My girlfriend used to train dogs for a living. She always said "it's the owner's fault, not the dog's". Now we have a Chihuahua who won't listen, doesn't respond to rewards, doesn't respond to punishment. She just does her own thing. My girlfriend is much more humble now. I wish a lot of these child psychologists would have to deal with a difficult child day in and day out, not just once a week. Maybe they would also lose some of the confidence in their advice.

- You're going to have to change diapers anyway, so you might as well get good at it. I was a one-man Formula 1 pit crew of diaper changing. AMA.

- Invest in a vasectomy.

Since I basically followed both of those pieces already, am I good?

Yep. Good luck.

Same thing as why organizational change can be more effective when lead by an external change agent than an internal one.

This helped us realize that, in this case, we really were the problem. We needed to, in some cases, be more firm. At first this resulted in a lot of tantrums, but once the child's expectations changed then he behaved with us similarly to with his speech therapist.

But after a while people will regress to their old habits.

Ironically enough, the exact same consistency and discipline are pretty vital for a child as well. They need a little structure in their lives to feel secure. (No, I'm not talking helicopter parenting or scheduling every second of your child's day).

Which is not to say that it's never the fault of the parents/owners. It probably is, the majority of the time. But to suggest that as a universal law, as you have done, is silly.

This is bulverism. You haven't presented evidence that tw04 is wrong. You've just assumed they're wrong, and presented a condescending explanation for why.

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

And as they said, you're not actually disagreeing with them.

And "very rare" was a comment on "99 %", not a quantity on its own.

HN is the one place where I expect readers to interpret numbers literally.

Would you describe a random number generator outputting 5 when picking between 1 and 10 as "very rare"?

1/10 != 1/100 != "very rare"

This is not unique to kids and pets. It is why even experienced athletes have coaches, for example.

I don't think these people are just dispensing pop psych advice in magazines or once a week. It's a clinic.

I remember being shocked when on holiday in Sweden, Gothenburg, a couple of years ago I saw an American (speaking American accented English at least) man slap a misbehaving child in the street.

In thirty years of living in Norway I have never heard of any child known to my family being spanked.

I think that the reason for no corporal punishment here is simply because children are expected to behave themselves and that it is assumed that they are, to a degree at least, rational beings who can be persuaded to behave instead of compelled.

And children were one of the things that does seem very different to me - shockingly so. I'm American, and most children are fairly quiet. But they are much more free to roam, within some reason and allowed to play quite often, even while at school. I'm going to guess all this helps out quite a bit along with your last points.

I have two kids, and as angry as they can make me, I always find that calming the situation down is way better than escalating it.

Since when somebody disagreeing with you is a disease?

If you have a kid who is getting bad grades in school and has behavioral issues, and the underlying cause of it is ADHD, then no amount of physical discipline, even up to child abuse like closed fist punches, throwing metal chairs, screaming at the top of your lungs while doing it, etc, is going to fix that. All it will do is breed resentment. And if you want to have a relationship with your child after they turn 18, I'd strongly recommend minimizing that.

And I'm speaking from personal experience as a child who went through that. My grades were as bad my senior year as they were from elementary school. The fear wasn't enough to make my brain neurons fire the same way as the other children around me.

(I also object to the labeling of anything that doesn't perfectly mesh with our conformist modern day upbringing as a 'disorder', but that's another topic. Given the realities of our system not adapting to the needs of people, but requiring people to adapt to the needs of the system, I'd reluctantly support medication over physical abuse.)

All physical discipline is child abuse. That's why it's illegal in most of Europe.

Setting bones? Fixing dislocated shoulders?

Lot of Indian parents (including mine) follow this approach.

My mum even keeps her collection of broken wooden spoons.

I get that people don't approve these days, and I know it's almost impossible to draw a legal line on when spanking is discipline and when it's abuse. I'm not sold that I agree on the party line that it's an inherently bad thing though. Just a tool that can be misused. I doubt I'll be having kids though - so it's a problem I won't need to deal with.

I keep hearing this mentioned as why "kids these days" are so stupid/weak/emotional/etc, without any proof.

I'm curious if there is any (popular) research in these areas that I can show otherwise (or not!).

It was removed from government schools in the early to mid 90's and eventually made illegal in private schools too.

Similarly I remember in my college history of communication class, we were very interested in if the Internet would destroy relationships and power dynamics (I'm dating myself, Internet was new at the time) and we spent a lot of time looking at how upset people were with the rise of literacy, such as in Hunchback of Notre-Dame there is the sentiment that the book will destroy the church.

All this to say we have been complaining "kids these days" basically since they invented spoken language. Possibly we see kids differently today in western culture because we control more of their activities and time so we get more pushback ("I don't want to go to music class!") or simply we spend more time with our kids now than generations past and rather than allowing them to run outdoors with their friends, we see them running in restaurants and other non-ideal places.

Anyway, research on spanking/hitting as promised:

Gershoff's overview of past research - Spanking and Child Development: We Know Enough Now To Stop Hitting Our Children - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/

American Psychological Association 2012 overview - http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking.aspx

Pediatrics article linking spanking to increased child aggression - Mothers' Spanking of 3-Year-Old Children and Subsequent Risk of Children's Aggressive Behavior - http://m.pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2010/0...

Canadian Academic publication overview - Physical punishment of children: lessons from 20 years of research -http://m.cmaj.ca/content/early/2012/02/06/cmaj.101314.full.p...

Abstract of article correlating spanking and later abuse - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18779030

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I'm aware of the link that physical punishment has on development, but what I wanted to know is if "kids these days", regardless of cause, are actually less capable/more entitled/etc. If there's even a way to measure such abstract claims.

In my own personal experience I would initially say yes, but I think this is where it is deceiving. For example, when I was in school I did my work and turned it in and didn't notice people who whined about their grades despite not doing any work. Now I am older and from talking with teacher friends, they constantly complain about students who act so entitled.

I think to myself, I don't remember anything like that. But those students could have existed, how would I have known at the time? Even if I didn't have my rose-tinted time-machine glasses on?

Anyway, this is all pretty obvious, just rambling.

I have had both kids and dogs, and trained both in pretty much the same way (don't tell their mom).

But again, that is my sample size of me.

Were chihuahuas bred to be obedient or were they bred to be toys and possibly food?

So I guess we should clicker train our black/brown haired fat kids and the blonde skinny ones are screwed.

Seriously though, your post makes me think about how dogs/child teaching is all in what you have and psychologist (maybe news) try to apply one method to all of them. It just doesn't work, some kids need one thing and others need something else. We live in such a crazy complex world.

One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river. "Look at the fish swimming about," said Chuang Tzu, "They are really enjoying themselves."

"You are not a fish," replied the friend, "So you can't truly know that they are enjoying themselves."

"You are not me," said Chuang Tzu. "So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?"

---

Do you know that they don't because you know the training that psychologists get, or because _you_ don't and you haven't had that training?

Similarly, do you know that the models are bad because you've studied how they don't fit people, or do you think that those models don't fit you?

I have just received bad advice before from a psychologist and looking back on it was because they don't know me and could not have known me in the few hours I spent with them. In order to know me they would have to go through a lot of people, and very few people are like me in personality terms. So to know me they would have to go through many many people before they had enough experience with people with my sort of psychology or temperament... to give me any sort of advice that would work with my temperament and actually add value to my life.

Exactly. It doesn't take much Zen magic to figure out when someone is useless to you. (OK, maybe sometimes it does, but nevertheless it doesn't.)

Plus it's doubly off-putting when they are being useless while feeling good about themselves because they think they are helping. I have a gut feeling that some psychologists are driven by their own insecurity about being useful.

To be frank, the article tips are pretty sound and well-accepted, including from specialists who deal with much more difficult children then you and me on a daily basis.

First point, there's a tendency to see one's kids as special, be it especially gifted, or difficult, or an astonishing critical thinker for their age. It's quite understandable, since we have an infinitely deeper relationship with them than with any other kid. Secondly, it's much more difficult to deal with relationship issues when you are involved in them; that explains why you can often clearly see what's wrong in others' relationships (parent/kids or S.O.), but yours always seem more complicated by several order of magnitude. And thirdly, we can also find it quite irritating to be given some basic tips when we are experiencing hell and we feel like we are so past that kind of "pop psych". It's like, "Do you think we've not tried that already?".

Of course, a few tips are no magic bullet (sorry for the cliché), and sometimes the problems are just too serious, but on the whole they just deliver, to the surprise of many parents when they see it used successfully by specialists. I'm not one of them but I know a few, and I personnally use the "give them a choice" tip and if done correctly, I have found it to work very, very well--for parenting and in life in general.

It's neat to see those specific strategies called out though - I can immediately think back to times when I tried that and realize, "ohhh, so that's why it worked so well." Should help me focus more on those strategies.

The third one broke us. We got to the point where both me & my wife were begging her, "come on, eat this, it has lots of chocolate!"

All these kind of advice works... until it doesn't. Yes, many parents don't know how to handle their kids. It's also often genuinely hard - I learned to not judge people for "not doing the right thing", without knowing the full story.

Fast forward till she had her own child, and I saw an interview with her. She was completely shattered. Like a wreck. She had her own difficult child, and coupled with little available help from others, she couldn't cope. She looked and sounded defeated and expressed that she felt guilty that, of all people, she was not coping.

There is a reason some parents "get it right" and, I'm sorry to say, but thats just as likely down to the kid.

Then when she has a kid, her kid learns exactly the mental tricks needed to be able to disobey her, by virtue of spending 24×7 with her.

Nature equips kids with instincts, one of which is to be selfish, the others of which can be exploited by parents to override that instinct. But nature also equips kids with a brain, and it is only natural that selfishness uses the brain to learn how not to be manipulated by those other instincts. But that takes time; hence the above results.

Some kids have physical issues like bags of energy or stomach/sleep issues and some parents equally have physical or mental problems dealing with that. And everything goes out the window when you've had a month or four with no sleep. I think a lot of people discount that side of things - it's like in the fight world: everyone has a game plan until they get punched in the face.

Something very similar happens in business, IMO. Managers talk about different styles or techniques but in the end, the success of their team is as much about the team members' skills and dynamics as it is about the manager.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/family/kathryn-mewes-the-su...

Totally unaware of this woman, and her show.

--

[1] Edit: It's Jo Frost.

All parents become a wreck with kids, and having a nanny come to help you focus on alternative parenting strategies is helpful.

Once you're down in the trenches, it's sometimes hard to rise above the tantrums and emotions and calmly reason about the latest psychological parenting research methods instead of just screaming, "GO TO YOUR ROOM!"

1) You praise the heck out of the child when they do accept the choice. This is hard because you have to remember to notice NON-drama, which is typically not noteworthy to people. You over-remember when things went bad and under-remember when things went fine. I do too--everyone does. (Politicians exploit the heck out of this BTW.)

2) You don't defer your whole life to arguing with the child. If it's time to go, you go, sweater or not. The key thing is that it's not punishment. It's just Life... or The Schedule. Don't act mad, just calmly firm. If the kid won't wear a sweater, they get cold. Bring the one you prefer as a backup if you want.

3) (Hardest) You model the behavior you want. Play a pick a sweater game when it's NOT time to go and there is no pressure. If they do it right or sort of right, praise the part they did right and do it again.

None of this is easy. FWIW I have a young kid and would grade myself at around 50% or less on these. But it's a model to work toward.

Heck, I would say that parenting ultimately starts when we're kids ourselves with the values and experiences we are taught. For instance, most of us don't care for kids until we're in our 30s, which makes parenting that much harder. Imagine how different it must have been historically when older kids care for the younger ones, giving everyone involved experience with parenting. On a personal level I'm fortunate to have three great nieces in various ages and try to learn what I can from them and of course parent them in myriads tiny ways (it's impossible to avoid, I've realized. You either make conscience efforts or not but you can't avoid parenting if you interact with kids).

Amen to that. I have 3 boys. We put in the same ingredients and got wildly different results with all three. I'm convinced that parenting is more about working with what comes factory installed than it is about moulding some ideal human from a formless block of potential.

Incentives and punishments that work with one don't work with the others; we have to really become students of our children to understand what they do and don't respond to, and to parent them accordingly. If my sample size of 3 is any indication, trying to fit children through a one-size-fits-all mold is going to fail miserably.

Before I had kids, my grandmother, who had 11, tried to tell me that you just couldn't do much about your kids's personalities. I was naive and didn't believe her until I had 2 and saw the difference first hand.

I am NOT trying to downplay the importance of nurture, but parents have a larger challenge than many non-parents or single-parents expect. It's not just about formulating a good environment (in fact, formulating an environment that is too easy is probably a substantial developmental detriment). Your kids come out the way they are, and you have to really understand their personalities and challenges and then teach them ways to cope with the world while accepting that you can't change their core internal traits. It's an intellectually and emotionally intense labor of love that lasts for decades, and it shapes both parent and child.

That is, you may provide the same ingredients, but ultimately the kid's the baker, and you're not even really in the kitchen to see what goes on. Who knows what makes it into the final product?

1: Aside from the normal older brother semi-worship for a while, I also witnessed what sounded like him coughing up a lung every morning for a winter or two with chronic bronchitis from smoking. Peer pressure to smoke (and there was quite a bit, most my friends did) isn't quite the hurdle you might think it to be when you have that in mind.

You are probably less strict with the youngest child and worry a bit more over the oldest.

Plus you and your spouse (or whoever) have aged and matured with time, so each child gets to know a slightly different version of you, your spouse, your parents and family. The more spaced out your children are, the more this will become so.

Kids likely won't turn out the same even with the exact same environmental inputs, but I'm just pointing out that we often vastly over estimate our ability to control those environmental inputs in the first place, so the point is somewhat moot.

I've got two kids, both teenagers now. In my view it's not just that kids are different, but that parents are different too. My impression is that most parenting advice assumes that the parents themselves have unlimited self discipline, organization, and emotional stamina.

I can only assume that the people constructing the advice have a nanny and/or a housekeeper.

A ruined dinner or getting late to swimming are one time events. Teaching your kids that tantrums will "work" in all the wrong ways will affect your life for a long time.

So sometimes we eat burned dinner cuz someone was acting like an asshole. Sometimes play dates "fall through" because someone thought they'd obligate a parent to do something they hadn't even discussed. Good God nothing teaches like bad experiences, and my wife and I can maintain some shred of sanity. Actually that's not fair, our children are a joy ( and exhausting).

It's one thing for your teenager to sob because she didn't have any spending money for the surprise trip somewhere with great shopping because she blew all her money instead of saving it for a great opportunity. It's a completely other thing to have to learn that lesson as an adult.

It's hard enough even with that help. Kids have their own minds and personalities and methods of coping with a vast world they just don't understand and can be overwhelming. One-size-fits-all suggestions such as "never punish" just trivialize how complicated little human beings really are.

That makes children hugely instructive for how to deal with your colleagues. Understand that underneath the facade, everyone has that native wiring that kids lay bear. What kind of things do children respond well to? What do they pull away from? How do you bring the child back to your good side when they're upset?

While the incentives may become more complex with adults, the fundamentals and principles are the same, and children are a powerful lens into the human psyche.

I have an infant. I spend a lot of time with him. During the week I probably take care of him more than my wife does, because she goes to work very early. I also work in a VR startup, scrambling to get projects done. Somehow, I still find time to cook dinner with my wife, watch the latest episode of whatever one TV show we are following, get a few house chores done, and waste time on HN and Twitter. The only times it feels like I'm too busy to get everything done is when I'm wasting too much time on HN and Twitter.

What I don't do is I don't watch very much television and I don't hang out in bars anymore. I'm married so I don't have to chase girls. I don't play video games anymore (hell, I don't even like non-VR games anymore, but we don't have room in our apartment for a Vive, which is the only VR system I would bother with for personal use). I don't go to the gym every day (only days I take the baby to swim class). I don't have any illusions that I'll be a rock-star, so I'm not in any bands.

Every person I know who thinks they are busy are actually just split and confused on their purpose in life. I have a friend who has a boat and a giant home theater system and he has to stay at work for so much overtime to cover the cost of it all he never gets to enjoy either. If he'd admit that he liked watching TV more than he liked fishing, or vice versa, he'd be a lot happier and actually do more. But he doesn't actually do anything extra in that time at work, because overtime is a fallacy and actually anti-productive. So he'd even be getting more done at work if he wasn't... at work all the time!

When you want to do a certain something, you necessarily have to choose to give up doing other things. I want to build a company and a happy family.

You are right, I'm "not very busy". Because being busy is an illusion. It doesn't matter to how much you get done if your TODO list is 10 items long or 100 items long if you can only get through 9 items in a week (and you will definitely find enough items to replace those 9 in that week). Those 90 extra items don't get done whether or not they are on your list. But if they are on your list, you convince yourself you're "busy". If anything, the anxiety of not being able to make even a 10% dent in a gigantic pile of tasks might even hurt your productivity.

  [1]: https://www.walden.org/Thoreau/

For many poor working people time with their children is a luxury -- but they can't even give them all the other stuff, sometimes not even decent food and shelter, much less an education.

Many rich people do that all the time. If he doesn't think his kids is a "fun project" too, then that's his choice, not something born out of necessity.

>You can't have it both ways.

You can, if you have "fuck you money", which Musk has 10000 times over.

It's the poor people who work 2 shifts and barely have the money to provide for their family that can't have both time and money at the same time.

>I'm sure musk sacrificed father/kid relationships for work success in a major way. It's not possible to have it all.

First of all, nobody mandates that you SHOULD have it all. You can make your own balance and opt to sacrifice maximum work success. Musk is not a slave. If he is a "slave to work success" that's his personal choice.

There are rich people that have excellent in-person, relationships with their kids, and can shun work and meetings for their personal time, whether with kids, spouse, other interests, etc. Gates, for one, stepped down as CEO at 45 and went part-time with MS stuff at 50.

You can have "fuck you money", but you can't have "fuck you time". Sure, the capitalist HN crowd will argue that money can buy you time (e.g. by having people do your chores for you, etc) but ultimately there is a finite amount of bedtime moments, meals, Sunday mornings, etc in your kid's lives. Try as you might, fuck you money won't change that.

I think you've misunderstood the concept of fuck you money, at least as it relates to time.

They don't buy you more time -- they buy you the luxury to be you that decides what you do with your finite time. And bonding with your children is entirely up to you (or Musk's in this example) decision if you have those.

Besides, nobody argued that there's not a "finite amount of bedtime moments, meals, Sunday mornings, etc in your kid's life" -- just that when you are rich it's upon you (and not, e.g. your boss or financial necessities, or drudgery work like cooking, and cleaning and such) to spend more of your time with your kid during those moments.

This is an illusion. Ultimately, you have to choose what is a priority in your life. There will be moments, many of them, where you have to choose between a board meeting or making it to bedtime, or taking a business trip across the world or a weekend spent hiking with your kids.

If you choose too many of the latter, at some point your board will get sick of you, your executives will stop trusting you, etc.

If you're prioritizing the things that let you be the CEO of a company, you're necessarily deprioritizing the things that let you spend the most time with your kids.

The problem with "fuck you money" is that it also easily lets you fuck yourself.

You don't have "fuck you money" if you are still dependent on being CEO to maintain the lifestyle you want. You have fuck you money when whether or not you work is down to what you want rather than what you need.

Notice how you just confirm the same thing I said. So, hardly an illusion.

"Ultimately, you have to choose what is a priority in your life" == "it's you that decides what you do with your finite time"

>There will be moments, many of them, where you have to choose between a board meeting or making it to bedtime, or taking a business trip across the world or a weekend spent hiking with your kids.

That's exactly what I said. Musk gets to chose.

>If you choose too many of the latter, at some point your board will get sick of you, your executives will stop trusting you, etc.

So, at worse you'll be off the board, and still left with b/millions in the bank. And only if you do it all the time.

Still, not the same kind of problem as not being able to spend time with your kids because you work all the time or you'll fall behind on rent and be homeless, etc...

>If you're prioritizing the things that let you be the CEO of a company, you're necessarily deprioritizing the things that let you spend the most time with your kids.

The whole point is that you don't HAVE to "prioritize the things that let you be the CEO of a company".

And you'll still be rich, with a home, with money to educate and feed your children etc if you DON'T.

That said, I've noticed well set patterns work very well with her even if she doesn't like certain aspects of them. She even gets cranky when I forget to do a certain part of the pattern even if she hates what the event is. (Daddy you didn't close the gate!)

Every kid is different, totally agree.

The purpose of parenting is not to control the children but to support them in learning themselves and the world.

Human beings are intelligent and wired for success. It doesn't take long before we start realizing the difference between choices that don't matter to us and ones that do.

If you're looking for parenting practices that support self knowledge in a collaborative and respectful environment, I recommend "Raising Our chikdren, Raising Ourselves" by Naomi Alford.

Offering fake choices does not respect the intelligence nor dignity of human beings.

And, we need to acknowledge that manipulation is probably a better approach than psychological abuse (time outs) and threats to a child's physical safety (spanking).

You forgot your jacket. It rains. You get wet.

A good example of manipulation/constructed "consequences":

You didn't write your homework. You don't get to play video games.

And, by the way, if you want your kid to hate a specific video game, turn it into (home)work. This is the approach schools take to killing our children's creativity and natural curiosity.

I (as a parent of 2 very easy kids) always avoid those type of permission-asking questions when presenting choice. Instead I offer, not ask: "You can wear the green or the red. What do you choose?"

This sounds astoundingly similar to what software developers are doing when they remove features and customisability and then retort "but you can still choose between X and Y"l nevermind the fact that X and Y are still a horrible substitute for the A-to-Z that they replaced --- and more unsettlingly, it seems like it does work on much of the user population.

If you never let them wear their shorts and tshirt in the snow when they really want to, they will never respect the cold or your advice.

Because children of that age (and younger) have two traits that will always trump logic:

1. Defiance (better described as a need to understand independence)

and

2. A lack of long-term thinking

When a child - who wishes to experience control - wants a cookie, a choice between a banana and an apple is untenable.

Be wary of interpretations that give you broad-reaching advice on how to essentially manipulate children. This - child psychology and help - is a huge industry; interpreting studies to fit a narrative is simple and rarely meets argument.

The point of the article is not that offering a binary choice is a panacea. The point is that you have to model the behavior you want, and reinforce it with praise. Just saying "no cookie" does not give the kid a positive action they can take. Offering a choice of what they can have gives them something to do. And the few times they do it, you have to be ready to make a big deal about how great that was.

Of course a kid who wants a cookie is going to be diappointed if you offer a banana or an apple. No one can change that. What you can train the kid to do is better manage disappointment. As they learn to do that--through positive reinforcement--the drama goes down. That's what the article is about.

It bothers me most when people discuss diet and obesity. "Just don't eat so much!" is often given as slightly condescending advice. Such advice reflects a personal experience where your body isn't screaming in hunger 24 hours a day. Different people have different metabolisms too, turning food into energy to be spent, or locking it away instantly as fat -- makes a huge difference. Calories-In-Calories-Out is a rather limited view of the situation.

Our internal experiences differ, it affects who we are and how we behave. We all have to be responsible and deal with our personal realities in an adult manner. But it's rather lame to assume that anyone who is challenged by things you find simple is either stupid or lacking in willpower.

This is not true - at least the "huge" part.

https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metabolism-vary-between-t...

"Metabolic rate does vary, and technically there could be large variance. However, statistically speaking it is unlikely the variance would apply to you. The majority of the population exists in a range of 200-300kcal from each other and do not possess hugely different metabolic rates."

Calories-In-Calories-Out is a rather limited view of the situation.

https://examine.com/nutrition/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-l...

"In conclusion, losing weight requires a negative energy balance, which can be obtained by eating less, as we have seen, but also by exercising more."

While 100% true. It's not helpful information. It doesn't mention the fact that different cars burn fuel at a different rate. That some drivers can afford a higher octane fuel. And that a poorly tuned vehicle with incorrect tire pressure will require more fuel.

The point is, that there are many factors that go into weight gain and loss. And while in terms of basic physics it does indeed boil down to energy balance, that ignores a great many factors that affect both ones internal demand for more energy and ones ability to make use of ingested energy rather than turning it into fat.

That does NOT mean we aren't all personally responsible. It means that you should consider having compassion and less contempt for people who fail where you succeed.

Are there cases of pure gluttony and laziness leading to obesity? Damn straight there are, and I'm not arguing otherwise. But whether you believe me or not there are real challenges that _some_ fat people face that you (presumably) and I just don't have to deal with.

Think of it this way, if someone is born with only one leg. They still have all the same personal responsibility you and I have to live their life as an adult. But both of us will understand if they struggle with certain things we're able to accomplish with ease. You wouldn't dream of saying that person lacks personal accountability because he struggles with walking.

So why do you presume to know FOR SURE that everyone who is fat got that way because of a failing of personal accountability? Perhaps they were just born without a leg... so to speak...

I hope you'll reconsider your position. At least to admit there is a possibility that other people have unseen handicaps that you just don't have to deal with.

Nope. I think we both agree there are edge cases for every situation. Where I find fault with your premise is that it is presumed everyone with a "problem" (weight, anxiety, depression, etc.) all fall into the "edge-case" category, where in fact 99% of them do not. Despite that, I get annoyed when we as a people assume that the the majority of people fall into the minority group.

Being very over-weight is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. I posit that the same argument can be made about anxiety, or depression, et al.

> I hope you'll reconsider your position. At least to admit there is a possibility that other people have unseen handicaps that you just don't have to deal with.

Sure thing, absolutely. I'l even go as far as to say I don't need to reconsider this. I agree with your point. Where I take umbrage is with the fact that people are allowed to shirk personal responsibility, hiding under the guise of "this problem is bigger than me", when in fact is isn't. The majority take advantage of the sincere problems (missing a leg) of the minority, which to me is slap in the face of people who need the real help and attention.

Time outs have worked very well for me too. Some behavior is simply unacceptable and ignoring it only teaches them they can repeat it.

Lastly, I think there's a tendency to forget that, with kids, they're basically completely different people every few days/weeks. We've gone through a lot of phases with our son and sometimes the best solution is to simply wait it out. More often than not the behavior changes as his brain changes.

'We are going out now', 'no, I don't want to, scream, etc, etc', 'Ok, stay there, when you are ready to talk to me and go out, I'll start talking to you again, until then, I'll be in the kitchen/bedroom/whatever'. This usually gives him 5 minutes to think a bit, then comes back, apoligises and we go on our way. I've tried pretty much everything before this, and seems it was the only thing that works with mine.

"Would you like to buy me one set of nunchucks or 2 sets?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/5g9pai/lpt_mot...

But mostly this approach seems to work. Now we as parents still need to remember to use this approach, which we unfortunately often forget in the morning rush.

Exactly my situation. My 2 year old just keep on it until she feels otherwise. Though one thing I have seen to work is to employ her into something adult like allow her to stir the liquid while making scrambled eggs :)

And I've seen this work often enough when we've had friends of my son come over that we often see act up around their parents, but that will try that shit once with us and then follow our sons cue once they see that all they achieve is getting ignored, that I tend to think that whether this works or not is more often down to follow-through.

That doesn't mean it's a one size fits all solution. You do need to adapt what kind of options you present, and how you respond if they try to push the boundaries - kids are not stupid; if you keep offering "options" when they know there are other alternatives that are on the table if they say the right things, then they'll try to challenge you for it.

Maybe don't create contrived situations where a toddler can crush your logic and it becomes a battle of wills.

If nurture didn't matter, tips would be totally irrelevant.

i dont understand how this isnt immediately a red flag for dystopian orwellian oppression. I guess u can do it to kids, they cant defend themselves.