No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems

Re:No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems by kbenson on Monday December 05, 2016 @12:08AM (#13103500)

Well, there's also the fact that unless you are homeschooling and preventing your children from experiencing human and media contact, your nurture input is only part of a whole. I learned a lot of what I did and did not want to be like from my parents growing up, but I also learned a lot from my siblings[1] and my friends, and my school experiences.

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.

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Re:No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems by bronson on Monday December 05, 2016 @02:17AM (#13103882)

Except the differences start showing up long before school age.

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Re:No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems by Broken_Hippo on Monday December 05, 2016 @05:04AM (#13104444)

And upfront, they were all treated differently. Not by fault, mind you, but just by happenstance. You probably didn't fawn so much over the second, and even less on the third. Not because they are less special, but more because you had a sense of what you are doing. You came into the second and third child with a battery of things to try because you tried some on your first child.

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.

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Re:No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems by kbenson on Monday December 05, 2016 @02:26AM (#13103910)

Well sure. Notice I said homeschooling and preventing most contact (which actually makes homeschooling redundant).

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.

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