I feel like this article is good, on the verge of great, then makes cultural comments that invalidate the point trying to be made for no real reason. Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?
The rest is spot on. I became a parent before I was ready, and man, they are little sponges. They learn everything you do, everything you say, embarrassingly so. My 5 year old would lay on the couch to 'rest her back' like me. She'd say weird country sayings I learned from my own Dad, like 'kneehigh to a cricket.' I had a habit of saying 'dicking with' to mean 'messing with' until she got scolded by a teacher at the ripe old age of 7.
The hardest part for parents today seems to be putting their phone down. It's what the kid and Mom have fought about forever, then applied to me. It's so easy to lose yourself in your social media, work, reading, etc. and kids are super receptive to it. But not as that effort, but as having a parent who stares at their phone unattentively. Our kid made her own 'phone' out of cardboard as a child, pretending to read and chat on it. That struck me deeply.
I never had social media, but as a voracious reader still find myself falling into the trap. Kids notice. Kids today have it harder because of that. My parents didn't have the Internet, they created the world we lived in and tailored it to us. I think that's incredibly rare today.
Now she's 13, knows it all, and doesn't want to be picked up anymore. And I tell you, I wish I never had a smartphone at all.
lolinder 20 minutes ago [-]
I'm going to quote the paragraph you're responding to so that those just reading the comments can see what it actually says:
> The marshmallow test also doesn’t account for cultural differences. In some cultures, waiting is baked into daily life. Think about Japan, where kids are often taught to wait quietly for meals or gifts. Compare that to the US, where instant gratification is practically a way of life. These cultural norms shape how kids approach situations like the marshmallow test. It’s not just about personality; it’s about the world they live in.
That's it. That's the entire quote about the effect of culture.
I see no mention of race or location—I see an argument that "the world they live in" affects children's ability to wait, and that culture is an important aspect of the world that kids live in.
Given that this is the actual text you're responding to, I'm not actually sure you disagree with them, because you go on to point out that smartphones are a dangerous component of modern culture.
motorest 6 hours ago [-]
> I feel like this article is good, on the verge of great, then makes cultural comments that invalidate the point trying to be made for no real reason.
Is it really for no real reason, though?
> Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?
You might not be aware, but different cultural backgrounds do result in different life experiences. You might have even noticed that that's the whole point of the article. What you try to downplay as "race or location" is actually different social environments and contexts where kids grow. They are used as concrete examples lending support for the hypothesis. It is a behavioral issue that is determined by each one's experience living in a specific social circle with specific social norms.
silisili 5 hours ago [-]
I reject that premise.
It's completely fine to point out societal norms. Neither were particularly offensive.
But assuming a Japanese child will have patience where an American will not is the same weird thought that leads to weird guys wanting Japanese wives for 'obedience.'
I'm not at all against pointing out or even flexing cultural differences, but they don't matter at all when raising a child(other than of course, if you teach your child by that example.)
I have a math brain. I've been teaching her math since she could speak, mainly because she seemed to want to impress me and it's how she would get my attention. Should she instead be bad at math because the Chinese value that more? Should I have stuck to teaching her big macs and bald eagles instead?
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
> I have a math brain.
You're applying the math brain wrong by using the "single counterexample invalidates whole article" mode, rather than just inserting the words "most" or "on average" or "in general" where necessary.
A specific kid will have individual behaviors. A group of kids will have behaviors that can be averaged. Different samples will have different outcomes.
I know sociology has poor reproducibility, but cultural and behavioral differences are definitely a thing.
I used to have a Korean colleague who'd moved to the UK specifically because he did not want his kids growing up in the Korean school system. They will always be ethnically and "genetically" Korean, and I would assume he would teach them the language, but he wanted them to be less culturally Korean because he thought they would be happier that way.
technothrasher 3 hours ago [-]
I've got a buddy who's dad is an American who was stationed in Korea, and his mom is a Korean citizen. He talks a lot about the cultural clashes he faced growing up and having trouble feeling like he fit as either a Korean or an American. It's clear the two different cultures really pulled at him strongly from two different places.
boilerupnc 2 hours ago [-]
There’s been a phrase in the South Asian diasporas for a while that captures this idea. ABCD [0] where “C” reflects the confusion (aka two way value pulling). As a person with first generation immigrant parents who raised us in the rural Midwest of America, the C is a real feeling.
There are only three factors that could really influence it:
1. The way you were raised.
2. Your genes.
3. Some metaphysical explanation.
I'm going to set #3 aside for a bit because there's no way to test that hypothesis. That leaves the way you were raised and genes.
What correlates with the way you were raised? Culture. Your parents' culture is tightly correlated with the way they raised you, and when speaking about groups and averages it's fair to say that in general affects outcomes. So if you take this explanation, TFA is not wrong to say that culture would affect outcomes.
What correlates with your genes? Your ancestry, which is (imperfectly) correlated with race. So if you take this explanation, OP would not have been wrong to say that on average race would affect outcomes. (That said, I don't think they actually do—they strictly mention culture!)
opdahl 5 hours ago [-]
You reject that peoples personalities are shaped by their environment? What if instead of focusing on location but instead focused on time period. Do you think there would be behavioral differences between a child born to a middle class family now compared to one 1,000 years ago? What about 10,000 years ago?
Rejecting the premise that the environment shapes who we are and the type of people we become sounds extremely ignorant of the realities of history.
silisili 5 hours ago [-]
> You reject that peoples personalities are shaped by their environment
No, I reject that you can tell anything meaningful about the environment by country. Or even state. Or even neighborhood!
Japan itself could fit into the US 25 times by area.
Are kids raised in SF the same as those raised in Alabama? Or NY vs Phoenix? It'd be insane to make any generalities about a country so large and diverse, IMO.
Heck, kids in Loudoun county grow up completely differently than kids in Baltimore county. What does that tell us about the US, if anything?
I'm guessing Japan is the same, but I'm not educated enough to speak to it.
throw0101c 4 minutes ago [-]
> Or even neighborhood!
Well then it's kind of a strange coïncidence that there is a high correlation between population density and political leaning/voting:
It looks like you're rejecting every concept of averages, or probabilities, or statistics, or generalization because you feel slighted by the resulting comparison.
When considering the US as a whole then Loudoun county will get the appropriate weight in the resulting number. If you zoom out to see the map of the world and no longer see your street, it doesn't mean the map is wrong. It's perfect for the purpose of visualizing the world.
I'll bet you're fine with "the US people are richer than the Burundi" or "Dutch people are taller than US people". These also don't tell you anything about the short Dutch people or ultra-poor in the US. But you accept them because you don't feel slighted by them.
Or else you reject the premise because you zoomed in on a place which is not right on that average so the whole concept gets thrown out the window.
mapt 2 hours ago [-]
It has become fashionable among Very Online people who obsess about social justice to loudly reject generalizations.
They took the very reasonable "you're not allowed to talk about black people liking watermelons" and applied it to every statement about every minority, disadvantaged or not, ethnically defined or not, whether offense was taken or not. Generalization was relabelled a microaggression, and avoiding them (or calling them out) became an urgent imperative, whether or not you're a member of the group in question. Whether or not you take offense personally, it became a Duty To Police this sort of speech.
This alienates one from the vast majority of humanity, which uses generalizations about people and things every day as a cognitive & social necessity. It makes it impossible to communicate or organize, because some sort of nitpicking about social equity, even purely semantic equity, is always prioritized over topical action in SJW-oriented leftist conversation. The rally for women's rights is cancelled because the committee spent all day deciding whether to use the term "women" or some alternative.
It also makes one less effective as a thinker, because there are statements that you can make about cultures and people's background that are statistically very likely, or which indicate a very real difference in the center of different bell curves.
JasserInicide 25 minutes ago [-]
Great post. The increasingly insane purity tests that the far left levy upon others they deign as less woke (in the original sense of the word) has gotten completely out of hand. Especially here on HN. Too many times I've seen normal discussion happen and then someone comes along with "Um excuse me can you not use that term because [3 paragraphs of nonsense when one time one person somewhere took offense to said term]". It feels paralyzing. People can't have discussions anymore, especially online. There's always 20 caveats you have to worry about.
Personally I blame autism for much of it but that's another can of worms.
SketchySeaBeast 12 minutes ago [-]
I know this is pretty much exactly what you're complaining about, but did you just equate autism and being far left? Do you find that the sort of complaints you are describing come out after you do groupings like that?
graemep 4 hours ago [-]
There are huge variations within a country, but they are far smaller than variations between countries.
It seems to be to be a common failing in the west to underestimate just how big differences are between themselves and other cultures. The two cultures I have lived in, despite being Britain and one of its former colonies (and therefore partially anglophone, similar political system, lots of other influences) are quite substation, and noticeable even in the (heavily westernised) circles I socialise in there. The differences would be even bigger if you compare to an East Asian culture like Japan.
Things that are regarded as fundamental concepts, or universal values are often not share (some values are pretty much human, some are not).
guappa 4 hours ago [-]
Funny you should think there are spain and finland are similar at all.
graemep 3 hours ago [-]
I did not actually mention either, but they are very similar viewed from a non-western perspective.
helboi4 43 minutes ago [-]
They're really not. Europe is diverse enough that you need to split it into quadrants to decide what countries are relatively similar. Like is Finland similar to Germany from an outside perspective? Yes. Is Finland similar to southern Italy? Absolutely not, you'd be better off comparing southern Italy and latin America, and Finland with Japan. Like seriously, those will have more in common with each other than Finland and southern Italy. People have told me Naples feels like Brazil... which is nothing like Finland, which has the orderliness and cultural restraint of Japan. North European,East European and South European countries are similar to other countries in those same segments of Europe. They are not similar across segments.
graemep 7 minutes ago [-]
Lots of similarities.
"Europe is diverse enough that you need to split it into quadrants to decide what countries are relatively similar"
The same is true for South Asia, but if you look at it from a western perspective you see the similarities.
There are plenty of similarities across Europe. Shared attitudes to sex, politics, religion..... things like freedom of worship and separation of church and state (laws restricting freedom of worship even in secular democracies like India, let alone the Middle East or China), attitudes to sex and sexuality (and ideas and definitions and identities linked to them - although this is changing because of Western influence, historically the idea of people having a fixed sexual orientation is a modern western one, for example)....
guappa 35 minutes ago [-]
Basically it's "roman empire vs not roman empire" :D
16 minutes ago [-]
guappa 1 hours ago [-]
I mean, the same perspective that people have when they say all asians look identical? :D Then yes, sure.
the-lazy-guy 5 hours ago [-]
Did you notice that you just devided kids in Loudoun and Baltimore in 2 groups, giving them as examples of different environments? You do not object to premise, only to granularity of defining environment geographically.
silisili 4 hours ago [-]
> You do not object to premise, only to granularity of defining environment geographically.
Correct. I just picked those two because of stark differences of two well known areas close to each other. But it can go down to even neighborhood, or even street in said neighborhood.
Sorry if my rambling seems confusing. I'm not against the idea that environment affects children. I'm against broad brush stroke categorization about how different countries behave.
buran77 4 hours ago [-]
> or even street in said neighborhood
Or even one individual on different days. It should be all chaos and noise and yet it's not because these "general" numbers get translated to a realistic "it's more/less likely" not "it's guaranteed".
You're arguing against comparisons you don't like, or feel make you look worse than others. In other words you want to get to arbitrarily define the brush width presumably based on where you feel you sit in the comparison.
noisy_boy 3 hours ago [-]
> I'm against broad brush stroke categorization about how different countries behave.
Ok - pick any conservative country (say India or Indonesia). Now tell me that the chances of an average Indonesian woman wearing a bikini to a beach (pretty normal in most Western countries) is same as an average French woman?
Or for a less gender-charged example, chances of an average Saudi eating Pork vs an average American.
Note that I didn't say "every", I said "average".
potato3732842 3 hours ago [-]
>Ok - pick any conservative country (say India or Indonesia). Now tell me that the chances of an average Indonesian woman wearing a bikini to a beach (pretty normal in most Western countries) is same as an average French woman?
The strongest predictor for both the French and the Indonesian is almost certainly going to be the individuals physique and and the second is probably going to be the country and prevailing culture in which the beach is located (i.e. what everyone else is wearing).
This kind of illustrates the point you're trying to disagree with. You can't just look at some sort of demographic based average and shoot from the hip and expect to hit anything.
noisy_boy 55 minutes ago [-]
> The strongest predictor for both the French and the Indonesian is almost certainly going to be the individuals physique
I take it that you have either never been to a beach or the one you have been to is only open to athletes and supermodels.
> the second is probably going to be the country and prevailing culture in which the beach is located (i.e. what everyone else is wearing)
So you haven't had the chance of seeing Indonesian woman wearing full headgear and clothes covering their body having fun at a beach far away from Indonesia? Not joking, they were having a genuinely good time - from direct experience.
The world is much bigger and has far greater variety of people, customs and norms than you can imagine.
potato3732842 24 minutes ago [-]
>I take it that you have either never been to a beach or the one you have been to is only open to athletes and supermodels.
Have you been to the beach in the last 10yr. All manner of 1-pc swimsuits are arguably the default style for women.
>So you haven't had the chance of seeing Indonesian woman wearing full headgear and clothes covering their body having fun at a beach far away from Indonesia? Not joking, they were having a genuinely good time - from direct experience.
My mistake, I mixed up Indonesia and the Phillipines in my mind. No surprise muslim women will not be wearing bikinis. But the Westerners will also be far more modest in a setting where that is the prevailing default so....
>The world is much bigger and has far greater variety of people, customs and norms than you can imagine.
If looking down one's nose like that is what it takes to be cultured I'm glad I'm not.
bluecheese452 1 hours ago [-]
Wrong.
jahsome 5 hours ago [-]
I can't even tell what you're arguing for or against. Every comment seems to defeat itself. I am not trying to be inflammatory, but your statements honestly don't seem to stem from anything other than "think about it bro" and ignorance.
paulluuk 2 hours ago [-]
I think their point is that you can not just say "children in china like math" or "children in france will drink wine", because those are stereotypes and there are many examples of children within those countries who do not conform.
They say that there are differences between even children living on two different roads in the same town, and these differences matter more than differences between countries, and therefore we should not make any kind of arguments based on nationality at all.
I disagree though, I do think that there are significant statistical differences growing up between, say, Afghanistan or Sweden. That does not mean that you can make claims about specific children in either country, but you can make generalizations about the population as a whole.
potato3732842 3 hours ago [-]
>No, I reject that you can tell anything meaningful about the environment by country. Or even state. Or even neighborhood!
This. The standard deviation is too damn high to make predictions. You might as well toss a coin.
genewitch 5 hours ago [-]
I'm all for claiming these things are soft sciences but they still claim to be sciences. Demographics, sociology, anthropology.
Sometimes I can't tell when people are pulling chains, so in the interest of charity ^
watwut 1 hours ago [-]
You don't believe that what parents do has impact on kids? Or, you don't believe that parents in one culture can treat kids differently then parents from culture qirh different values?
rayiner 12 minutes ago [-]
> But assuming a Japanese child will have patience where an American will not is the same weird thought that leads to weird guys wanting Japanese wives for 'obedience.
Sorry dude cultural differences are real. When I got married to my American wife, my Bangladeshi mom pulled her aside and said, “you know, we don’t get divorced.”
hector126 4 hours ago [-]
(Throwaway as this topic can be inflammatory for those unfamiliar with the literature)
Behavioral patterns and personality traits have been pretty conclusively proven to be genetically inheritable. "Behavioral Genetics and Child Temperament" (Saudino) investigates this, as does "A genome-wide investigation into the underlying genetic architecture of personality traits and overlap with psychopathology" (Priya Gupta, et al).
There's no doubt that nurture and culture play a massive role in one's later personality and behavior as an adult, but it's incorrect to disregard genetics in this conversation. Some people are predisposed to be shy, some people are predisposed to be aggressive. Smart, critical people are able to appreciate genetic differences amongst broad human groups without letting that lead to unsavory viewpoints.
starfallg 3 hours ago [-]
> But assuming a Japanese child will have patience where an American will not is the same weird thought that leads to weird guys wanting Japanese wives for 'obedience.'
You are making several jumps in logic to get from A -> B.
Japan has an education system which teaches the importance of certain values, patience and self-discipline among them.
Here is the short-film "Instruments of a Beating Heart" currently on the Oscars shortlist about this very point -
> Should she instead be bad at math because the Chinese value that more?
Not "bad" , but less fully invested...
Maybe?
It's isolating being the only non-Mandarin-speaking family at a math people gathering. It's quite striking in the high-level math community.
pbasista 5 hours ago [-]
> assuming a Japanese child will have patience where an American will not is the same weird thought ...
I agree that it is weird. And I did not read the article. But I would assume that this is not the point it was trying to make when referring to race or location backgrounds.
When remarks like these are made, I would think they usually refer to a neighborhood. For instance, a well-groomed neighborhood at a good location vs. a slum at the outskirts of town, perhaps without electricity or even without running water. The race is mentioned in that context often not because it would have a direct impact. But because there is, unfortunately, a correlation between people living in poor neighborhoods and people of racial minorities.
I would think that the implication then is that a bad neighborhood is one of the factors which drive bad social behavior.
rusk 5 hours ago [-]
It’s all social conditioning. You are socially conditioning your child to be good at math. Good for you. It would be very hard for me to group you together with others and formulate a trend. As we zoom out and evaluate the aggregate picture your outlier datapoint is swallowed up and culture becomes the dominant mediator.
You can reject all you want but your [personal, anecdotal] data point is irrelevant.
It takes a village to raise a child.
[rejecting an analysis because you disagree with the premise is unscientific - this analysis exposes a trend - it does not make a prediction - but gives pointers for further analysis]
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
> I'm not at all against pointing out or even flexing cultural differences, but they don't matter at all when raising a child(other than of course, if you teach your child by that example.)
Except they do matter, unless you're going to "raise" a child by locking them in the apartment until they turn 18. Otherwise, as soon as they go to kindergarten[0], it's entirely out of your hands.
They say[1] that minimum viable reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a village. And the corollary to that is, the village will find our child, whether you want it or not, and they will have as much say in their mindset and values as you do. You can influence that, but only so much, and not everywhere all at once[2].
(Also obligatory reminder/disclaimer that group-level statistics are not indicative of any individual's character; individual variance in-group is greater than variance between groups, etc.)
EDIT:
> Should she instead be bad at math because the Chinese value that more? Should I have stuck to teaching her big macs and bald eagles instead?
No, you do you - and I respect you for passing on your interest in maths to your daughter, and I hope it'll stick. The point is, whatever the culture you're embedded in, she will be exposed to its tropes in aggregate. It doesn't mean she'll turn into a stereotype; no one ever does (see the disclaimer above); it's just that when someone doesn't like some aspects of their culture, "shopping for a village" that isn't reputed for those traits is one of the historically tried and true methods of reducing the risk.
EDIT2: To add another personal anecdote, there was a defining moment in my life early on, that I'm certain changed my entire life's trajectory. In my primary school, I ended up in a class with some rather unruly, mischievous kids, under a walking pathology of a teacher; by the time I was 12 and it was time to switch to secondary school, I already picked up on some of the bad behaviors. My mom went through some extraordinary effort to get me placed in a math-profile class[3], despite me not showing much aptitude or interest in sciences, just so I get away from the rascals. It paid off. I may have started as the dumbest kid in the group, but this group wasn't into mischief, and instead was supportive to intellectual pursuits; I ended up befriending a bunch of nerds, and quickly becoming the nerdiest of them all. I can't imagine that happening if I stayed with my primary-school crowd. In fact, they'd probably bully my fledgling interest in programming out of me, so I pretty much owe my entire career and the shape of my life to that one choice by my mom, to move me to a different "village".
--
[0] - And maybe earlier, if they go to daycare, or you're socially active and they tag along; and no later than when they go to school - unless, again, zip-ties and a radiator are a major part of the upbringing approach.
[1] - Well, someone on HN says that; I think they may have even coined it. Either way, it's true.
[2] - I grew up in a Christian offshoot that's a borderline cult. I can tell first-hand that, no matter how hard they try, even a strong fundamentalist culture that works hard on staying true to its values and pretty much defines themselves in opposition to "the world", can only do so much to resist the local culture in which people are embedded. And, when they try too hard, they just end up bleeding members.
[3] - A brief moment in time in Poland where we had 3-school system and profile classes in the secondary school.
genewitch 4 hours ago [-]
I'd have to find a copy to see if it cites its source but paraphrased I've heard it:
> People mechanically can have kids, physically, before they're mentally able to take care of them. The [village] elders would raise and teach the children while the adolescents worked at things adolescents do better than elders
So "it takes a village" used to be literal, and as we in this part of the west started to isolate and nuclear family the whole idea that the elders should have plurality input to the neuroplasticity kinda went wayside.
I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. They all died when I was young but my sister was younger yet. I moved all our kids to be within 15 minutes of their living grandparents. They werent teens when we got here. My youngest spends 3/7th of their time at grandma's house.
I'll let you know how all this works in like 30 years.
I think a large, maybe even the main part of why community of family and close friends raising children together works: humans are uniquely motivated by shame and pride, and having that many eyes on you leads to quick corrections before bad habits take root.
There's arguments about in groups and globalization and if it's better to amalgamate and if so, community based child raising has gotta go. Please do not ask me to spell this out as I won't be.
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
The way I understood the line about "minimum viable reproductive unit" I quoted is different, more straightforward: a nuclear family can't survive alone. Two people and a kid just can't survive in the wilderness; we've evolved to function in group.
From this POV, the "village" is still there, it's always there. It may not be a literal village, and you and me might both be pretty much alone except for our partners, when it comes to parental responsibilities. However, the modern "village" is the society we live in - our neighbors, our friends, co-workers, the market economy as represented by people selling good and providing services we need to survive; later, also parents of children our kids go to school with. These are all people we interact with daily, share the same material and social environment, and we all influence each other.
There's no way to avoid that influence (in fact, if you try, the "village" will start getting worried, possibly to the point social services might get involved). It's always there, and once your kids start education, they'll be interacting with other members of society unsupervised - this is what I mean by "village finding your child".
> I think a large, maybe even the main part of why community of family and close friends raising children together works: humans are uniquely motivated by shame and pride, and having that many eyes on you leads to quick corrections before bad habits take root.
I 100% agree with that. I think it's fundamental. But it works only up to certain size; it's not that globalization is in opposition to that, it's just that to form societies larger than ~150, you need replacements for "shame and pride" as behavioral regulators to keep a group from self-destructing. Hence leaders and rules - and applied recursively a couple times, you end up with presidents and districts and rule of law and bureaucracy and all the staples of modern life, existing next to and on top of groups of families and friends.
rightbyte 4 hours ago [-]
I think the main potential benefit for a child, and the future community it will be part of, with secondary caretakers, is if the primary caretakers are insane.
It is like abit of good influence outweights alot of bad influence.
rightbyte 4 hours ago [-]
I think you have a really important point. There are these philosophical or political individualists that don't get this.
You could make an analogy with dogs. There you have plenty of examples of what can happen in isolation. A functional collective will in most cases manouver you out of parenting in part or fully with soft or hard means if you are bad enough since you will indirectly wreck havoc otherwise.
lupire 2 hours ago [-]
Some people get really hung up on rigid thinking around "correlation is not causation" and throw the baby out with the bathwater, bending over backwards to avoid leaning on correlation at all. They focus on strict causal-logic, to the point of ignoring the truth value of of statistical reasoning under uncertainty.
rayiner 44 minutes ago [-]
> then makes cultural comments that invalidate the point trying to be made for no real reason. Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?
Cultures differ significantly in how they raise their children. My dad grew up in a Bangladeshi village. He has this story where a cousin was sick and asked for lobster (which back then was a widely available food in the villages). His parents told him they’d make it for him the next morning, but he died overnight. My dad always invokes that story when I try to impose limits on my kids. When my brother and I were growing up, they put a lot of expectations on us academically, but no gratuitous self denial in terms of food or toys or anything like that.
By contrast my wife is an old stock American WASP. She has a very different parenting style than my parents. She makes my kids wait for everything and tells them everything they want is too expensive (even though we could easily afford anything they want).
mannykannot 17 minutes ago [-]
Race is not mentioned in the article. Ironically, you are doing the very thing, here, which you claim spoils it.
The mention of culture is not out of place in the article, as the marshmallow test (which features quite prominently in it, including in its actual title) does have different outcomes in different cultures, and, in addition, it is hardly controversial to suppose that the way children are brought up is an important factor in establishing and maintaining a culture's cohesion.
lr4444lr 2 hours ago [-]
This is a beautiful comment, but take a step back here: parenting today is more child centric than it has ever been in the USA, with parents spending more raw hours with their kids (because they are spending less time independently with each other or extended family) and more direct paternal involvement to boot. I do not mean to minimize the scourge of adult phone overuse or the importance of being sensitive to a child's emotional world, but kids today overall get a ton of time with their parents, and parents are exhausted.
EDIT: and the kids are not all right.
Aurornis 14 minutes ago [-]
> The hardest part for parents today seems to be putting their phone down.
> And I tell you, I wish I never had a smartphone at all.
Being self-aware of phone use is 80% of the battle.
I also read a lot on my phone. Most of my screen time is in the books app.
Early on I decided to leave the phone on the charger in the mornings and evenings before the kids are in bed. Problem solved.
The biggest trap I see in my circle is the mental gymnastics of blaming everyone else for their own excessive phone use. It becomes easier to overuse a phone when they blame the algorithm or the companies for “making” them use the phone more than they want. Some people read stories about apps being made to be addictive and feel relieved because it offloads responsibility away from their decision making.
In the addiction treatment world it’s acknowledged that if someone can’t control their own behavior then they need even more controls and accountability, not to cede all responsibility for their actions to the addictive thing they’re drawn to. That usually means making decisions to shape their environment to keep them away from addictive behaviors, but for some reason many people see headlines about “the algorithm” and addictive apps and decide it’s futile to resist.
Making the decision to leave my phone on the charger during kid time was one of the higher ROI decisions I’ve made in my life. I used a smart watch to get any urgent notifications if I really needed them.
netcan 4 hours ago [-]
Well written comment... compliments the article well.
I think you inserting the objections to the culture/country part yourself. I don't think they are present in the actual article.
The central idea here is that children are shaped by their environment, the people around them and those people's behaviour. They sponge up behaviours of their parents, peers and such.
But... it's not all mimicry and habits. It's also a response to incentives in their life. That's the writer's point about trust... and the marshmello test. Does the child live in a world where trust and patience pay off... or a world where you get what you can while you can? The socio-economic correlation to patience in the marshmello test is a proxy... demonstrating his point.
desunit 2 hours ago [-]
I think you’ve raised a great topic, and it could serve as the foundation for another post. One study found that the environment plays the most significant role here, especially the nonshared environment (outside siblings/family). This challenges the traditional view that growing up in the same household has a major influence on personality and intelligence.
The good news is that most kids very good at modeling themselves after the adults they see, without specific prompting to do so.
The bad news is that they can be too good: It's hard to change yourself if you don't want them to learn something. ("Do what I say, not what I do.")
silisili 5 hours ago [-]
Spot on. A child will take every annoying habit you don't even know that you have, and put it on full display. It's quite humbling.
jedimastert 1 hours ago [-]
> Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?
This seems like a dishonest characterization of some of the points in the article.
Unfortunately, we do live in a society. A childhood is not just determined by the house the child lives in, but the community the child lives in as well, and the parents are also affected by the community they grew up in, which affects the way they parent.
2 hours ago [-]
Miraltar 5 hours ago [-]
The article doesn't talk about race or location at all, it talks about culture
guilamu 2 hours ago [-]
The race or location of the parent absolutely determines their childhood. This has been studied for decades, and it's called Practice theory. It emerged in the late 20th century and was first outlined in the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu [1].
That seems to be more about culture, which is separate from race or location.
vanderZwan 3 hours ago [-]
> Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?
Ignoring the fact that you inserted a narrative that wasn't present in the article, YES OF COURSE THIS HAS A MAJOR IMPACT.
I'm a half-Dutch, half-Chinese man who spent the first years of my life in Ghana being blissfully happy and welcomed in the local community, and then the rest of my childhood being miserable in a Dutch village because I was excluded from that local community, all because I was "the local ethnic minority".
And I'm half-Asian, with parents from a higher-education background who had a good income. I only had to deal with "diet racism" compared to pretty much any other ethnic minority/social background in the Netherlands.
I've lived this and the fact that people like you keep insisting that my life experiences do not exist because they did not experience it is infuriating.
Anyway, fair points about the phone being a serious issue. But for goodness sake stop pretending that race and socio-economic background has no impact just because it makes you a little uncomfortable.
helboi4 39 minutes ago [-]
Honestly, yes this guy's comment screams white guy growing up in a white culture. Like... do you really think your culture is a default and you would've been like you are without your outside influence? Your culture is very specific and no more default than any other.
qingcharles 5 hours ago [-]
I always wonder how many of the sayings I inherited from my father he inherited from my grandfather that died before I was born. It's like a kind of genetic memory.
silisili 5 hours ago [-]
I have a ton myself that my Dad would say but couldn't explain, so I don't use them as much.
Two notable examples...
'What do you want, a Dewey button?' as a sarcastic way of saying 'who cares.' He didn't know why. Google says it's probably related to Thomas Dewey.
'Kitty bar the door.' An expression to mean he was going to go all out. He didn't know who kitty was or why he said it. I still have no idea its real etymology.
nkurz 25 minutes ago [-]
> 'Kitty bar the door.'
It looks like Katy or Katie are the more common spellings in the Southern US, although Kitty seems to the standard when talking about hockey. The origin is disputed: https://worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-kat1.htm
eszed 45 minutes ago [-]
You may not have been able to find that saying because its more-usual version is "Katy, bar the door":
Except it's not genetic ? So I guess a cultural memory, sometimes referred to as "Memory"
lupire 1 hours ago [-]
It's memetic memory, also called "culture"
roenxi 5 hours ago [-]
It isn't as reliable as something that goes generation to generation transmission, but I think some things skip every other generation; like an organised grandparent leading to a disorganised parent who never had to think about it. Then an organised child because they learned to cover for the parent.
andrepd 5 hours ago [-]
It's the original meaning of "meme"
cassepipe 4 hours ago [-]
It took me some time to understand you meant it came from memetic
Terr_ 5 hours ago [-]
I'd characterize modern popular usage as... hmmm... "formulaic in-joke."
aqueueaqueue 2 hours ago [-]
Is it better if the phone is a book and you read alot. That might be something to encourage?
I guess it is still an isolated activity from the kid, but at least the message is "read books" over "stare at addictive device".
You can also talk about the book with your kids and they see different covers each day and may be curious (and may pick it up)
bloak 4 hours ago [-]
> She'd say weird country sayings I learned from my own Dad, like 'kneehigh to a cricket.'
It's also fun when it happens in the other direction: child invents a totally new word, parents think it's funny and copy it, it becomes a word used only within that family, but perhaps it stays around long enough for some of the grandchildren to pick it up. But everyone has to pay attention not to use it outside the home because outsiders would be very confused by it. We have a few words like that.
darkwater 4 hours ago [-]
And when you are a bi-lingual family, you can bring that to the Nth power :)
desunit 4 hours ago [-]
I didn't mention race in the post, but culture. I think culture has a significant effect on a person, and to prove my point, I'd refer to the book The Culture Map, which was a revelation for me and explained a lot of things I had noticed while working in a multicultural environment. Genetic factors typically account for about 50% of individual differences in traits like personality, cognition, and psychopathology, leaving the other 50% to environmental influences.
patrickwalton 3 hours ago [-]
Do you have a source for 50% attribution? Studies I've seen suggest single-digit genetic attribution.
Cognition (IQ): ~50% genetic influence in adulthood
Schizophrenia: <50% concordance in identical twins
Psychopathology: Varies, but mostly <50% genetic influence
wvh 2 hours ago [-]
Wholeheartedly agree. Can't teach kids to eat broccoli if you don't eat it yourself, they're just too perceptive. I don't like phones myself, but sadly enough, it is becoming hard to keep up with society (e.g. sports groups) or even outright not accepted to be "offline" anymore. It becomes a tricky balancing act to teach your own pre-teens to deal with being left out versus fighting the dopamine goblin. I don't think technology is bad, nor food for that matter, but we really as a society have to overcome our monkey brains. We ought to be better informed about how our brains work, especially as parents responsible for developing brains; and we ought to have basic neurology taught in schools to give the new generation a fighting chance against the rapid pace of technological advancement.
Cheezmeister 5 minutes ago [-]
Incidentally, Fighting the Dopamine Goblin is the title of my next EP.
For real though, the DG is the perfect personification. Don't overfeed it, it'll only get meaner.
xanderlewis 5 hours ago [-]
> Our kid made her own 'phone' out of cardboard as a child, pretending to read and chat on it.
I did that, but a cardboard laptop!
Ygg2 5 hours ago [-]
> cultural comments that invalidate the point trying to be made for no real reason. Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?
You have two kids, one ate ten boxes of marshmallows yesterday, the other didn't eat for two days. Which one is going to wait more for marshmallows?
It's pointing that the Marshmallow test was flawed. Which doesn't surprise me (most social experiments are very flawed).
Basically, when you account for socioeconomic factors, the correlation goes away, or so I heard. Rich kids are more successful in life than poor kids, who knew?
andrepd 5 hours ago [-]
> Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?
But of course it does. In fact the rest of your comment is about how kids absorb the environment they grow up in!
exe34 3 hours ago [-]
> Our kid made her own 'phone' out of cardboard as a child, pretending to read and chat on it. That struck me deeply.
as a child of the 80s in an emotionally barren household with domestic violence, I also built myself a whole computer lab out of cardboard boxes at the age of 5 to mimic my father!
lupire 1 hours ago [-]
Do you think those two facts are related or just coincidence?
RheingoldRiver 7 hours ago [-]
> Think about Japan, where kids are often taught to wait quietly for meals or gifts
Author got the country and items correct but not associated correctly. In Japan, kids pass the marshmallow test with flying colors but fail the same test if it's a gift. In America kids generally pass the gift test (hypothesis is that they're used to waiting for presents on Christmas).
Another thing is there's the difference between getting a guaranteed reward that you want (two marshmallows) vs waiting for the unknown. What good is waiting if a kid could potentially have 15 minutes of fun time with a toy, but they instead wait for two gifts and all they get is a pair of socks?
But I was also a kid who'd beg nonstop to open my presents early. I knew if I opened something early, that was more time with a cool game or something. If I waited, well, that was less time with the cool game. Plus most of the presents weren't interesting. There was just one thing I wanted in particular and the other stuff could be forgotten.
watwut 6 hours ago [-]
Marshmallow test is one of those things real psychologists (whether practical or science) just do not care all that much about, but pop culture is sure obsessed with it.
christophilus 2 hours ago [-]
I think you’re right. It is one of the many studies that has failed to replicate[0].
That's a lot of citations for something they 'just do not care' about.
DiscourseFan 6 hours ago [-]
Psychologists, in my experience, seem to be strangely unaware of what is taken seriously by other psychologists. They're generally 50/50 on Freud, for instance, and the half who don't care much for him also don't think anyone does.
4 hours ago [-]
Lionga 6 hours ago [-]
Probably because Psychology is super individual und culturally dependent.
Nothing Psychologists ever "find out" generally applies, but just happens in their little circle und their circumstances in their time.
watwut 1 hours ago [-]
Some keep writing whether it replicates and usually conclude it does not or only weakly.
They do not actually care about it as something valid relevant to practice or to build new research on. Because it frequently fails to reproduce.
Aurornis 12 minutes ago [-]
Not quite. Psychology is a big field and the range of educational practices is very broad.
There are some excellent psychologists out there, but there are also a lot of trained psychologists who embrace all of the pop-culture and even pseudoscience trends in full.
rusk 5 hours ago [-]
They do care about it. It’s an immensely important milestone in the development of the field, and is pretty much axiomatic as a developmental marker and has been widely and consistently replicated.
Where modern day psychology diverges is (as discussed in the article) on the conclusions and analysis.
I don’t have kids. However, this same concept can be applied, and verified, with dogs.
I have made it a rule to never deceive my dog, and she trusts me because it. If I pick up her water bowl to refill and clean it while she is in the middle of drinking, I make it a point to always give it back with fresh water. I have several water bowls around the house , and the one in my room only gets refilled when I see she is actively drinking from it.
She sees this removal of something she wants (and needs) as a good thing, because I have never deceived her. I always give it back.
If I say we are going for a walk or I grab the leash, we go for a walk. I try to not do things that she would interpret as something not intended. For example, grabbing the leash and not taking her out.
With dogs you become really mindful of your actions. They learn so many of your subtle non-verbal cues, that you start to notice how much your body speaks.
I often think about this, and it has been a valuable learning experience. If I ever decide to have kids, I will make sure that what I communicate (either verbally or non-verbally) is congruent with my actions. I believe that this, is the surest way to build trust.
bloomingkales 3 hours ago [-]
"With dogs you become really mindful of your actions."
Dogs hold you accountable in the most beautiful way. The best boss.
Everything is a trust relationship. I recall finding myself offended when I had difficulty pitching ideas at my workplace. A lot of times it felt like "hey, why don't you trust me or my idea". I only had maybe one or two of those moments, but I have also witnessed other people going through a trust battle just like the one I described at work.
This can happen in a family, in a romantic relationship, work, or in society. When the arena becomes entirely about trust, people act out. That's why kids rebel, that's why marriages fall apart, and that's why people leave companies.
TheAlchemist 2 hours ago [-]
"Another thing I’ve noticed is how much modeling matters. My daughter watches everything I do. If I tell her to wait and then lose my patience two seconds later because the internet is slow, what’s the lesson there?"
As a father of 3 kids, I can confirm 100% this is true. Once you understand that, your life changes completely. You realize there is somebody in this world, who will model their life after yours.
What kind of example you give them is up to you.
Suddenly, "be the change you want to see in the world" gets a whole new meaning !
dtgriscom 2 hours ago [-]
You know the world by what you experience. Infants and toddlers have a very small world (mostly their home); whatever that world is like becomes their expected reality.
nemo44x 2 hours ago [-]
It’s 100% true. It’s heartbreaking when a toddler does something you don’t approve of and you ask them why and they point to something you did.
gretch 6 hours ago [-]
People always use the marshmallow test as a sign that the participant can’t delay gratification.
But what if they just understand time-value-of-marshmallow. Sometimes marshmallow now is better than marshmallow later.
latexr 51 minutes ago [-]
Yes! I personally find marshmallows underwhelming. If you gave me one or two I might eat them. But if the choice is between “eat one now and you’re free to go do whatever you want” or “stay locked alone in this room for a quarter of an hour and you get two”, the latter is a worse proposition.
I’m perfectly content with being with my own thoughts for hours, but being forced to do nothing for a crummy reward when a better alternative is right there is not compelling.
a12k 32 minutes ago [-]
Are you a child between the ages of 3 and 5? Because that's the typical age of a participant in the marshmallow test. This is like scoffing a kid not finding something on Dora the Explorer.
latexr 11 minutes ago [-]
I’m not criticising the kids, I’m criticising the conclusions of the experiment. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to explain my reasoning this clearly or perhaps even consciously understood why I had made that choice, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have been able to intuitively make that tradeoff. Which is precisely the point of the article: kids subconsciously performing an action based on psychological and environmental factors not fully within their grasp.
Within the parameters of your analogy, my point is closer to scoffing at the experimenters for making sweeping conclusions based on kids being able to find a single item on Dora the Explorer. Sure, maybe the kids who failed to find it had a learning disability, or maybe they weren’t that stimulated by being forced to watch a show they disliked when they could just go play something else. Even with the conclusions having been drawn years later, where the finders performed better academically, that could still indicate the non-finders were simply uninterested in the way most schools work by forcing you to be there and listen to certain subjects at certain times. Perhaps they would’ve thrived in a freer environment where they had greater freedom to pick the subjects for each day.
autoexec 6 hours ago [-]
There's a lot of things the marshmallow test might signal, but most kids probably aren't spending a lot of time performing cost benefit analysis when faced with the problem. I wouldn't doubt that kids with trust issues would tend to do worse. Certainly the ones with behavioral/executive function/developmental issues do worse than others.
silvestrov 4 hours ago [-]
> kids with trust issues would tend to do worse
They don't do worse in the household they live in. They do better because if they waited for the 2nd marshmallow at home then they would end up with nothing.
Better with one bird in the hand right now than waiting for two empty promises.
So many of these psychological tests are based on values in upper-middle-class families. They are not always valid when the parents are drug users or alcoholic.
Kids of alcoholic parents know that most promises are empty promises. You are a fool if you take a "we will go to Disneyland on saturday" promise seriously.
krisoft 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Just the wording "trust issues" makes it sound like the issue is with the kid. When in reality it is possible that they have a well grounded, rational, and evidence based belief that adults tend to not fulfil their promises. Exactly as you say.
makeitdouble 5 hours ago [-]
Kids are pretty used to calculations related to stuff to eat.
I think anyone who grew up with siblings has an extremely developed sense of how much they're willing to risk vs how much reward. Like would I eat my brother's pudding knowing we'll be fighting to death when he's also back from school ? Yes, of course. That's risk/reward that made sense back in the days.
itronitron 2 hours ago [-]
Whenever my sister and I had to share a single food item, like a brownie. Our mom would have one of us cut the item in half, and the other would get to pick their half first. Deciding which half was never a casual assessment.
vintermann 4 hours ago [-]
Exactly, it's nonsense to talk about "executive function" as if it's some internal liquid that some kids have and others don't. Kids adapt to the realities of their situation, if they feel - on an intellectual level, or maybe on a more instinctive level - that things are precarious and options you have today won't be there tomorrow, and promises made to you won't necessarily be kept, of course you eat the goddamn marshmallow.
saagarjha 6 hours ago [-]
Speak for yourself. The kids I know are modeling the future interest rates on marshmallows.
_kb 5 hours ago [-]
Toddler scribbles are in fact marshmallow yield curves.
zmgsabst 6 hours ago [-]
You have a lot of people that take that last fact and then assume the converse.
But in a poor household, taking the marshmallow now is likely the optimal choice since there might not be any later — even if your parents tell you to wait. That’s not necessarily a sign of anything but having adapted to a particular environment: times you listened led to a negative outcome, so you stopped.
motorest 6 hours ago [-]
> But in a poor household, taking the marshmallow now is likely the optimal choice since there might not be any later — even if your parents tell you to wait. That’s not necessarily a sign of anything but having adapted to a particular environment: times you listened led to a negative outcome, so you stopped.
You've repeated the whole thesis from the article: people are conditioned for delayed gratification if that is possible/predictable, and then asserts that parents have the influence to develop that trait in kids by fostering predictability.
autoexec 5 hours ago [-]
To further complicate things, kids in poor households tend to have more behavioral/executive function/developmental issues. It's still worth pointing out that just failing the marshmallow test shouldn't cause someone to assume anything.
autoexec 6 hours ago [-]
You're right. Although it can hint at the possibility of those types of problems, the marshmallow test shouldn't be used to make those kinds of assumptions, especially in isolation. Like I said, it can signal a lot of very different things (even hunger).
bell-cot 4 hours ago [-]
"Poor" isn't needed here. If the kid has siblings, or the family has an "opportunistic" dog, or the kid has spent time in a daycare where treats are sometimes grabbed, or ...
Or the kid is getting bored by the stupid researcher and her stupid test, and is trying to get it over with as fast as he can.
tonyedgecombe 5 hours ago [-]
One of the criticisms of the test is that children who fail it are more likely to have parents who regularly fail to deliver on their promises. From that perspective it doesn’t make sense to wait.
namdnay 6 hours ago [-]
A marshmallow in the hand is worth two in the bush
swayvil 5 hours ago [-]
If you abstain from marshmallows for 40 years, I'll give you 1000 marshmallows.
rightbyte 4 hours ago [-]
Historic returns is no promise of future returns. Terms and conditions apply.
The marshmallow test is interesting. Rather than measuring mainly self control, it might be measure more or less only trust.
IncreasePosts 6 hours ago [-]
Marshmallows in hand have diminishing returns as well. The difference between having 0 marshmallows and 1 marshmallow is much larger than the difference between having 1 and 2, or 2 and 3.
aqueueaqueue 2 hours ago [-]
> time-value-of-marshmallow
Bravo! Love that phrase. Some freakonomics shit happening there...
MrBuddyCasino 5 hours ago [-]
Like most everything else in social psychology, the Marshmallow Test is (largely) bullshit [0].
Don't fault social psychologists for what pop culture does with what they wrote. Even author of the marshmallow test experiment is arguing against this simplistic interpretation of it.
malloci 6 hours ago [-]
This is the way
axegon_ 5 hours ago [-]
My mom has this very interesting theory: A parent needs to be by a child's side for the first 6-7 years of their life and devote all their time to it. Which is what she did with me. My dad stepped up for the challenge and provided for both of us. My mom had one goal: to make sure that I'd stay curious. She taught me how to read at the age of 4, signed me up for piano lessons(I haven't played piano at all nearly 3 decades later but I can still read notes), she made sure I'd be interested in different cultures, which subsequently pushed me to learn a few languages(which is the biggest contributor to the fact that I am doing very well for myself by a huge margin, forget software engineering, speaking English was the one thing that truly opened up the gates for me). Which on a slightly lower level did exactly what the article says. For contrast, I was old enough to witness and evaluate the extreme opposite - my mom's brother and his wife, who had children when a dog would have sufficed their needs. Their children were pushed aside, no one ever spent any time with them, whenever they started crying, someone jumped over to the toy store, get a bag of toys and shove them in their face so they would shut up. To such an extent that their rooms were filled with unopened toys and I'm not talking about 1 or 2 in a box, I'm talking dozens if not hundreds of toys still in their boxes. Last time I saw these children, they were >10 years old and they had no clue how to use a fork and a knife.
lazystar 48 minutes ago [-]
> Last time I saw these children, they were >10 years old and they had no clue how to use a fork and a knife.
Shoutout to the adults like myself that grew up like this. On the one hand, you develop outside the box thinking, because you had to learn everything via trial-by-eroror - no one taught you how to think inside the box. On the other hand, it's tough to trust or ask anyone for help.
robbomacrae 7 minutes ago [-]
You've just given the perfect example of Attachment Theory [0].
I recommend that you read things that Pete Walker has written, if you haven’t already.
desunit 4 hours ago [-]
I think your mom did a great job, and that’s the whole point of the post. We need to focus on bonding with our kids and building trust with them. I’m actually a father of three, and being a father to my youngest while being much older is an entirely different experience. I pay attention to all the small details with my kids (which is actually why I wrote that post! ).
guappa 4 hours ago [-]
We learnt how to read notes in school. But the stuff you read at 7 is not the stuff people want to hear at concerts :D
ralfd 3 hours ago [-]
How did your siblings do? And where are your cousins now?
axegon_ 1 hours ago [-]
No siblings. Cousins? Don't know, don't care.
lupire 1 hours ago [-]
Your father is a parent and didnt parent 6 years by your side.
Why didn't your mother step up to support that?
If a mother can replace a father in this role, why can't a teacher?
Why doesn't a child need some freedom and independence to discover their own internal motivations and creativity?
noisy_boy 46 minutes ago [-]
> Why didn't your mother step up to support that?
Maybe she wasn't fortunate to have the level of education required to support a family and the father did. Don't be so judgemental - people have complex lives and come from all sorts of background.
echelon_musk 4 hours ago [-]
> unwashed orange
People wash oranges?! Why? You peel the skin off and discard it. Is the worry that if the skin is dirty then you eat the insides with dirty hands after peeling it?!
She is 1.9 years old and anything that looks like food will be bitten. But to tell the truth you even need to wash bananas: pesticide residues (you can transfer chemicals to your hands and then to the editable part), can collect dirt/bacteria/rodent excrement.
necovek 2 hours ago [-]
Unless your or your kids immune system is compromised, that's probably a bit too much care (we did go to similar lengths with a preemie, but not with our second kid).
desunit 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, for dirt I wouldn't worry at all... but e.g. rodent excrement is quite dangerous: leptospirosis (kidney damage, meningitis, liver failure), hantavirus, salmonella, LCMV. I know, chances are low but I'd be happy to reduce them as much as possible.
zeristor 7 hours ago [-]
This article mentions the marshmallow experiment.
I am confused do people actually like eating marshmallows, if so why?
It always seems to be taken as read that they’re irresistible. Why on Earth
krisoft 2 hours ago [-]
> It always seems to be taken as read that they’re irresistible.
Nah. It wouldn't work if it was irresistible. You need a candy crapy enough to be resited by some people sometimes, but good enough to be desired by some people sometimes.
Experimenters tried the same setup with a turkish delights once. Things went sideways so fast that they needed to get a talking lion to calm the situation down. Kids were betraying their own siblings even without further prompting or promises of more turkish delights.
ozim 6 hours ago [-]
Normally I don't eat marshmallows and I don't crave for them.
But once a pack is open and I get one, whole pack just goes. I find texture quite satisfying and since I eat them once in couple years it feels like something new and different from normal stuff I eat so it ends up "just one more" until there is no more.
cheema33 4 hours ago [-]
> do people actually like eating marshmallows, if so why?
Everybody around me likes them. I have no idea why. It could be cultural. I moved to the US when I was about 19. Tried my first marshmallow when I was maybe 25. Ick. Its mostly a ball of sugar. I don't like Vanilla ice cream either. For similar reasons.
dochne 7 hours ago [-]
I mean, it's asking kids if they want a ball of sugar - that does feel like a pretty sure thing.
weaksauce 6 hours ago [-]
i'm not particularly fond of sweets in my adult life but in my child years it was something i loved. i don't know why anyone would think a child wouldn't like a sweet ball of treat
watwut 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, but it is ball of sugar is worst possible form. You can make so many tasty things with sugar ... but someone somehow decided for this.
autoexec 6 hours ago [-]
That seems terribly unfair to marshmallows. Smores, lucky charms, rice krispies treat/bubble slice, and hot chocolate wouldn't be the same without them.
oblio 6 hours ago [-]
Amusingly, in my experience, it should be the "pasta experiment". I'm not 100% sure why they're that way, but pasta is super appealing to kids. I guess it's because they're funny (especially spaghetti).
CTDOCodebases 6 hours ago [-]
Giving sugar to a kid is like giving meth to an adult.
oblio 6 hours ago [-]
> Giving sugar to a kid is like giving meth to an adult.
Giving sugar to a kid is like giving sugar to an adult.
Have you seen the meth usage rates? Awesome.
Now compare them to obesity rates. I'm not saying sugar is the sole factor, but the fact that I've seen off the shelf sauerkraut (literally "sour cabbage") having sugar[1] as a listed ingredient in the US, tells you all you need to know about sugar's addictiveness.
[1] Yeah, corn syrup or whatever the cheapest sugar substitute is.
lemper 6 hours ago [-]
yea mate, my kid and his friends love to eat marshmallow. i, on the other hand, quite dislike sweet things.
dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
Marshmallows, twizzlers, any of those corner store “cakes” like twinkies, the McRib, pop tarts etc. are absolutely disgusting hyped things I don’t understand. It’s like they manage to take sugar that most people like and make it inedible.
ipnon 6 hours ago [-]
There are no iPad kids in Taiwan. You go to a restaurant and all the toddlers are quietly eating. When the tantrums flare the parents gently put a lid on it. It’s truly remarkable, and I don’t have a good theory for it. But it makes going out for dinner a consistent pleasure.
I don’t know how to raise kids with an even keel but I am certain that putting a nonstop algorithm in their face and becoming outraged when they inevitably become overstimulated is not the way.
eloisius 6 hours ago [-]
Must not be the same Taiwan I live in. When I go out to eat I constantly see mom, dad, and kid all zonked on their own devices (usually a phone, granted, not an iPad) instead of having a meal "together." I've also seen plenty of meltdown tantrums. If I had to square your observation, I'd say it's just because there are fewer kids, period, than almost anywhere because people aren't having them.
jaapz 4 hours ago [-]
I love threads like this
One person going "X doesn't happen in Y" is almost always followed by someone saying the exact opposite, solidifying the fact that we all live in our own bubbles, often experiencing the same things in completely different ways
Kind of reminds me of when you buy a certain car, you are suddenly primed to see that same car model everywhere, while before you weren't aware of them at all.
kaptainscarlet 2 hours ago [-]
That is why they say an anecdote is not data
ChrisGreenHeur 2 hours ago [-]
An anecdote is exactly one data.
You cannot extrapolate on one data point.
isametry 1 hours ago [-]
> exactly one data
Datum :)
watwut 53 minutes ago [-]
Frankly a lot of people go by what they see in media rather then reality. People who belive a country X have only well behaved toddlers especially.
audunw 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I’m also in serious doubt about this. At least for Taipei (could be regional differences)? I don’t live in Taiwan, but visit often. Last time we had dinner with another family and the kids got iPads/phones immediately.
spacechild1 6 hours ago [-]
I would never think of giving my toddlers a mobile device in the first place...
3 hours ago [-]
andrepd 5 hours ago [-]
Funny you're being downvoted. Meta shareholders? :-)
staz 3 hours ago [-]
it's probably being downvoted because it's empty virtue signaling that doesn't provide anything to the discourse
efdee 5 hours ago [-]
My kids love their screens. They use it for "productive" things (Minecraft, ...) and "unproductive" (shorts, ...). We have certain time restrictions and there are two days a week where they're not allowed to use them. We also don't let them take screens to restaurants. They get to take a bunch of crayons and a book and they're very much fine with this.
I feel that it's a matter of sticking to principles and being predictable for the kids, but maybe I'm biased and just have "easy" kids.
eloisius 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you give them some reasonable guardrails without being a hardass. Some digital indulgence is impossible to enjoy with tight time limits (e.g. Minecraft) but taking two days off is a good way to stay anchored in real life.
autoexec 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why the focus on "young" parents. Consistent parenting is very important at any age. Kids need their parents to be reliable and dependable with clear expectations and boundaries or things can get bad very quickly.
Inconsistent and unpredictable parenting is a common factor in children with oppositional defiant disorder and treatment often includes working with the parents as much as working with the child.
dmurray 6 hours ago [-]
This got me too, but on reading, it's clear the author means parents of young children.
Since the focus of the article is on child development, it's reasonable that it limits its scope to parents of young children, and not e.g. parents of 50-year olds, even if building trust might be nice there too.
desunit 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, I mean every parent, but the whole post started with an observation of my youngest child and later expanded to marshmallows, culture, and so on.
freddie_mercury 5 hours ago [-]
The word "young" doesn't even appear in the article, so not sure what you're talking about. The author never once mentions young parents.
autoexec 4 hours ago [-]
> The word "young" doesn't even appear in the article, so not sure what you're talking about.
The title of the post we're both commenting on, which reads: "Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids". I was assuming that the title was oddly editorialized, but it's also not that uncommon for articles to change their titles too so it's possible that posting guidelines were followed and it was the article itself that specified "young parents" at some point. Considering the age of the article though, I kind of doubt it.
nmeofthestate 4 hours ago [-]
It was posted by the author I think. I have no idea why they went with the different title. Isn't HN usually pretty strict about titles, to discourage clickbaiting?
JohnMakin 3 hours ago [-]
This is spot on - I came from a very abusive and neglectful home, bordering on torture, and the way it carries into my life into my middle age is funny to look back on when it comes to “scientific” studies like the marshmellow test. In many ways, my early distrustful experiences have led me to become stronger in other ways that make up for my weaknesses. Not everyone is like this, unfortunately, and I very much agree with this message - kids should feel safe for maximum development. Especially kids on the spectrum, where frequently broken promises can possibly be more traumatic than it would otherwise seem.
cyrillite 2 hours ago [-]
Yes. Adversity is only good for development if it’s a strong enough signal to require growth while also being within the range of adaptability, relative to your environment (support system, resources, etc.).
A given event might wipe out Child A, might cause adaptation in Child B, and might be within the recoverable range but above the adaptive threshold for Child C. The reliable path to growth is small but sufficient challenge, response, adaptation and recovery, repeat as frequently as is beneficial.
amunozo 41 minutes ago [-]
I'm not a father (yet), but I thought a lot about this, and I totally agree with everything. It is good to hear it from somebody with actual experience.
asukachikaru 7 hours ago [-]
Interesting read, thanks for sharing.
I've had discipline problems for my whole life despite fighting it with different ways, to the point I'm kind of giving in and accepting that it is just who I am.
I have trust in my parents. We have issues between us like all families, but I believe they did their best to raise me without a doubt. At least I didn't have concern about food on the table for a single second during my childhood, and I got most of the toys I wanted. Maybe it is something more minor or deeper.
kybernetikos 6 hours ago [-]
There are ways that people are set up psychologically that can lead to "discipline problems". A common companion of ADHD is oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) for example.
I've seen people with an instinct to resist everything when under pressure or stressed. I also know people who don't seem to have the instinct for understanding authority and hierarchy that most people do ("if I have to listen to the teacher, why doesn't the teacher have to listen to me?").
I'm sure having people with these behaviours can be very adaptive and beneficial for the whole society in some situations (I bet they do better on the Milgram experiment for example), but in many cases in modern life it can make it feel like everything is an unnecessary fight. I think for people dealing with such individuals the key is to understand that it isn't directed at you personally. I'm not sure what the best advice is for those with those instincts, but I would imagine that it's a combination of learning to use those instincts appropriately and not being too hard on yourself when it goes wrong.
oceanofsolaris 6 hours ago [-]
I am not saying that you shouldn’t build trust with your kids (it’s important and only fair to them … they rely on and usually adore you, you should in turn be kind and reliable to them and love them back).
But: the null hypothesis for anything which correlates childhood behavior, childhood environment and adult behavior should be that everything is 100% genetic. From my glance at the studies, the marshmallow experiment was instead always done with the null hypothesis that kids and their parents are only connected by living in a common household (aka “shared environment” in the sense that it’s shared between siblings).
I would still imagine that some effect of the household on the “delayed gratification” would persist, but it would probably be weaker and I am not sure it would predict much about outcomes as an adult.
spiderfarmer 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t know if I understand you correctly but I’d argue genetics don’t play that big of a role in preparing your kids for their life as an adult. In my experience as a parent I am frightened daily by how influential I am in my role as a father. They pick up thousands of small things by copying the behavior and messaging of their parents. Even now they’re teenagers.
jeeybee 4 hours ago [-]
This post is a perfect reminder of Gandhi’s advice: "Be the change you want to see in the world." We can’t expect kids to trust or wait for better outcomes unless we first model consistency and patience ourselves. Our everyday actions—keeping promises, showing reliability—are the real lessons that shape their future.
dennis_jeeves2 37 minutes ago [-]
That's the best and the simplest way to put it. All these ways of how-to-teach kids X seems quite a bit of over analysis.
Frieren 5 hours ago [-]
The main challenge that parents face today is on-line culture. Creating trust may mitigate that.
In the same way that teachers cannot educated children instead of their parents, even that they help. Social networks should not educate children but they are doing that. Being the problem that social network incentives are misaligned with education. Ad driven feature development and content promotion plus total deregulation make the on-line world a minefield for children.
If children at least trust their parents it is possible to mitigate the worst parts of on-line culture.
dtgriscom 2 hours ago [-]
I've always taken comfort from the fact that my two boys were different on day zero. This tells me that although I have a great deal of influence on them, it isn't all up to me: it's both nurture and nature. (Takes a bit of the pressure off.)
cyrillite 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, but outcomes are largely multi-realisable. It’s true that nature has a big role to play, but I think a lot of that role is expressed in how it changes nurture dynamics.
A shy child might not develop productive, healthy confrontation and resolution skills if nurture isn’t sensitive to that factor and willing to create an environment where those skills are learned.
My nature affected my parents nurture, as well as my other caregivers, mentors, and teachers. I think that’s the more significant role of nature. Nurturers could be much more attuned to this and more mindfully think through how to test for and pursue the right end goals, given different natures.
albert_e 3 hours ago [-]
Author Oliver Burkeman discusses this marshmallow test in his book Meditations for Mortals.
Paraphrasing from memory -
Who is to say that stockpiling as many marshmallows as you can is inherently more virtuous or objectively more positive than enjoying one marshmallow in the moment you and the marshmallow are ready for each other.
"Now" is the one moment you are truly alive. Rest is a concept.
timthorn 6 hours ago [-]
Going off on a tangent, but what's the point of washing an orange?
desunit 3 hours ago [-]
She is 1.9 years old and anything that looks like food will be bitten. But to tell the truth, you even need to wash bananas: pesticide residues (you can transfer chemicals to your hands and then to the editable part), can collect dirt/bacteria/rodent excrement.
thefz 6 hours ago [-]
Once I saw how fruit is transported and stocked, I wash all of it regardless of whether I am going to eat the skin or not.
artemonster 6 hours ago [-]
Its the same type of idiotic comment under any tiktok/short/fb video from any kitchen when chefs work without gloves: „EeW, UsE glOveS!!11“
That tiny amount of dirt wont kill you, but definitely keep your immune system in working order
exmadscientist 5 hours ago [-]
The issue is not the literal dirt. Dirt is fine. The issues are the pesticides and industrial contamination like whatever's on the floor of the packing plant or grocery store.
jaapz 4 hours ago [-]
There can still be bacteria or viruses on the produce, generally for people with weak health it is recommended to wash all the produce they consume.
There are also many *-icides, but they are generally quite hydrophobic so it's not easy to wash them off.
But you are right about the dirt, there is even some evidence suggesting ingesting some dirt may be good for your gut health.
thefz 4 hours ago [-]
Plenty of ways to keep my immune system updated providing myself scratches and cuts while mountain biking / trail running, let alone eating snacks while on the trail with my hands absolutely not clean, or by simply breathing in a forest.
But ingesting the black residue from exposure to diesel smoke while in transport is not for me, thanks. Feel free to train your immune system to dispatch tar.
nmeofthestate 3 hours ago [-]
Has anyone else seen oranges encrusted with this black residue from diesel smoke? It's not an issue in my country.
seszett 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe in order not to get the (particularly bad, as far as I know) pesticides on your hands? I wash my hands after having peeled an orange, but washing the orange itself seems like a waste to me.
I don't really know. I could understand if it was for zesting, but then you're supposed to use untreated oranges anyway because the pesticides don't wash out easily because of the oils on the orange's skin.
qudat 4 hours ago [-]
I’ve read online that the skin of fruits can contain bugs and larvae that when washed help keep your fruit longer and prevent things like fruit flies.
blarg1 6 hours ago [-]
The skin might be dirty, so cutting a knife through it will slightly contaminate the insides
artemonster 6 hours ago [-]
And thats a good thing? It wont kill you, but your immune system will be busy and trained.
bell-cot 4 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia mentions that immunity to any particular strain of norovirus lasts for 6 to 24 months.
thinkindie 5 hours ago [-]
i came here to leave the same comment, and I checked beforehand if someone noticed the same.
wiz21c 5 hours ago [-]
Building trust is much more than routine, it's about being predictable yourself. It's also about being supportive of the kids when they want to do something yopuu thik is so-so, also about letting them fail (and help them to recover), making them understand why we ask them to do something, giving them clear limits, but more than all, I'd say, being there (don't look your phone when you're with them, spend time with them when they want to, etc.)
And that starts from day zero and last (in my own experience) at least unti 19 years old.
It's fun, not difficult and it allows some spare time (yeah, less time than before you got them, but some time nonetheless) for yourself.
rednafi 2 hours ago [-]
Parenting is one of the hardest things I will probably ever do in my life. I grew up in a middle-class family in SEA, and when I came to the West, I realized what a fantastic job my parents did raising me.
Here, things are quite different. Many upper-middle-class families struggle to provide stability, proper education, and a loving environment—things we always took for granted growing up. This isn't a denigration of Western society. More like an observation of how capitalism has made both parents work like crazy and still feel like they don’t have enough.
It’s not a panacea in the East. We had to deal with overpopulation. Absurd competition in schools, colleges, and universities scarred my childhood. But I'm thankful to my parents for what they endured for me.
lnsru 2 hours ago [-]
My some friends and almost all neighbors could be my grandparents by age. And they love to invite me for a tea and share their memories. West was wildly different back then. Much better with rising economy and much better vibe. Traveling with kids was normal. Like Barcelona, Nice, Paris were normal destinations (I am in Germany). Skiing in the Alps absolutely normal even for poorer families. Rents were high, but not impossible. The job stability was there and infrastructure was built in their eyes. They saw when train line was built and the train started coming every two hours, every hour, every twenty minutes. Now the same train is constantly late and occasionally canceled. And one old guy told me openly, that he’s not envy me rising kids today. It’s kinda stupid when pay rise does not cover inflation and increasing taxes. Infrastructure is collapsing. Ancient school system is stuck producing factory workers for factories that are long gone. It’s just hard time being a parent.
rednafi 1 hours ago [-]
> Skiing in the Alps was absolutely normal even for poorer families. Rents were high, but not impossible. Job stability was there, and infrastructure was built in their eyes.
I'm in Germany too. Rent in Berlin makes me glaze over this sentence with dreamy eyes. Despite being in tech and paying taxes in the 90th percentile, these big cities always find ways to drive you crazy. I don't have kids yet, but I'm not sure I'll be able to shield them from all of this shit as well as my parents did.
> Now the same train is constantly late and occasionally canceled.
Tell me more.
> And one old guy told me openly that he doesn't envy me raising kids today. It’s kinda stupid when a pay raise doesn’t cover inflation and increasing taxes.
I don't wanna be rich. I just want my pay to cover my yearly expense increases. It's getting more expensive every year, and people are scared shitless because of layoffs. Most people don’t even bring up raises to their managers. No wonder westerners don’t want kids—people just can’t afford them comfortably anymore.
> The ancient school system is stuck producing factory workers for factories that are long gone. It’s just a hard time to be a parent.
Schools aren’t qualified to teach kids the right things. Parents aren’t qualified either; it’s just that Americans like to think homeschooling is the way. It’s not—many of the parents I’ve seen homeschooling didn’t even go to college.
People make so much more money in the West, but my parents live a far more comfortable life in Bangladesh than I do. They’re retired, live in an apartment three times the size of mine, and have enough not to rely on anyone. Plus, all the SEA shit doesn’t affect them now that they’re out of work. I envy them so much.
thaawyy33432434 5 hours ago [-]
>instant gratification is practically a way of life.
For kids on ADHD spectrum - absolutely. Marshmallow test is flawed, because it doesn't filter for the lack of control over executive function.
> A follow-up study showed that kids from stable, reliable homes were much more likely to wait than kids from unpredictable ones.
Unstable home is strongly correlated with impaired lack of control over executive function.
CarRamrod 6 hours ago [-]
Perhaps a more accurate title would be "Why parents of young children should focus on building trust with their kids". In any case, thanks for the enlightening article.
5 hours ago [-]
benrutter 4 hours ago [-]
> A follow-up study showed that kids from stable, reliable homes were much more likely to wait than kids from unpredictable ones. If you’re a kid and the adults in your life constantly break promises, why would you trust them this time? Why wait for the second marshmallow if history tells you it might not show up? Waiting isn’t a character trait; it’s a strategy. And strategies are shaped by experience.
I think this is a potentially dangerous oversimplification of the work discrediting this study. The first sentence is pretty accurate, but the rest of the paragraph puts "stability" 100% in the hands of parents, and not childrens surrounding environment due to poverty. Parents can only do so much if there aren't good schools, safe communities or reliable policing.
I'm probably being a little too critical here, and it's clearly important as a parent to do everything you can to make sure that your child has a stable, trusworth environment, I have a son and that's exactly what I try to do personally.
But I think we also have a massive influence in how we shape society, children in poverty have unpredictable, unstable environments even if they have great parents. There are some really clearly documented outcomes of the effects of poverty, and yet a societal tendency to blame outcomes on parents and character over situation still remains.
I'm basically just saying in a long winded way, be a good parent, but do what you can to make the world a safer and more reliable place for other children too.
jmyeet 27 minutes ago [-]
> Kids crave predictability.
I cannot overstate the importance of this. This particularly affects neurodivergent people. The article also (correctly) mentions how socioeconomic status plays a role here.
Food insecurity erodes psychological safety. Housing insecurity erodes psychological safety. Having to do unpredictable and extra jobs just to make ends meet such that a parent has unpredictable availability hurts psychological safety. Having to break promises because of circumstances hurts psychological safety and this is just way more likely if you're struggling, despite your best intent.
It's worth ruminating on this when you start to understand how every aspect of society is designed to extract value from you at every possible moment. Third and fourth jobs, medical debt forcing you to work, student debt, mortgage debt, high rent prices.
Yet the thirst for ever-increasing profits is unquenchable. Part of the reason that people such as myself rail against this system and the society we've built around work is how damaging it is to society as a whole.
South Korea is really the end stage of this pipeline, where birth rates are around ~0.71 children per woman as there are so many disincentives to have children and, for that child to have a good life, everything gets invested into their education. The pressure is intense such that the teen suicide rate is huge. And this birth rate is so low that 3 generations of this will decrease the population by 90%.
Liffoldw3a 2 hours ago [-]
As a parent, you can't demand trust. It's a gradual process that requires mutual commitment and it will inevitably strengthen your relationship. It will also set your child up to develop healthy relationships in the future.
dtgriscom 2 hours ago [-]
Well, that's always true. It's just that if you demand trust of an adult, they'll pretend to give it to you; children will make it clear (somehow) that they're reserving judgement.
gardenhedge 34 minutes ago [-]
Maybe the experiment was planned better than the video but in the video it's not clear if the children are aware it's an experiment and if they're aware of what an experiment is in general.
jamesblonde 7 hours ago [-]
The point about trust/predictability is a nice new take on the delay gratification story.
Good points from a motivated new! parent. When you get to your third kid, you tend to lose that burning ambition and think you know it all. We should always be learning.
4 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
t43562 5 hours ago [-]
I know this comment invites disaster but.....what is heaven other than the ultimate delayed gratification? i.e. don't worry about your miserable life as a serf toiling for the lord of the manor 6 days a week because if you're good now you'll be happy after you die. You can imagine the aristocracy laughing to themselves about that idea.
Nowadays we get told to save money...but I'm from Zimbabwe where saving money was a total disaster. Instead it was important, when I was still there, to spend it at the earliest possible time on anything physical. The prize for discipline was to be robbed.
... and yet of course if nobody saved money we'd all live an inflationary hell and if some people didn't believe in heaven there might be nothing else to retard their atrocious behaviour.
dennis_jeeves2 27 minutes ago [-]
>I know this comment invites disaster but.....what is heaven other than the ultimate delayed gratification? i.e. don't worry about your miserable life as a serf toiling for the lord of the manor 6 days a week because if you're good now you'll be happy after you die. You can imagine the aristocracy laughing to themselves about that idea.
You are correct. This is the delusion that peasants feeds their kids so that life appears to be worth living. In the west it's the similar rigmarole of mortgages, debt, divorce, unstable jobs etc that their parents did. Not saying that there is no value to discipline, but it has to be intelligently applied ( not easy) else you will loose. For example saving for a house (vs taking a large mortgage) will not do you good if the inflation is high.
cylemons 4 hours ago [-]
Did things get better after dollarization?
t43562 2 hours ago [-]
I wasn't there but I think dollarization brought stability. There was no need to rush off to spend your money.
The "elite" don't really benefit from dollarization though. The currency was a way for them to rob everyone without even trying. All the big black market money dealing companies were ultimately owned by the big players in ZANUPF. So they profited from the difference between the official exchange rate and the black market one. They were able to use their influence to get dollars at the official rate and sell at the unofficial one.
So for that and other (more reasonable) reasons they have tried to reintroduce a currency. The place is so humped that I don't know if it can ever be fixed. This is what you get for electing demagogues. I say that as a warning to those of you who think national pride is a substitute for intelligent behavior.
wazoox 4 hours ago [-]
This applies to adults, too. When you're really poor, it's actually a reasonable strategy NOT to keep money but spend everything as soon as you hit pay day, for instance on storable food. Why's that ? Because money on your bank account can be seized, because you're late on rent, or because you unexpectedly got fined because your rusty old car has a broken light, etc. Food can't be seized, therefore at least you know you'll eat next week, even if it's only cheap pasta and canned sauce, and Nutella basically lasts forever.
nemo44x 2 hours ago [-]
Everyone hate hypocrite and little kids especially hate hypocrites. You really need to be consistent with what you tell them and how your own actions. It’s so easy to mess this up so you need to humble yourself and explain that you’re not perfect either.
libsofhn 11 minutes ago [-]
Cool, now parenting guidance on a tech dork portal.
DFHippie 2 hours ago [-]
It's not just kids. I find this works with pets as well: be predictable in delivering their necessities -- food, exercise, play, affection -- and they behave better. Make them beg and they behave worse.
Also, businesses thrive on trust. If a business can predict and prepare for conditions, if it can depend on loans, grants, services, the economy, it can invest and thrive.
There's a lesson for our current moment in there.
scotty79 3 hours ago [-]
It's actually possible that tolerance for delayed gratification might have nothing to do with life success. It might be purely coincidential that affluent parents create environments that make delying gratification easier, but the success is transferred to their offspring by much simpler mechanism, inheritance.
ziofill 6 hours ago [-]
Not just young parents
yapyap 4 hours ago [-]
old parents as well btw
0x1ceb00da 5 hours ago [-]
s/trust/rust/g
What could be better than compiling the compiler with the little ones? There is no trust without rust.
christkv 6 hours ago [-]
My kids got this delayed gratification stuff from the beginning but mostly in the form of. Yes you might get that cookie at the bakery however you have to wait to eat it until after dinner.
I'm much more worried about the general lack of resilience and self-reliance I see in a lot of kids and teens. I think it's caused by a combo of parents and schooling. Also the level of anxiety seems very very high.
debeloo 3 hours ago [-]
The article mentions the marshmallow experiment.
I wonder if it's "inverse" has been studied. Promise the child another one after 15 minutes but then either not deliver on the promise or even steal the one marshmallow.
I know people that had the equivalent happen to them as kids, and I think it had enormous effect on their personality as adults.
Depending how often it happens, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how you raise sociopaths.
atoav 3 hours ago [-]
One of the most important points about parenting is that kids learn from watching you. That means what you say has far less impact than people colloquially think it does. What matters is whst you do and how that relates to the words you say.
E.g. if you want your kids to value culture, it is way more effective to live in a way that shows you value it, instead of just saying culture is important and never touching it with a ten foot pole yourself. You could never say culture is importsnt and go to the theater and museum every other weekend and that would be way more effective than telling your kid about the importance every day.
The latter doesn't teach the kid that culture is important, it teaches them that there are certain things your parent wants you to be, that they themselves don't manage to do despite them thinking it is important. As a kid your parents are likely the most powerful figure in your lifes, so if they aren't able to do it, how could you?
Any parents needs to have a keen eye out for these implicit lessons they are teaching their kids. The crazy thing is that these implicit lessons can at times be the polar opposite of the lesson you want to teach them.
And it is okay to fail, if they see you are trying to improve yourself, guess what the implicit lesson is? That working on yourself is not only normal, but a good thing that even parents do.
m0llusk 6 hours ago [-]
When I was a little kid I had a school psychologist give me the marshmallow test. It was extremely awkward because their assumption was the same as used throughout this article, that the marshmallow represented a strongly tempting treat. But it happens that to me as a picky eater marshmallows were always creepy nonfood and to this day I still find them absolutely disgusting. I was also quite disciplined because of my violent and abusive father, so I just sat through it and then gave both of the marshmallows to the first other kid I encountered who said they liked them.
When people go on and on about the marshmallow test what they are really saying is they don't really know anything or even actually care about human nature or experience. The whole thing is garbage.
Nowadays my paying work is servicing properties which means a lot of awkward sharing of people's homes and families. It is absolutely heartbreaking how many kids are being raised like pets or fun game partners. They end up having near zero executive function and have to be helped with everything including the most basic life decisions. What kids need is a sense of agency and some tools for dealing with the world. Enough of these stupid and disconnected marshmallow games. Let's start actually taking kids seriously and giving them what they need to function as adults.
cylemons 4 hours ago [-]
> kids are being raised like pets or fun game partners
Does that mean they are neglected or that they are spoon fed everything?
theshackleford 5 hours ago [-]
> I was also quite disciplined because of my violent and abusive father
I went the complete opposite direction as the result of violent and abusive parents and had never considered that the opposite also occurs, but of course it must.
For whatever reason, the more violent my parents became with me, the more violent and defiant I became…and not just with my parents. I came to see everyone and everything as a threat to my safety and began to respond accordingly.
Given the whole fight or flight thing, I am wildly predisposed to choosing fight. It took years and I mean years to learn to control this.
kittikitti 6 hours ago [-]
The headline makes it sound like a boomer giving advice to a millennial parent or your in-laws giving unsolicited advice. I started hate-reading it but it turned out to be rather wholesome and good. Thank you!
desunit 5 hours ago [-]
Nah, I'm millennial and not trying to give any advice. Just sharing my observations while talking to my young daughter. Glad that you liked it!
strangehome 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
strangehome 7 hours ago [-]
Google "summarise AI" and paste the URL to see how bad the first results offer 1. A good UX, 2. A meaningful summary. This is gap in the market I would love to exploit if I wasn't trapper in a 9-5
The rest is spot on. I became a parent before I was ready, and man, they are little sponges. They learn everything you do, everything you say, embarrassingly so. My 5 year old would lay on the couch to 'rest her back' like me. She'd say weird country sayings I learned from my own Dad, like 'kneehigh to a cricket.' I had a habit of saying 'dicking with' to mean 'messing with' until she got scolded by a teacher at the ripe old age of 7.
The hardest part for parents today seems to be putting their phone down. It's what the kid and Mom have fought about forever, then applied to me. It's so easy to lose yourself in your social media, work, reading, etc. and kids are super receptive to it. But not as that effort, but as having a parent who stares at their phone unattentively. Our kid made her own 'phone' out of cardboard as a child, pretending to read and chat on it. That struck me deeply.
I never had social media, but as a voracious reader still find myself falling into the trap. Kids notice. Kids today have it harder because of that. My parents didn't have the Internet, they created the world we lived in and tailored it to us. I think that's incredibly rare today.
Now she's 13, knows it all, and doesn't want to be picked up anymore. And I tell you, I wish I never had a smartphone at all.
> The marshmallow test also doesn’t account for cultural differences. In some cultures, waiting is baked into daily life. Think about Japan, where kids are often taught to wait quietly for meals or gifts. Compare that to the US, where instant gratification is practically a way of life. These cultural norms shape how kids approach situations like the marshmallow test. It’s not just about personality; it’s about the world they live in.
That's it. That's the entire quote about the effect of culture.
I see no mention of race or location—I see an argument that "the world they live in" affects children's ability to wait, and that culture is an important aspect of the world that kids live in.
Given that this is the actual text you're responding to, I'm not actually sure you disagree with them, because you go on to point out that smartphones are a dangerous component of modern culture.
Is it really for no real reason, though?
> Like the race or location of the parent determines their childhood?
You might not be aware, but different cultural backgrounds do result in different life experiences. You might have even noticed that that's the whole point of the article. What you try to downplay as "race or location" is actually different social environments and contexts where kids grow. They are used as concrete examples lending support for the hypothesis. It is a behavioral issue that is determined by each one's experience living in a specific social circle with specific social norms.
It's completely fine to point out societal norms. Neither were particularly offensive.
But assuming a Japanese child will have patience where an American will not is the same weird thought that leads to weird guys wanting Japanese wives for 'obedience.'
I'm not at all against pointing out or even flexing cultural differences, but they don't matter at all when raising a child(other than of course, if you teach your child by that example.)
I have a math brain. I've been teaching her math since she could speak, mainly because she seemed to want to impress me and it's how she would get my attention. Should she instead be bad at math because the Chinese value that more? Should I have stuck to teaching her big macs and bald eagles instead?
You're applying the math brain wrong by using the "single counterexample invalidates whole article" mode, rather than just inserting the words "most" or "on average" or "in general" where necessary.
A specific kid will have individual behaviors. A group of kids will have behaviors that can be averaged. Different samples will have different outcomes.
I know sociology has poor reproducibility, but cultural and behavioral differences are definitely a thing.
I used to have a Korean colleague who'd moved to the UK specifically because he did not want his kids growing up in the Korean school system. They will always be ethnically and "genetically" Korean, and I would assume he would teach them the language, but he wanted them to be less culturally Korean because he thought they would be happier that way.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-born_confused_desi
Where do you think that math brain came from?
There are only three factors that could really influence it:
1. The way you were raised.
2. Your genes.
3. Some metaphysical explanation.
I'm going to set #3 aside for a bit because there's no way to test that hypothesis. That leaves the way you were raised and genes.
What correlates with the way you were raised? Culture. Your parents' culture is tightly correlated with the way they raised you, and when speaking about groups and averages it's fair to say that in general affects outcomes. So if you take this explanation, TFA is not wrong to say that culture would affect outcomes.
What correlates with your genes? Your ancestry, which is (imperfectly) correlated with race. So if you take this explanation, OP would not have been wrong to say that on average race would affect outcomes. (That said, I don't think they actually do—they strictly mention culture!)
Rejecting the premise that the environment shapes who we are and the type of people we become sounds extremely ignorant of the realities of history.
No, I reject that you can tell anything meaningful about the environment by country. Or even state. Or even neighborhood!
Japan itself could fit into the US 25 times by area.
Are kids raised in SF the same as those raised in Alabama? Or NY vs Phoenix? It'd be insane to make any generalities about a country so large and diverse, IMO.
Heck, kids in Loudoun county grow up completely differently than kids in Baltimore county. What does that tell us about the US, if anything?
I'm guessing Japan is the same, but I'm not educated enough to speak to it.
Well then it's kind of a strange coïncidence that there is a high correlation between population density and political leaning/voting:
* https://dailyyonder.com/distance-and-density-not-just-demogr...
And not just in the US:
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00104140231194...
* https://macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/338canada-the-urban-rura...
When considering the US as a whole then Loudoun county will get the appropriate weight in the resulting number. If you zoom out to see the map of the world and no longer see your street, it doesn't mean the map is wrong. It's perfect for the purpose of visualizing the world.
I'll bet you're fine with "the US people are richer than the Burundi" or "Dutch people are taller than US people". These also don't tell you anything about the short Dutch people or ultra-poor in the US. But you accept them because you don't feel slighted by them.
Or else you reject the premise because you zoomed in on a place which is not right on that average so the whole concept gets thrown out the window.
They took the very reasonable "you're not allowed to talk about black people liking watermelons" and applied it to every statement about every minority, disadvantaged or not, ethnically defined or not, whether offense was taken or not. Generalization was relabelled a microaggression, and avoiding them (or calling them out) became an urgent imperative, whether or not you're a member of the group in question. Whether or not you take offense personally, it became a Duty To Police this sort of speech.
This alienates one from the vast majority of humanity, which uses generalizations about people and things every day as a cognitive & social necessity. It makes it impossible to communicate or organize, because some sort of nitpicking about social equity, even purely semantic equity, is always prioritized over topical action in SJW-oriented leftist conversation. The rally for women's rights is cancelled because the committee spent all day deciding whether to use the term "women" or some alternative.
It also makes one less effective as a thinker, because there are statements that you can make about cultures and people's background that are statistically very likely, or which indicate a very real difference in the center of different bell curves.
Personally I blame autism for much of it but that's another can of worms.
It seems to be to be a common failing in the west to underestimate just how big differences are between themselves and other cultures. The two cultures I have lived in, despite being Britain and one of its former colonies (and therefore partially anglophone, similar political system, lots of other influences) are quite substation, and noticeable even in the (heavily westernised) circles I socialise in there. The differences would be even bigger if you compare to an East Asian culture like Japan.
Things that are regarded as fundamental concepts, or universal values are often not share (some values are pretty much human, some are not).
"Europe is diverse enough that you need to split it into quadrants to decide what countries are relatively similar"
The same is true for South Asia, but if you look at it from a western perspective you see the similarities.
There are plenty of similarities across Europe. Shared attitudes to sex, politics, religion..... things like freedom of worship and separation of church and state (laws restricting freedom of worship even in secular democracies like India, let alone the Middle East or China), attitudes to sex and sexuality (and ideas and definitions and identities linked to them - although this is changing because of Western influence, historically the idea of people having a fixed sexual orientation is a modern western one, for example)....
Correct. I just picked those two because of stark differences of two well known areas close to each other. But it can go down to even neighborhood, or even street in said neighborhood.
Sorry if my rambling seems confusing. I'm not against the idea that environment affects children. I'm against broad brush stroke categorization about how different countries behave.
Or even one individual on different days. It should be all chaos and noise and yet it's not because these "general" numbers get translated to a realistic "it's more/less likely" not "it's guaranteed".
You're arguing against comparisons you don't like, or feel make you look worse than others. In other words you want to get to arbitrarily define the brush width presumably based on where you feel you sit in the comparison.
Ok - pick any conservative country (say India or Indonesia). Now tell me that the chances of an average Indonesian woman wearing a bikini to a beach (pretty normal in most Western countries) is same as an average French woman?
Or for a less gender-charged example, chances of an average Saudi eating Pork vs an average American.
Note that I didn't say "every", I said "average".
The strongest predictor for both the French and the Indonesian is almost certainly going to be the individuals physique and and the second is probably going to be the country and prevailing culture in which the beach is located (i.e. what everyone else is wearing).
This kind of illustrates the point you're trying to disagree with. You can't just look at some sort of demographic based average and shoot from the hip and expect to hit anything.
I take it that you have either never been to a beach or the one you have been to is only open to athletes and supermodels.
> the second is probably going to be the country and prevailing culture in which the beach is located (i.e. what everyone else is wearing)
So you haven't had the chance of seeing Indonesian woman wearing full headgear and clothes covering their body having fun at a beach far away from Indonesia? Not joking, they were having a genuinely good time - from direct experience.
The world is much bigger and has far greater variety of people, customs and norms than you can imagine.
Have you been to the beach in the last 10yr. All manner of 1-pc swimsuits are arguably the default style for women.
>So you haven't had the chance of seeing Indonesian woman wearing full headgear and clothes covering their body having fun at a beach far away from Indonesia? Not joking, they were having a genuinely good time - from direct experience.
My mistake, I mixed up Indonesia and the Phillipines in my mind. No surprise muslim women will not be wearing bikinis. But the Westerners will also be far more modest in a setting where that is the prevailing default so....
>The world is much bigger and has far greater variety of people, customs and norms than you can imagine.
If looking down one's nose like that is what it takes to be cultured I'm glad I'm not.
They say that there are differences between even children living on two different roads in the same town, and these differences matter more than differences between countries, and therefore we should not make any kind of arguments based on nationality at all.
I disagree though, I do think that there are significant statistical differences growing up between, say, Afghanistan or Sweden. That does not mean that you can make claims about specific children in either country, but you can make generalizations about the population as a whole.
This. The standard deviation is too damn high to make predictions. You might as well toss a coin.
Sometimes I can't tell when people are pulling chains, so in the interest of charity ^
Sorry dude cultural differences are real. When I got married to my American wife, my Bangladeshi mom pulled her aside and said, “you know, we don’t get divorced.”
Behavioral patterns and personality traits have been pretty conclusively proven to be genetically inheritable. "Behavioral Genetics and Child Temperament" (Saudino) investigates this, as does "A genome-wide investigation into the underlying genetic architecture of personality traits and overlap with psychopathology" (Priya Gupta, et al).
There's no doubt that nurture and culture play a massive role in one's later personality and behavior as an adult, but it's incorrect to disregard genetics in this conversation. Some people are predisposed to be shy, some people are predisposed to be aggressive. Smart, critical people are able to appreciate genetic differences amongst broad human groups without letting that lead to unsavory viewpoints.
You are making several jumps in logic to get from A -> B.
Japan has an education system which teaches the importance of certain values, patience and self-discipline among them.
Here is the short-film "Instruments of a Beating Heart" currently on the Oscars shortlist about this very point -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRW0auOiqm4
Not "bad" , but less fully invested... Maybe? It's isolating being the only non-Mandarin-speaking family at a math people gathering. It's quite striking in the high-level math community.
I agree that it is weird. And I did not read the article. But I would assume that this is not the point it was trying to make when referring to race or location backgrounds.
When remarks like these are made, I would think they usually refer to a neighborhood. For instance, a well-groomed neighborhood at a good location vs. a slum at the outskirts of town, perhaps without electricity or even without running water. The race is mentioned in that context often not because it would have a direct impact. But because there is, unfortunately, a correlation between people living in poor neighborhoods and people of racial minorities.
I would think that the implication then is that a bad neighborhood is one of the factors which drive bad social behavior.
You can reject all you want but your [personal, anecdotal] data point is irrelevant.
It takes a village to raise a child.
[rejecting an analysis because you disagree with the premise is unscientific - this analysis exposes a trend - it does not make a prediction - but gives pointers for further analysis]
Except they do matter, unless you're going to "raise" a child by locking them in the apartment until they turn 18. Otherwise, as soon as they go to kindergarten[0], it's entirely out of your hands.
They say[1] that minimum viable reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a village. And the corollary to that is, the village will find our child, whether you want it or not, and they will have as much say in their mindset and values as you do. You can influence that, but only so much, and not everywhere all at once[2].
(Also obligatory reminder/disclaimer that group-level statistics are not indicative of any individual's character; individual variance in-group is greater than variance between groups, etc.)
EDIT:
> Should she instead be bad at math because the Chinese value that more? Should I have stuck to teaching her big macs and bald eagles instead?
No, you do you - and I respect you for passing on your interest in maths to your daughter, and I hope it'll stick. The point is, whatever the culture you're embedded in, she will be exposed to its tropes in aggregate. It doesn't mean she'll turn into a stereotype; no one ever does (see the disclaimer above); it's just that when someone doesn't like some aspects of their culture, "shopping for a village" that isn't reputed for those traits is one of the historically tried and true methods of reducing the risk.
EDIT2: To add another personal anecdote, there was a defining moment in my life early on, that I'm certain changed my entire life's trajectory. In my primary school, I ended up in a class with some rather unruly, mischievous kids, under a walking pathology of a teacher; by the time I was 12 and it was time to switch to secondary school, I already picked up on some of the bad behaviors. My mom went through some extraordinary effort to get me placed in a math-profile class[3], despite me not showing much aptitude or interest in sciences, just so I get away from the rascals. It paid off. I may have started as the dumbest kid in the group, but this group wasn't into mischief, and instead was supportive to intellectual pursuits; I ended up befriending a bunch of nerds, and quickly becoming the nerdiest of them all. I can't imagine that happening if I stayed with my primary-school crowd. In fact, they'd probably bully my fledgling interest in programming out of me, so I pretty much owe my entire career and the shape of my life to that one choice by my mom, to move me to a different "village".
--
[0] - And maybe earlier, if they go to daycare, or you're socially active and they tag along; and no later than when they go to school - unless, again, zip-ties and a radiator are a major part of the upbringing approach.
[1] - Well, someone on HN says that; I think they may have even coined it. Either way, it's true.
[2] - I grew up in a Christian offshoot that's a borderline cult. I can tell first-hand that, no matter how hard they try, even a strong fundamentalist culture that works hard on staying true to its values and pretty much defines themselves in opposition to "the world", can only do so much to resist the local culture in which people are embedded. And, when they try too hard, they just end up bleeding members.
[3] - A brief moment in time in Poland where we had 3-school system and profile classes in the secondary school.
> People mechanically can have kids, physically, before they're mentally able to take care of them. The [village] elders would raise and teach the children while the adolescents worked at things adolescents do better than elders
So "it takes a village" used to be literal, and as we in this part of the west started to isolate and nuclear family the whole idea that the elders should have plurality input to the neuroplasticity kinda went wayside.
I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. They all died when I was young but my sister was younger yet. I moved all our kids to be within 15 minutes of their living grandparents. They werent teens when we got here. My youngest spends 3/7th of their time at grandma's house.
I'll let you know how all this works in like 30 years.
I think a large, maybe even the main part of why community of family and close friends raising children together works: humans are uniquely motivated by shame and pride, and having that many eyes on you leads to quick corrections before bad habits take root.
There's arguments about in groups and globalization and if it's better to amalgamate and if so, community based child raising has gotta go. Please do not ask me to spell this out as I won't be.
From this POV, the "village" is still there, it's always there. It may not be a literal village, and you and me might both be pretty much alone except for our partners, when it comes to parental responsibilities. However, the modern "village" is the society we live in - our neighbors, our friends, co-workers, the market economy as represented by people selling good and providing services we need to survive; later, also parents of children our kids go to school with. These are all people we interact with daily, share the same material and social environment, and we all influence each other.
There's no way to avoid that influence (in fact, if you try, the "village" will start getting worried, possibly to the point social services might get involved). It's always there, and once your kids start education, they'll be interacting with other members of society unsupervised - this is what I mean by "village finding your child".
> I think a large, maybe even the main part of why community of family and close friends raising children together works: humans are uniquely motivated by shame and pride, and having that many eyes on you leads to quick corrections before bad habits take root.
I 100% agree with that. I think it's fundamental. But it works only up to certain size; it's not that globalization is in opposition to that, it's just that to form societies larger than ~150, you need replacements for "shame and pride" as behavioral regulators to keep a group from self-destructing. Hence leaders and rules - and applied recursively a couple times, you end up with presidents and districts and rule of law and bureaucracy and all the staples of modern life, existing next to and on top of groups of families and friends.
It is like abit of good influence outweights alot of bad influence.
You could make an analogy with dogs. There you have plenty of examples of what can happen in isolation. A functional collective will in most cases manouver you out of parenting in part or fully with soft or hard means if you are bad enough since you will indirectly wreck havoc otherwise.
Cultures differ significantly in how they raise their children. My dad grew up in a Bangladeshi village. He has this story where a cousin was sick and asked for lobster (which back then was a widely available food in the villages). His parents told him they’d make it for him the next morning, but he died overnight. My dad always invokes that story when I try to impose limits on my kids. When my brother and I were growing up, they put a lot of expectations on us academically, but no gratuitous self denial in terms of food or toys or anything like that.
By contrast my wife is an old stock American WASP. She has a very different parenting style than my parents. She makes my kids wait for everything and tells them everything they want is too expensive (even though we could easily afford anything they want).
The mention of culture is not out of place in the article, as the marshmallow test (which features quite prominently in it, including in its actual title) does have different outcomes in different cultures, and, in addition, it is hardly controversial to suppose that the way children are brought up is an important factor in establishing and maintaining a culture's cohesion.
EDIT: and the kids are not all right.
> And I tell you, I wish I never had a smartphone at all.
Being self-aware of phone use is 80% of the battle.
I also read a lot on my phone. Most of my screen time is in the books app.
Early on I decided to leave the phone on the charger in the mornings and evenings before the kids are in bed. Problem solved.
The biggest trap I see in my circle is the mental gymnastics of blaming everyone else for their own excessive phone use. It becomes easier to overuse a phone when they blame the algorithm or the companies for “making” them use the phone more than they want. Some people read stories about apps being made to be addictive and feel relieved because it offloads responsibility away from their decision making.
In the addiction treatment world it’s acknowledged that if someone can’t control their own behavior then they need even more controls and accountability, not to cede all responsibility for their actions to the addictive thing they’re drawn to. That usually means making decisions to shape their environment to keep them away from addictive behaviors, but for some reason many people see headlines about “the algorithm” and addictive apps and decide it’s futile to resist.
Making the decision to leave my phone on the charger during kid time was one of the higher ROI decisions I’ve made in my life. I used a smart watch to get any urgent notifications if I really needed them.
I think you inserting the objections to the culture/country part yourself. I don't think they are present in the actual article.
The central idea here is that children are shaped by their environment, the people around them and those people's behaviour. They sponge up behaviours of their parents, peers and such.
But... it's not all mimicry and habits. It's also a response to incentives in their life. That's the writer's point about trust... and the marshmello test. Does the child live in a world where trust and patience pay off... or a world where you get what you can while you can? The socio-economic correlation to patience in the marshmello test is a proxy... demonstrating his point.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3147063/
The bad news is that they can be too good: It's hard to change yourself if you don't want them to learn something. ("Do what I say, not what I do.")
This seems like a dishonest characterization of some of the points in the article.
Unfortunately, we do live in a society. A childhood is not just determined by the house the child lives in, but the community the child lives in as well, and the parents are also affected by the community they grew up in, which affects the way they parent.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_theory
Ignoring the fact that you inserted a narrative that wasn't present in the article, YES OF COURSE THIS HAS A MAJOR IMPACT.
I'm a half-Dutch, half-Chinese man who spent the first years of my life in Ghana being blissfully happy and welcomed in the local community, and then the rest of my childhood being miserable in a Dutch village because I was excluded from that local community, all because I was "the local ethnic minority".
And I'm half-Asian, with parents from a higher-education background who had a good income. I only had to deal with "diet racism" compared to pretty much any other ethnic minority/social background in the Netherlands.
I've lived this and the fact that people like you keep insisting that my life experiences do not exist because they did not experience it is infuriating.
Anyway, fair points about the phone being a serious issue. But for goodness sake stop pretending that race and socio-economic background has no impact just because it makes you a little uncomfortable.
Two notable examples... 'What do you want, a Dewey button?' as a sarcastic way of saying 'who cares.' He didn't know why. Google says it's probably related to Thomas Dewey.
'Kitty bar the door.' An expression to mean he was going to go all out. He didn't know who kitty was or why he said it. I still have no idea its real etymology.
It looks like Katy or Katie are the more common spellings in the Southern US, although Kitty seems to the standard when talking about hockey. The origin is disputed: https://worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-kat1.htm
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/katy-bar-the-door.html
I guess it is still an isolated activity from the kid, but at least the message is "read books" over "stare at addictive device".
You can also talk about the book with your kids and they see different covers each day and may be curious (and may pick it up)
It's also fun when it happens in the other direction: child invents a totally new word, parents think it's funny and copy it, it becomes a word used only within that family, but perhaps it stays around long enough for some of the grandchildren to pick it up. But everyone has to pay attention not to use it outside the home because outsiders would be very confused by it. We have a few words like that.
Personality: ~40-50% genetic influence
Cognition (IQ): ~50% genetic influence in adulthood
Schizophrenia: <50% concordance in identical twins
Psychopathology: Varies, but mostly <50% genetic influence
For real though, the DG is the perfect personification. Don't overfeed it, it'll only get meaner.
I did that, but a cardboard laptop!
You have two kids, one ate ten boxes of marshmallows yesterday, the other didn't eat for two days. Which one is going to wait more for marshmallows?
It's pointing that the Marshmallow test was flawed. Which doesn't surprise me (most social experiments are very flawed).
Basically, when you account for socioeconomic factors, the correlation goes away, or so I heard. Rich kids are more successful in life than poor kids, who knew?
But of course it does. In fact the rest of your comment is about how kids absorb the environment they grow up in!
as a child of the 80s in an emotionally barren household with domestic violence, I also built myself a whole computer lab out of cardboard boxes at the age of 5 to mimic my father!
Author got the country and items correct but not associated correctly. In Japan, kids pass the marshmallow test with flying colors but fail the same test if it's a gift. In America kids generally pass the gift test (hypothesis is that they're used to waiting for presents on Christmas).
source - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-culture-affec...
another source - https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/07/21/new-take-marshmall...
But I was also a kid who'd beg nonstop to open my presents early. I knew if I opened something early, that was more time with a cool game or something. If I waited, well, that was less time with the cool game. Plus most of the presents weren't interesting. There was just one thing I wanted in particular and the other stuff could be forgotten.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jun/01/famed-impu...
That's a lot of citations for something they 'just do not care' about.
Nothing Psychologists ever "find out" generally applies, but just happens in their little circle und their circumstances in their time.
They do not actually care about it as something valid relevant to practice or to build new research on. Because it frequently fails to reproduce.
There are some excellent psychologists out there, but there are also a lot of trained psychologists who embrace all of the pop-culture and even pseudoscience trends in full.
Where modern day psychology diverges is (as discussed in the article) on the conclusions and analysis.
I have made it a rule to never deceive my dog, and she trusts me because it. If I pick up her water bowl to refill and clean it while she is in the middle of drinking, I make it a point to always give it back with fresh water. I have several water bowls around the house , and the one in my room only gets refilled when I see she is actively drinking from it.
She sees this removal of something she wants (and needs) as a good thing, because I have never deceived her. I always give it back.
If I say we are going for a walk or I grab the leash, we go for a walk. I try to not do things that she would interpret as something not intended. For example, grabbing the leash and not taking her out.
With dogs you become really mindful of your actions. They learn so many of your subtle non-verbal cues, that you start to notice how much your body speaks.
I often think about this, and it has been a valuable learning experience. If I ever decide to have kids, I will make sure that what I communicate (either verbally or non-verbally) is congruent with my actions. I believe that this, is the surest way to build trust.
Dogs hold you accountable in the most beautiful way. The best boss.
Everything is a trust relationship. I recall finding myself offended when I had difficulty pitching ideas at my workplace. A lot of times it felt like "hey, why don't you trust me or my idea". I only had maybe one or two of those moments, but I have also witnessed other people going through a trust battle just like the one I described at work.
This can happen in a family, in a romantic relationship, work, or in society. When the arena becomes entirely about trust, people act out. That's why kids rebel, that's why marriages fall apart, and that's why people leave companies.
As a father of 3 kids, I can confirm 100% this is true. Once you understand that, your life changes completely. You realize there is somebody in this world, who will model their life after yours. What kind of example you give them is up to you.
Suddenly, "be the change you want to see in the world" gets a whole new meaning !
But what if they just understand time-value-of-marshmallow. Sometimes marshmallow now is better than marshmallow later.
I’m perfectly content with being with my own thoughts for hours, but being forced to do nothing for a crummy reward when a better alternative is right there is not compelling.
Within the parameters of your analogy, my point is closer to scoffing at the experimenters for making sweeping conclusions based on kids being able to find a single item on Dora the Explorer. Sure, maybe the kids who failed to find it had a learning disability, or maybe they weren’t that stimulated by being forced to watch a show they disliked when they could just go play something else. Even with the conclusions having been drawn years later, where the finders performed better academically, that could still indicate the non-finders were simply uninterested in the way most schools work by forcing you to be there and listen to certain subjects at certain times. Perhaps they would’ve thrived in a freer environment where they had greater freedom to pick the subjects for each day.
They don't do worse in the household they live in. They do better because if they waited for the 2nd marshmallow at home then they would end up with nothing.
Better with one bird in the hand right now than waiting for two empty promises.
So many of these psychological tests are based on values in upper-middle-class families. They are not always valid when the parents are drug users or alcoholic.
Kids of alcoholic parents know that most promises are empty promises. You are a fool if you take a "we will go to Disneyland on saturday" promise seriously.
I think anyone who grew up with siblings has an extremely developed sense of how much they're willing to risk vs how much reward. Like would I eat my brother's pudding knowing we'll be fighting to death when he's also back from school ? Yes, of course. That's risk/reward that made sense back in the days.
But in a poor household, taking the marshmallow now is likely the optimal choice since there might not be any later — even if your parents tell you to wait. That’s not necessarily a sign of anything but having adapted to a particular environment: times you listened led to a negative outcome, so you stopped.
You've repeated the whole thesis from the article: people are conditioned for delayed gratification if that is possible/predictable, and then asserts that parents have the influence to develop that trait in kids by fostering predictability.
Or the kid is getting bored by the stupid researcher and her stupid test, and is trying to get it over with as fast as he can.
The marshmallow test is interesting. Rather than measuring mainly self control, it might be measure more or less only trust.
Bravo! Love that phrase. Some freakonomics shit happening there...
[0] "Delay of gratification and adult outcomes: The Marshmallow Test does not reliably predict adult functioning" https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.14...
Shoutout to the adults like myself that grew up like this. On the one hand, you develop outside the box thinking, because you had to learn everything via trial-by-eroror - no one taught you how to think inside the box. On the other hand, it's tough to trust or ask anyone for help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory
I recommend that you read things that Pete Walker has written, if you haven’t already.
Why didn't your mother step up to support that?
If a mother can replace a father in this role, why can't a teacher?
Why doesn't a child need some freedom and independence to discover their own internal motivations and creativity?
Maybe she wasn't fortunate to have the level of education required to support a family and the father did. Don't be so judgemental - people have complex lives and come from all sorts of background.
People wash oranges?! Why? You peel the skin off and discard it. Is the worry that if the skin is dirty then you eat the insides with dirty hands after peeling it?!
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43033732
I am confused do people actually like eating marshmallows, if so why?
It always seems to be taken as read that they’re irresistible. Why on Earth
Nah. It wouldn't work if it was irresistible. You need a candy crapy enough to be resited by some people sometimes, but good enough to be desired by some people sometimes.
Experimenters tried the same setup with a turkish delights once. Things went sideways so fast that they needed to get a talking lion to calm the situation down. Kids were betraying their own siblings even without further prompting or promises of more turkish delights.
But once a pack is open and I get one, whole pack just goes. I find texture quite satisfying and since I eat them once in couple years it feels like something new and different from normal stuff I eat so it ends up "just one more" until there is no more.
Everybody around me likes them. I have no idea why. It could be cultural. I moved to the US when I was about 19. Tried my first marshmallow when I was maybe 25. Ick. Its mostly a ball of sugar. I don't like Vanilla ice cream either. For similar reasons.
Giving sugar to a kid is like giving sugar to an adult.
Have you seen the meth usage rates? Awesome.
Now compare them to obesity rates. I'm not saying sugar is the sole factor, but the fact that I've seen off the shelf sauerkraut (literally "sour cabbage") having sugar[1] as a listed ingredient in the US, tells you all you need to know about sugar's addictiveness.
[1] Yeah, corn syrup or whatever the cheapest sugar substitute is.
I don’t know how to raise kids with an even keel but I am certain that putting a nonstop algorithm in their face and becoming outraged when they inevitably become overstimulated is not the way.
One person going "X doesn't happen in Y" is almost always followed by someone saying the exact opposite, solidifying the fact that we all live in our own bubbles, often experiencing the same things in completely different ways
Kind of reminds me of when you buy a certain car, you are suddenly primed to see that same car model everywhere, while before you weren't aware of them at all.
You cannot extrapolate on one data point.
Datum :)
I feel that it's a matter of sticking to principles and being predictable for the kids, but maybe I'm biased and just have "easy" kids.
Inconsistent and unpredictable parenting is a common factor in children with oppositional defiant disorder and treatment often includes working with the parents as much as working with the child.
Since the focus of the article is on child development, it's reasonable that it limits its scope to parents of young children, and not e.g. parents of 50-year olds, even if building trust might be nice there too.
The title of the post we're both commenting on, which reads: "Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids". I was assuming that the title was oddly editorialized, but it's also not that uncommon for articles to change their titles too so it's possible that posting guidelines were followed and it was the article itself that specified "young parents" at some point. Considering the age of the article though, I kind of doubt it.
A given event might wipe out Child A, might cause adaptation in Child B, and might be within the recoverable range but above the adaptive threshold for Child C. The reliable path to growth is small but sufficient challenge, response, adaptation and recovery, repeat as frequently as is beneficial.
I've had discipline problems for my whole life despite fighting it with different ways, to the point I'm kind of giving in and accepting that it is just who I am.
I have trust in my parents. We have issues between us like all families, but I believe they did their best to raise me without a doubt. At least I didn't have concern about food on the table for a single second during my childhood, and I got most of the toys I wanted. Maybe it is something more minor or deeper.
I've seen people with an instinct to resist everything when under pressure or stressed. I also know people who don't seem to have the instinct for understanding authority and hierarchy that most people do ("if I have to listen to the teacher, why doesn't the teacher have to listen to me?").
I'm sure having people with these behaviours can be very adaptive and beneficial for the whole society in some situations (I bet they do better on the Milgram experiment for example), but in many cases in modern life it can make it feel like everything is an unnecessary fight. I think for people dealing with such individuals the key is to understand that it isn't directed at you personally. I'm not sure what the best advice is for those with those instincts, but I would imagine that it's a combination of learning to use those instincts appropriately and not being too hard on yourself when it goes wrong.
But: the null hypothesis for anything which correlates childhood behavior, childhood environment and adult behavior should be that everything is 100% genetic. From my glance at the studies, the marshmallow experiment was instead always done with the null hypothesis that kids and their parents are only connected by living in a common household (aka “shared environment” in the sense that it’s shared between siblings).
I would still imagine that some effect of the household on the “delayed gratification” would persist, but it would probably be weaker and I am not sure it would predict much about outcomes as an adult.
In the same way that teachers cannot educated children instead of their parents, even that they help. Social networks should not educate children but they are doing that. Being the problem that social network incentives are misaligned with education. Ad driven feature development and content promotion plus total deregulation make the on-line world a minefield for children.
If children at least trust their parents it is possible to mitigate the worst parts of on-line culture.
A shy child might not develop productive, healthy confrontation and resolution skills if nurture isn’t sensitive to that factor and willing to create an environment where those skills are learned.
My nature affected my parents nurture, as well as my other caregivers, mentors, and teachers. I think that’s the more significant role of nature. Nurturers could be much more attuned to this and more mindfully think through how to test for and pursue the right end goals, given different natures.
Paraphrasing from memory -
Who is to say that stockpiling as many marshmallows as you can is inherently more virtuous or objectively more positive than enjoying one marshmallow in the moment you and the marshmallow are ready for each other.
"Now" is the one moment you are truly alive. Rest is a concept.
There are also many *-icides, but they are generally quite hydrophobic so it's not easy to wash them off.
But you are right about the dirt, there is even some evidence suggesting ingesting some dirt may be good for your gut health.
But ingesting the black residue from exposure to diesel smoke while in transport is not for me, thanks. Feel free to train your immune system to dispatch tar.
I don't really know. I could understand if it was for zesting, but then you're supposed to use untreated oranges anyway because the pesticides don't wash out easily because of the oils on the orange's skin.
And that starts from day zero and last (in my own experience) at least unti 19 years old.
It's fun, not difficult and it allows some spare time (yeah, less time than before you got them, but some time nonetheless) for yourself.
Here, things are quite different. Many upper-middle-class families struggle to provide stability, proper education, and a loving environment—things we always took for granted growing up. This isn't a denigration of Western society. More like an observation of how capitalism has made both parents work like crazy and still feel like they don’t have enough.
It’s not a panacea in the East. We had to deal with overpopulation. Absurd competition in schools, colleges, and universities scarred my childhood. But I'm thankful to my parents for what they endured for me.
I'm in Germany too. Rent in Berlin makes me glaze over this sentence with dreamy eyes. Despite being in tech and paying taxes in the 90th percentile, these big cities always find ways to drive you crazy. I don't have kids yet, but I'm not sure I'll be able to shield them from all of this shit as well as my parents did.
> Now the same train is constantly late and occasionally canceled.
Tell me more.
> And one old guy told me openly that he doesn't envy me raising kids today. It’s kinda stupid when a pay raise doesn’t cover inflation and increasing taxes.
I don't wanna be rich. I just want my pay to cover my yearly expense increases. It's getting more expensive every year, and people are scared shitless because of layoffs. Most people don’t even bring up raises to their managers. No wonder westerners don’t want kids—people just can’t afford them comfortably anymore.
> The ancient school system is stuck producing factory workers for factories that are long gone. It’s just a hard time to be a parent.
Schools aren’t qualified to teach kids the right things. Parents aren’t qualified either; it’s just that Americans like to think homeschooling is the way. It’s not—many of the parents I’ve seen homeschooling didn’t even go to college.
People make so much more money in the West, but my parents live a far more comfortable life in Bangladesh than I do. They’re retired, live in an apartment three times the size of mine, and have enough not to rely on anyone. Plus, all the SEA shit doesn’t affect them now that they’re out of work. I envy them so much.
For kids on ADHD spectrum - absolutely. Marshmallow test is flawed, because it doesn't filter for the lack of control over executive function.
> A follow-up study showed that kids from stable, reliable homes were much more likely to wait than kids from unpredictable ones.
Unstable home is strongly correlated with impaired lack of control over executive function.
I think this is a potentially dangerous oversimplification of the work discrediting this study. The first sentence is pretty accurate, but the rest of the paragraph puts "stability" 100% in the hands of parents, and not childrens surrounding environment due to poverty. Parents can only do so much if there aren't good schools, safe communities or reliable policing.
I'm probably being a little too critical here, and it's clearly important as a parent to do everything you can to make sure that your child has a stable, trusworth environment, I have a son and that's exactly what I try to do personally.
But I think we also have a massive influence in how we shape society, children in poverty have unpredictable, unstable environments even if they have great parents. There are some really clearly documented outcomes of the effects of poverty, and yet a societal tendency to blame outcomes on parents and character over situation still remains.
I'm basically just saying in a long winded way, be a good parent, but do what you can to make the world a safer and more reliable place for other children too.
I cannot overstate the importance of this. This particularly affects neurodivergent people. The article also (correctly) mentions how socioeconomic status plays a role here.
Food insecurity erodes psychological safety. Housing insecurity erodes psychological safety. Having to do unpredictable and extra jobs just to make ends meet such that a parent has unpredictable availability hurts psychological safety. Having to break promises because of circumstances hurts psychological safety and this is just way more likely if you're struggling, despite your best intent.
It's worth ruminating on this when you start to understand how every aspect of society is designed to extract value from you at every possible moment. Third and fourth jobs, medical debt forcing you to work, student debt, mortgage debt, high rent prices.
Yet the thirst for ever-increasing profits is unquenchable. Part of the reason that people such as myself rail against this system and the society we've built around work is how damaging it is to society as a whole.
South Korea is really the end stage of this pipeline, where birth rates are around ~0.71 children per woman as there are so many disincentives to have children and, for that child to have a good life, everything gets invested into their education. The pressure is intense such that the teen suicide rate is huge. And this birth rate is so low that 3 generations of this will decrease the population by 90%.
Good points from a motivated new! parent. When you get to your third kid, you tend to lose that burning ambition and think you know it all. We should always be learning.
Nowadays we get told to save money...but I'm from Zimbabwe where saving money was a total disaster. Instead it was important, when I was still there, to spend it at the earliest possible time on anything physical. The prize for discipline was to be robbed.
... and yet of course if nobody saved money we'd all live an inflationary hell and if some people didn't believe in heaven there might be nothing else to retard their atrocious behaviour.
You are correct. This is the delusion that peasants feeds their kids so that life appears to be worth living. In the west it's the similar rigmarole of mortgages, debt, divorce, unstable jobs etc that their parents did. Not saying that there is no value to discipline, but it has to be intelligently applied ( not easy) else you will loose. For example saving for a house (vs taking a large mortgage) will not do you good if the inflation is high.
The "elite" don't really benefit from dollarization though. The currency was a way for them to rob everyone without even trying. All the big black market money dealing companies were ultimately owned by the big players in ZANUPF. So they profited from the difference between the official exchange rate and the black market one. They were able to use their influence to get dollars at the official rate and sell at the unofficial one.
So for that and other (more reasonable) reasons they have tried to reintroduce a currency. The place is so humped that I don't know if it can ever be fixed. This is what you get for electing demagogues. I say that as a warning to those of you who think national pride is a substitute for intelligent behavior.
Also, businesses thrive on trust. If a business can predict and prepare for conditions, if it can depend on loans, grants, services, the economy, it can invest and thrive.
There's a lesson for our current moment in there.
What could be better than compiling the compiler with the little ones? There is no trust without rust.
I'm much more worried about the general lack of resilience and self-reliance I see in a lot of kids and teens. I think it's caused by a combo of parents and schooling. Also the level of anxiety seems very very high.
I wonder if it's "inverse" has been studied. Promise the child another one after 15 minutes but then either not deliver on the promise or even steal the one marshmallow.
I know people that had the equivalent happen to them as kids, and I think it had enormous effect on their personality as adults.
Depending how often it happens, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how you raise sociopaths.
E.g. if you want your kids to value culture, it is way more effective to live in a way that shows you value it, instead of just saying culture is important and never touching it with a ten foot pole yourself. You could never say culture is importsnt and go to the theater and museum every other weekend and that would be way more effective than telling your kid about the importance every day.
The latter doesn't teach the kid that culture is important, it teaches them that there are certain things your parent wants you to be, that they themselves don't manage to do despite them thinking it is important. As a kid your parents are likely the most powerful figure in your lifes, so if they aren't able to do it, how could you?
Any parents needs to have a keen eye out for these implicit lessons they are teaching their kids. The crazy thing is that these implicit lessons can at times be the polar opposite of the lesson you want to teach them.
And it is okay to fail, if they see you are trying to improve yourself, guess what the implicit lesson is? That working on yourself is not only normal, but a good thing that even parents do.
When people go on and on about the marshmallow test what they are really saying is they don't really know anything or even actually care about human nature or experience. The whole thing is garbage.
Nowadays my paying work is servicing properties which means a lot of awkward sharing of people's homes and families. It is absolutely heartbreaking how many kids are being raised like pets or fun game partners. They end up having near zero executive function and have to be helped with everything including the most basic life decisions. What kids need is a sense of agency and some tools for dealing with the world. Enough of these stupid and disconnected marshmallow games. Let's start actually taking kids seriously and giving them what they need to function as adults.
Does that mean they are neglected or that they are spoon fed everything?
I went the complete opposite direction as the result of violent and abusive parents and had never considered that the opposite also occurs, but of course it must.
For whatever reason, the more violent my parents became with me, the more violent and defiant I became…and not just with my parents. I came to see everyone and everything as a threat to my safety and began to respond accordingly.
Given the whole fight or flight thing, I am wildly predisposed to choosing fight. It took years and I mean years to learn to control this.