very occasional spank is likely to be massively damaging, but I also don't think its necessary - I grew up around the time it was outlawed in Norway in the 80's. It was publicised enough that the one time my mother slapped me when I was a child, I threatened to call the police because I'd heard about it on the radio.

People insisted the change in the law would be a disaster and that children needed to be spanked, and it'd be all doom and gloom.

It was largely a non-event, apart from some pastor that made a big point of protesting and telling everyone how he still spanked his children.

Children still learn not to put wires in electrical outlets whether their parents spank them or not (as I'm writing this, I've had flashes of recollection of scary scenarios that feel like they may have been things I was told about as a child, but I really has no way of knowing if that's a real memory or "fabricated"). There was no massive rise in badly behaved children, or sudden surge of people electrocuting themselves. Of course, nor did it make us all magically better adjusted.

I have an entire childhood of other experiences I could relate to you that tells me that I do, in fact, know how I would have reacted in I had just been talked to. And I am genuinely grateful for the (very few) times I was swatted, because there are things in this world that fear is the appropriate response to.

You appear to have spent your childhood in a safe country. I did not. If what I am saying sounds foreign to your mindset, consider yourself lucky, and I mean that with genuine sincerity.

>It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned not to stuff wires in outlets).

You understand the innate survivorship bias in this example, right? Of course you can talk to the people who never poked wires in to an outlet- they're still here to talk.

We also know that hitting your pets does not work either, yet for some reason we seem to believe that hitting children is effective.

My point is that negative reinforcement has its place, not that it is desirable in and of itself. My parents very seldom used it, but it wasn't completely off the table, and I am confident that I benefited from that approach. That is a fundamentally different situation than one where spankings or other physical punishment are so common as to have children lose trust in their parents. I always trusted my parents.

>We also know that hitting your pets does not work either, yet for some reason we seem to believe that hitting children is effective.

Speaking of pets and pain: the hotwire that I used around the horse corral kept both my dogs and the horses safe, with only an absolute minimum of actual pain. No animal needed more than one or two incidences of contact to learn to not mess with the fence, and there was no more effective solution available. Note that this isn't hitting or striking an animal out of anger- it is a very specifically directed form of negative reinforcement to prevent otherwise dangerous behaviors from spreading. It works very well, and does not cause the affected animals any long-term trauma. The just learn to respect the wire barrier. Just like they know that it will hurt if they touch it, they also know that it won't chase or bother them if they leave it alone, and that's usually how it goes, no stress beyond the first few contacts.

Sorry, but with all due respect: You do not. You know that with the accumulated past experience you had, you acted a certain way in a different situation. You do not, for example, know if the reason you acted differently when just talked to was that you'd gotten accustomed to more serious reactions for something serious and therefore interpreted the talking to as less important and dismissed it. You make the point yourself that it was rare, and is something you tie to really important lessons, so it would make sense if you dismiss being talked to as implying something isn't that dangerous.

Of course, again, we can't know.

> You understand the innate survivorship bias in this example, right?

Yes, I do. But you do not seem to have understood that the point of giving that example was that your example is also down to survivorship bias, and to illustrate why that makes anecdotes like this (both of our anecdotes) worthless as a means of determining how well either alternative works.

My point was not to prove that "my" alternative is better, but to illustrate why personal experience is a poor basis for drawing conclusions about this (and again: yes, that applies to my experience too).

To which I respond: if things were truly that un-understandable, we would have been unable as a species to have additive culture that improves over time, because what we think about how people and the world work vs. the actuality of things would be too divorced from one another.

And yet we can positively point to growth of knowledge across all human endeavors, in societies around the globe. I therefore fundamentally disagree with your proposition.

Which is ok. It's fine to agree to disagree. We could both be wrong, after all. :)

On the contrary, we have very much every reason to believe things probably happened somewhat like but still different in ways to how we remember them; I have memories of events from that age that I know for a fact can't be real. Why? Because in some of them I remember myself in the third person.

The idea that we can reliably assess how a certain action affected us is a nice fantasy, but that's also all it is. Sometimes we get it right. The problem is we can't be sure when.

I've never spanked him, I wouldn't be confident of him understanding a danger I had explained to him though.

Were your responding to 'make it physically impossible for the child to access a hot oven.'?

If yes, then you're wrong: its (99%) always possible. Just buy and install a kid's barrier and park the 2yo in his room during the cooking. Or use a cold door oven. No need for a 'big enclosure padded out with cotton wool'.

> Many dangers in the real world, you can maybe stop the kid touching an oven, but you won't be always there to stop him/her from dangerous situations.

100% agree, unfortunately. My point was that, agreeing with the parent (no pun intended), at 2yo, you don't loose sight on your child if it's environment is not 100% safe, end of the discussion.

Kids that age are in some respect smarter than we often think, but in other respects they're totally helpless.

So he's understood that the oven is hot, but not that it being hot means he will hurt himself if touching it and that as a consequence he shouldn't. That's reasonable for him. He needs to make several other connections to determine it's bad: Many other things are hot, but not hot enough to be dangerous. He needs to also realise that too hot equals pain, and this means realising that touching the plate equals pain, not just hot. That's a step or two two long from starting premise to consequence for a 2 year old.

You'll see the same with kids that refuse to dress up when going out when it is cold out. It's hot inside. They've been told it's cold outside. But they also need to realise that this means they will be cold if they go out without dressing up even if it's hot inside.

Sometimes what works with very young children is to help them connect those dots. With my son I'd open the door, step out, so he can feel he's cold, and then tell him we needed to put warm clothes on to stay warm. Or you can be explicit in explanation: "we need to put clothes on so we stay warm when we go out" instead of "we need to put clothes on because it's cold outside".

For things that can be painful, try expressing that: that the oven will hurt. That it is hot, that's a separate thing (for now).

With a two year old you're not getting away from trying to prevent access, but my son certainly responded to just having the causal chains from "do things adults consider dangerous" to "will hurt" shorter.

Another strategy that keeps giving even now that he's 9, is to give constrained choices, and make him decide or decide what he thinks the right answer is: "Do you think the hot oven will hurt a lot or lots and lots?" (or when facing a 9yo that wants to decide everything: "do you want healthy dinner A or [marginally more popular] healthy dinner B?" as opposed to "what do you want for dinner?"). Choosing a specific framing is a scarily effective way of guiding them to where you want them to be (and it works scarily well on adults too; we're not nearly as much smarter than a toddler as we'd like to think).

I certainly can't say if the above works for you, but it's worth a try.

On the one hand it isn't far from smacking, on the other, it isn't a punishment as such.

I think it was the correct choice. My curiosity was sated, no punishment was involved, and she made the (for me, anyway) right choice of letting me experience the direct consequences of my actions when she knew they wouldn't be too bad.

I'm not saying with any confidence that spanking is necessary in these circumstances, only that it may be justifiable given the risks involved. You need some sort of strong negative stimulus. It's not nice, but neither is being hit by a car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning

Hell, my parents also told me when I was ~4 not to stick anything in the electrical outlets. No spankings were involved. I listened because why wouldn't I?

(Well, at least until senior year in college, when I was like "What happens if I strip an Ethernet cord and stick it in an electrical outlet?" I'd missed the exploding-wires demonstration in my physics course, y'see. Did not get electrocuted, though I did get a spectacular pyrotechnics show.)

Tamper-resistant receptacles, however, do seem to provide a real increase in safety. FWIW.

https://www.esfi.org/resource/how-protected-are-children-fro...

(These did not exist when I was a child, but had they been available, I'm sure my parents would have used them.)

>I listened because why wouldn't I?

So did I, about a vast majority of things, until I didn't, because I thought electromagnets were cooler than verbal warnings were deterring. I think you will be hard-pressed to find a child anywhere in the world that doesn't push boundaries.

Ultimately that comes down to the plug design. Schuko sockets (used in most of Europe) are typically indented into the outlet enclosure. This enables IKEA[1] (and others) to make covers that basically can't be removed without tools.

[1]: https://www.ikea.com/se/sv/catalog/products/20098963/

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?

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 probably gave you over the years. (She seemed to have loved me well enough regardless. :D)

My parents sat me down and calmly explained everything they could. Which, as I mentioned before, worked great, until the appeal of something else overwhelmed verbal warnings, which was also not uncommon. Sometimes it was electricity, sometimes it was fire. I can think of another time maybe a year or so later when I discovered a box of strike-anywhere matches, and proceeded to light them one after another to wow at the sparkles, and watch the changes in the match as it burned. My mother took a different approach this time, and as 'punishment', gave me an entire box of matches, of which I was supposed to light them one at a time, let them burn down, then drop them in a bucket of water and repeat until the box was empty.

I suppose she was trying to allow me to explore my fascination with fire in a safe way so that I would get bored with it. Honestly, I can see some merit in that line of thought. ...but instead of getting bored, once I was done, I went and asked for another box. (it turns out fire is fascinating.)

I did get good at learning just how long I could hold a match before I risked burning myself, and how to strike them properly. So that was a plus. I also learned that the embers of the spent match can be kicked back up in to flame again for a surprisingly long time, too. So I'd say it was a good lesson, no spanking involved. But electricity is not nearly as forgiving, and I genuinely do think a swat in that kind of situation can be a useful thing.