I call my kids out for being lazy when they're being lazy.

Examples from this morning "I don't know what the second rucksack is": meaning "I can't be bothered getting it out the rucksack, you do it for me", my answer "You just want someone else to do it, stop being lazy and get it yourself". Also "I can't do it [take off my boots]": meaning "I don't want to bother, and my hands will get dirty", my answer "why should someone else get their hands dirty, just because you can't be bothered to pull" (then I demonstrated what to do, then mimicked his pretending he couldn't do it in order to demonstrate I knew what he was up to). It's not for nothing my kids get me Darth Vader merchandise!

> '"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations," Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as 'Morphiumsüchtig.' The verb, suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine-seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine."

> '"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.

> '"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It's leaky all the time—even if it's not raining at the moment. But its only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modiying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."

süchtig = addicted, hooked seeking = suchend

[1] https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sucht [2] https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/suchen [3] https://michelmasters.wordpress.com/category/etymologie-und-...

It isn't.

"Stop slacking" might be better; it unambiguously refers to current behavior that a person can change immediately.

https://spanishto-english.com/spanish-dictionary/haraganear

It calls "being lazy" an intransitive verb

"Being lazy" is a transient state.

That's the important distinction here.

I loved volunteering in my son's classroom(s). But I admit to having rage-fits when a beautiful, sweet, talented little 6 year old boy forfeits on a task, telling me "I'm stupid, I can't do anything".

There's no question how his parents talked to him.

If I couldn't immediately answer the question, I felt was just stupid and it wasn't worth my time.

This, in spite of a family insisting I was the greatest.

Some would argue it's because of your family insisting you were the greatest, in part.

>At some point I decided if I had to work at anything, I didn't want to do it. If I couldn't immediately answer the question, I felt [it] was just stupid and it wasn't worth my time.

Yep, you are a smart, great person. Your family loves you because of all of the smart, great things you do, in part. If something is hard and doesn't come naturally to you? It must be something stupid and not great. So don't worry, you are still smart and great, and people still love you. Don't try anything hard.

I'm obviously being facetious, but according to some experts (though not all, not even most), that emotional dynamic is encouraged by praising kids for their intelligence or abilities, instead of effort. I don't know how much I believe it, but that type of weird insecurity does seem fairly common among intelligent people who were extremely precocious.

I'm convinced that the more we all tell kids that practice beats talent by a long shot, the happier our next generation will be. Even if only some people around a kid talk like that I'm convinced it can make a difference, get people into this growth mindset when they're big.

(TED talk about the growth mindset, if the term feels like manager bullshit mumbo jumbo to you: https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing...)

What would you say to a kid who says "I'm stupid, I can't do anything"?

I went through a phase in high school where I was convinced I was very stupid. My parents certainly didn't talk to me that way, though.

Learning to fake cry to get adults to do things is pretty much the first intentional communication a baby learns as far as I can tell.

However, a word like "lazy" is a bit tricky. While you are saying "stop being lazy" (meaning - please cease the behavior you are exhibiting in this moment) it can have an undertone of "you are lazy", especially if repeated over the course of days/months/years.

I wonder if there is a better phrasing to respond in a scenario like a kid not searching for his own backpack. Maybe "Do the work!"

This may backfire on you down the road.

Your children may stop respecting you as they gain independence.

I wish more people understood/accepted this.

e: this is after massive academic self sabotage that ended up with him barely graduating from high school on the special ed track despite being probably 130+iq. He would show up late to every class, refuse to do his assignments, and roll his eyes and loudly yawn to mock the teachers the teachers before falling asleep at his desk. Despite this he'd still end up topping out exams in physics, chemistry, etc. But there were other issues at play like my mother being sick our whole childhood and my father having emotional and social problems from an abusive childhood.

Children lose respect for parents that are inconsistent, don’t have their shit together, or that do literally everything for them.

As pointed out in sibling comments your job as a parent is not to get your children to like you.

I don't mean that in the sense of "unconditional love" but a pragmatic day to day annoyance and dissatisfaction that keeps building up. Don't accept that as normal.

If you start resenting the presence or behavior of your children you need to act. Better act long before that.

And you know what, they actually do learn over time and their behavior does improve.

Saying "okay darling, I'll take your shoes off," doesn't built respect, quite the opposite, it teaches them to continue to manipulate you and that leads to a massive amount of disrespect.

The person I respect most in life is my grandma and she is the only one who called out the bullshit in me when she saw it. Same with my baby cousin (I'm more than 20 years older than him), he's a teenager now and I'm his favorite person in the world and I was the only person who called him out and let him know I expected him to behave around me, his parents let him walk all over them. He certainly had and still has zero respect for his parents.

Speaking of my baby cousin, his dad once asked me why I correct his grammar. I told him I didn't mind how he talks around his friends, but I wanted him to learn to speak correctly for the times he needs to portray himself professionally, like a job interview.

But the truth is that parenting is a huge messy business that never goes according to plan. You will screw up your kids in subtle ways, even if you avoid the major landmines. This is not due to any failing beyond being a human being that was also raised by fallible parents. The other parents on HN will appreciate this: how many times have you heard the words coming out of your mouth and thought "Oh my god. I swore I would never say that to my child! I sound just like my mother(or father)!" Way too many times, lol. It's completely unavoidable. This thought is usually followed by a small voice which sheepishly admits "So that's why they said that to me!"

As the article says, it is truly up to each one of us to remove the imaginary shackles of self-definition. We, as children, are willing co-conspirators in the building of our own false self-image. It is necessary to have a rigid model of ourselves in childhood? I guess that's debatable, but I would argue that it probably is. I think it gets us through to adulthood, where it can and should be gently discarded as a tool (like bicycle training wheels) that was once useful but no longer is.

Totally, and that goes for systems as well as children.

It’s amazing how a lot of my childhood memories started making sense after I had a kid.

If we only comment on how inherently good they are they might get lazy as whenever they get bad grades excuses like "I wasn't trying" works. It doesn't matter if the parents continue being surprised of the bad grades, the answer can also be "I was just lazy".

This is exactly what happened to me and I'm still trying to reprogram myself.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth

You'll see that and related phrases as buzzwords sometimes.

Psychologists can't replicate Carol Dweck's 'Growth Mindset' claims: https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/what-is-your-mindset

> The findings of Dweck’s key study have never been replicated in a published paper, which is noteworthy in so high-profile a work. One scientist told BuzzFeed News that his attempt to reproduce the findings has so far failed. An investigation found several small but revealing errors in the study that may require a correction.

It is likely another hypothesized model from the social psychology field that doesn't actually exist, in the same category as Stereotype Threat and Power Posing.

It often just takes mentioning these concepts to someone for them to have an epiphany and get on the growth mind track.

I'm not sure they meant it this way but now that I'm older I realize that those 'gifts' could simply have been a healthy brain, free of any obvious learning disability, chronic fatigue or ADHD-like symptoms. And lo and behold, when I did in fact put in the effort I'd get Bs and As.

As a parent I use that approach with my son and, so far, it seems to be working.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201512/is...

And what's more, this "grit" trait, the propensity to follow through and get stuff done, appears to be a set of inherited traits as well.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-limits-of...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention-to-treat_analysis

I myself did this after struggling with a really good (ie. hard) chemistry class in high school. I avoided it in college until I was forced to take it, and found that I loved it. I have always regretted drawing a premature conclusion about my aptitude for chemistry.

I don't think you're really wrong, I just think it's much harder than you're making it sound, and I wonder if the cure is worse than the disease.

I think one must be careful with this. I'd use that approach if my kid got a single bad grade among otherwise great grades in math. But I wouldn't tell her that if I knew she wasn't good at math - that would just be dishonest, and kids can tell.

My approach with my daughter is to praise her for things I've observed she's good at, and to make comments about the thing itself when I see her struggling. When she struggles with something, I encourage her by telling her that the thing itself is hard, instead of downplaying her ability to accomplish it. When applicable, I tell her it's hard even for me, as in "it's hard even for a 30-year old grown ass dude like me, so don't fret over it."

And finally, if I see her struggling with something I believe she shouldn't at her age (e.g. handwriting), I look up resources that will help me help her, or ultimately seek external help.

Since I'm reading HN of course I'm good at math. However, I don't really believe there is any such thing -- rather I had some good teachers, and father who knew math and who was willing to invest time explaining it to me, and something of a desire to "understand everything" which of course includes (starts with) Mathematics. Deep down I guess I think that perhaps when you get to Hilbert's problems _then_ you might be talking "hard math" but until then it really isn't that much to get your head around. You just need a decent teacher, time and effort.

So now I have two sons. Both I will say struggled somewhat with Math up to 7th grade when they hit a good teacher. By "struggled" I mean they got constant A/A+ but I had to put in significant work (as did they) to get them there. First son now in 9th grade gets continuous A+ without any help from me. Sometimes I ask him questions about what he's studying, and try to expand his horizons accordingly. The other son in 7th grade is still somewhat struggling but I can feel he is getting to a turning point.

Second son would often become disillusioned and say "I'm just not good at math". I can just imagine teachers and family members nodding in agreement. I didn't do that : I told him he just doesn't understand it yet but he will.

Anyway, my concern in this is : how many kids end up believing they're "not good at math" due to their teachers, family and environment? How many scientists and engineers (or just members of the public who understand statistics and interest rates...) are we losing because the idea that "math is hard" is so widely held and propagated like a virus?

I read HN, I assure I am not good at math. :P

Note that a) your sons are linked to you genetically; b) your sons' genetics likely differ. You can't actually derive any useful information from this anecdote alone.

I think it's a mixed issue. There most likely are differences in effectiveness of picking up math in people, and they may be significant, but the environment is making them too significant and creating unnecessary thresholds (i.e., if you can't do X math by age Y, there's a problem).

From what I've seen, most institutions want the most easily teachable students, which automatically selects for all ducks to be in the row, regardless of whether these factors are fatally influential. So if someone just has an easier time with math, for whatever reason, they'll have an easier time in general, because they require less work from institutions.

I think we have very little data of what good teaching can do because it largely doesn't exist, so mostly we're just looking at flat ability.

Understood. I think the information I feel I can derive is this : with sufficient effort you can turn a "can't do math" person into one that can, modulo your theory that there are some "untransformable" people.

>I think we have very little data of what good teaching can do because it largely doesn't exist

True, although in the case of my kids' teachers I can immediately tell which of them has any real appreciation for Mathematics and it seems to correlate strongly with outcome. For example our schools like to hire English teachers to teach math in middle school. That doesn't seem to work out so well.

Moreover, in my experience I see lots of people in the US say "I'm bad at math" if they are not good at algebra. Algebra is not math. Neither are fractions. Geometry is part of math. So are combinatorics, logic, numerical analysis, etc.

Violent language like your examples hurt people. Those hurts sum to resent and ultimately more violence. The following book goes into this in depth: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Marshall B. Rosenberg, Arun Gandhi

(Goes off and plays video games.)

Still, I prefer to use techniques that don't make my children feel unhappy, for obvious reasons. First the carrot, then the stick.

For example, if a child gets a good grade and you praise its intelligence instead of their work it seems that they won't put in the effort next time.[1]

1: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007....

At the time all I would have wanted to hear is "it's okay if you don't do well on this one" (because it'd have taken the pressure off when I knew I couldn't do well) but what I really would have needed to hear would have been "yes, you're not well prepared, so you might not do well on this one but we'll help you prepare for next time so you won't be in this situation again".

I mostly got by avoiding homework and underperforming (I had the talent to do well enough but didn't put in the effort to take advantage of that) but my parents only intervened when I was at risk of having to repeat a year -- and at that point the only way to make progress was rote learning, which I hated and was (and still am) extremely bad at (because I had never done it before).

So IOW you may think your kid's a genius but the important thing is not to let them rest on their laurels. Don't obsess over grades but make sure your kid participates in class and does their homework like they should or else they'll skip on that out of habit and will be woefully underprepared when they run into situations where they can't get by on simply being a "genius" (which may be sooner than you think).

Everything creative was an inconvenience.

Her eldest is in and out of prison. Her daughter was pregnant at 14. Her youngest is violent and has already got a social worker.

If every creative or intellectual outlet is taken away from someone or they are demotivated, what is left?

It makes me sad when I hear of parents prescribing anything negative.

There's no sliver bullet to this problem.

Also, a positive comment for consolation purposes ("but you're so good at it!" when they actually aren't) is dishonest and kids can tell (I know I could at least, and I know my daughter can).

There's a really good book that talks about this (among other things) called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GG0MXI/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

"Wow, you have learned so much math this year because you worked really hard."