The experiments this op-ed describes are really neat. I especially like the one that demonstrates the importance of "practice what you preach."

Here's another cool experiment related to social/moral development, which you can perform on your own kid:

Have two grown-up friends each show your baby a toy. The first friend should offer the toy to your kid but then retract the offer and keep the toy to himself. The second friend should offer the toy to your kid but "accidentally" drop it out of reach.

Now, give your baby a different toy, and then prompt her to share it with one of the friends.

Your baby is very likely to share it with the friend who dropped the toy, rather than the one who withdrew the toy.

The above experiment is based on a 2010 study involving 21-month-olds. It found that two-thirds of the kids shared with the person who dropped the toy -- and the other third kept the toy to themselves. Not a single one shared with the person who offered the toy then retracted the offer. (I talk about this more in "Experimenting With Babies" http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com)

Not only is this fascinating because it shows that babies act preferentially toward people who are kind to them ... but it holds true EVEN IF the person who initiates a kind act is unable to complete it, but demonstrates the proper intent. Think about the complexity of the cognitive processes that are going on in that evaluation. It's amazing!

That book has interesting experiments, but suffers psychology's common problem (especially baby psychology): massively over-extending the experimental data into unsupportable conclusions that ignore loads of confounding factors.

Example, quoted from the website:

""" The babies in the unjustified group spent more time looking at the adult's discordant expression and exhibited more checking behavior. Additionally, the babies' facial expressions only displayed empathy for the adult when a negative emotional response fit the scenario.

The takeaway:

Parents, take note: Your toddler can see through your "stiff upper lip" routine.

"""

The "takeaway" is completely unsupported. In no way does the experiment suggest that hiding pain is useless.

For one thing, "stiff upper lip" (aka "faked neutrality") is different from faked happiness.

For two, the experimental methodology only applies to cases where the baby knows that the experience's standard emotional response. That applies to hammer strikes on a finger, but not something like divorce or losing a job.

For three, "spent more time looking at the adult's discordant expression" shows that the babies learn from their parents reactions, as they expend effort to understand counterintuitive behavior. "Counterintuitive" is not the same as "fake" or "wrong".

So the "takeway" may in fact be the opposite of what the data suggests!

Thanks, my thoughts exactly.

Coming from a machine learning background, I am often shocked at the quality of experiments in psychology and even economics.

I think the reason may be because in machine learning, you describe your algorithm and experiment exactly. If someone can use the same algorithm and devise an experiment to disprove your results, you look like a fool. With softer sciences, maybe people just say, "then you obviously didn't do it right!" and there is no code to point at.

I like to think that in medicine they know how to do things properly, since there is so much regulation and money on the line.

In machine learning you are implementing known algorithms on fully understood systems.

Studies of humans (medical, psychological, economic, etc) are attempting to discover unknown algorithms on unknown, extremely complex systems. The quality will always seem lower than engineering studies because scientists don't know what they don't know.

I don't understand this at all. At 21 months, a toddler can walk and talk, and you can play keep away with them for fun. I don't know what it means to drop a toy out of reach. Do you drop it on a high counter or something?

As the parent of a 21-month-old, I can assure you that nothing is out of reach—especially the counter.

Mine used two boxes of different sizes as stairs to reach the counter and the retrieved chocolates from the cabinet above. Then she climbed back down and moved the boxes back to where they came from so we wouldn't know. Only then did she relax and eat the chocolates.

I thought my wife was stealing all the chocolates for days until I caught the toddler doing it.

Mine has figured out how to climb the dog to get at the cat's tail; something that the toddler seems to view as a nutritious and delicious food item.

I fear the dog may have been the mastermind in this plan.

In the original experiment -- see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20424094 for the abstract -- the toddlers stood on one side of a slanted table, so that anything placed on the table would roll down to the other side, where the adult actresses were. Presumably, the toddlers were not able to walk around the table.

One way to replicate this at home, albeit imperfectly, is to place your toddler in a high chair, so that if you drop the toy on the floor, she is unable to reach it.

I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response. Although they might be excellent actresses, being mean to a baby is probably going to make you feel pretty rotten, at a level it might be hard to control, and the baby could be picking up on that.

Animals can pick up subtle cues that are not apparent to adults; I'd be amazed if babies weren't at least as good.

I'm thinking of Clever Hans http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Both actions seem to qualify as "mean to a baby" to me. Assuming the actresses agreed with me, this would cancel out the variable.

I was thinking about that, and the thing is people are often deceptive to children for their own good, as a way to handle them without upsetting them (arguably not ideal parenting but let it pass). So that, if you convince the child you really did drop it, you won't feel bad. But if you are overtly mean - it's unmistakeable that you deliberately the toy back, then it's hard to kid yourself that the baby didn't realize. Now did the baby realize? That's the whole thing we're trying to determine! I'm just saying that the actresses' model of what the baby will understand and won't will affect how they feel about it.

This of course all depends on the actresses having a particular model of the baby's ability to model them.

Point is, the whole gift giving/dropping/witholding might be a red herring, and perhaps the same results could be replicated by having both people give a toy to a baby, but one acting scary and mean. And perhaps if two mannequins went through the same giving/dropping/witholding experiment, the result would not be observed. And perhaps if a smiling actress stole the toy, while a scowling actress dropped the toy, the affect would be reversed.

Simple enough to swap the actresses around to remove the individuals as confounding variables.

On a related note. HN gets pretty obnoxious nit picking about experiments. Guaranteed half the posts about a social science experiment come from novices whining about some flaw only they can see in the experiment yet a hard science paper gets posted and surprisingly no one has any complaints about the experimental design.

How would swapping actresses help?

The issue is not a quality of the individual person, but of their action - and the relationship between their action and the baby's later response to that person is very thing being tested.

BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse.

>How would swapping actresses help?

Using many actresses would allow the investigators to see if an individual receives a different response compared to the overall group. But it looks like you actually meant say the babies knew the testers felt bad so refused to share, not because the baby had been slighted. I think you need to read more on what the study tested.

>BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse.

Reread your comment:

>I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response.

The level of disrespect you show is amazing. It would be one thing if you actually read the study and realized that "Hey, they used the baby's mom and a drug addict in withdrawal as the two testers! Clearly the study is flawed." Nope, your first comment is essentially "I wonder if these professionals are incompetent."

What did the study test then? (I don't have a subscription to "Psychological Science", so can't read the full text, at least, not from the above link).

From the abstract on the first expt (and from the story linked here on HN), it seems unambiguous. My understanding is: one actress offered then refused the toy (intentional); a second actress offered but accidently dropped the toy (unintentional). Later, the baby treated the two actresses differently.

My thinking was that it would be impossible to control for the effect I described (i.e. the Clever Hans Effect), given the social nature of what they were investigating. You probably already know about Clever Hans and so didn't read the wikipedia article I linked, but it's pretty entertaining/interesting, and addresses the problems of controlling for the effect in some social experiments (EDIT: what I'm referring to is that it says in some social experiments they can't control for it just have to accept the effect may be there).

It would be really cool if they had a clever way of controlling for it (I've come across a few very clever experimental designs in Psych studies), so I was wondering if they did or not, and if so how.

I didn't think the conductors of the experiment were incompetent.

Thanks for rereading my comment.

Yes, this was my first thought too. The results need to be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism when there is no double blind and the interpretation of the result is subjective.

Who would have thought that 21-month-olds are predisposed to Kantian ethics?

Or could you say they're enacting a tit-for-tat strategy?

Well, should you take a cultural relativist POV then there's nothing "true" about Kantian ethics—it's a choice of values. It's interesting to see 21mo behavior selecting for those values.

If you take the deontological view then this is still a fairly complex behavior to execute. To consider whether this sort of judgement is one that should be fairly placed on the 21mo if it did the same is a challenging mental task.

So, perhaps babies are predisposed to heuristics which favor the categorical imperative. That'd be interesting and certainly worth surprise.

Many contradictory views are all "philosophy." It's rarely obvious which view is true, if any are.

This book looks awesome. Grabbing one tonight thanks for letting me know about it!

Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be. 'Tricks' and 'techniques' abound, and every other article is about 'teaching' your child to achieve/empathize/compete.

You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they will learn.

Your kids are way smarter than you think. They know what you're doing, they know you're trying to encourage certain behaviors, and they eventually know how to manipulate you much more effectively than you know how to manipulate them.

Quit treating five-year-olds like they're some kind of resistant clay, and you have to cleverly shape them into the person they're going to be. That kid is already a person. Treating him like a puppy to be trained will certainly affect his personality and behavior, but the largest impact will not be the one you intended. You're teaching them how you want them to be, and you're also teaching them that the way to get what you want is to manipulate people into giving it to you.

That's exactly right. All this parenting 'help' is just fueling our thoughts that kids aren't really people, and need to be bent to our will.

That's not accurate. Kids are little people. Ignorant of many things, but they're little people. My wife reads these 'how to raise your kids' posts and books and crap, and all it does is make her feel as if she is a terrible parent because he wasn't signing at 10 months and isn't using full sentences at 12. She feels guilt that he may be behind other kids already, because he's not doing things that these posts and books suggest (and are mostly ridiculous).

Let kids be kids, let them climb trees and ride bikes and be alone. But, spend a lot of time with them and have them watch how you treat people, what you say about people and how you interact with the world. Take him/her with you when you work on the yard, just have them help by carrying rocks around. Take him/her to the store to get the fuel filter you're fighting right now. Talk to them as if they're capable and they'll be capable. Have boundaries that are firm, but reasonable.

And always, always remember that you can say whatever you want about their character being great, or their traits being great, but if you show malice and spite, they'll be malicious and spiteful as well.

I had the same worries when my son was a baby. He only learned a few signs. And since no one else knew what they meant it quickly dropped to the wayside. He's far more eloquent at speech and writing then I was at his age. Getting all As except in graphing still bothers me to this day. He is not a genius nor does he care for maths like I did. He is also trilingual which completely blows my mind. This he got from his mother.

And yet I feel like a bad parent because we don't have the resources to enroll him for all the activities his friends do. One event particularly stands out from my own childhood. I tried out for the wrestling team and when I brought the paperwork home my mom said I couldn't, we didn't have health insurance.

I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Being good at something and then being told you can't because you don't have the right paperwork.

Kids are "little people" only the in the sense that they are immature examples of H. sapiens. Letting them be kids is very good advice precisely because it doesn't suggest we should expect them to be like adults.

You are both right and wrong.

Children are not identical to adults, and treating them like they should be free to make all of their own decisions at 5 years of age would be negligent.

But they are like adults in many ways that we tend to ignore - they may not have a great conception of which things can hurt them how badly, but they have a sense of dignity, and they have a sense of independence. They want to make decisions for themselves, and they need to interact with adults that treat them as a rational peer to whatever degree that is possible.

Give them what freedoms you can, and respect them enough to explain the real reasons for the rules you impose. Sometimes you may find that they aren't very good ones at all, when you try to explain them - when that happens, admit that it wasn't a good rule, and work out a better one with them.

I felt a lot of this when I was growing up. A lot of times I could feel my dad trying to mold me into the best type of person possible. Not that it was unwelcome or that he was doing the wrong thing, but in a lot of ways it felt weird and unnatural. Sometimes it felt like he was a lot more guarded around me, like he couldn't be who he really was because he was trying to set the best possible example and be the best possible parent.

In hindsight, I think that left me unprepared for a lot of challenges I faced in college. A lot of times, I would ask him a question and get only half of a response, because answering truthfully would involve revealing less-than-ideal character. I wish that there had been more heart-to-heart and less 'raising your kid the right way'

Thanks for sharing.

In the terms of the article, I wonder if the behavior your dad was displaying was more motivated by "shame" than "guilt". Shame-based responses to me seem to be much more concerned with how a social group will perceive your behavior, whereas guilt-based responses deal with the rightness or wrongness of the action itself.

It almost strikes me as a choice between a moral absolute/relativist viewpoint.

Indeed, your father had trouble because we was trying to sculpt you without actually being a role model, and you noticed the different between his words and actions. The article discusses this phenomenon.

He was trying to be an actual role model. In many ways, he did a good job. In places where he wasn't perfect though, he hid that fact instead of being upfront.

I don't know what would have been best, but especially as I got older I would have preferred complete transparency. He was a good man, but I wish I had known more about his flaws. It would have given me more insight into my own.

There's certain opinions that my parents hold that I do not. As one (fairly non-controversial) example, I don't believe in the death penalty, but my dad does.

We were having a debate about it one time, and I asked my dad how it was that we disagreed on these topics. He replied that he raised my sister and I to have what he felt were more ethical viewpoints on various issues than what his own perspectives were.

I was astounded when he told me this. He doesn't hide what his real thoughts are, but he recognizes that some of them aren't the most kind or moral and has actually raised me to have different views than himself.

Maybe this isn't about morality but about wishing your Dad had been closer/more intimate rather than more distant

The article actually goes further to suggest it's not how you treat your child, but also how they see you treat others.

Being a decent person is a great first step, but even so your child will eventually (probably often) do something you consider bad behavior. Possible responses range from ignoring the behavior to trying to beat it out of them, and you'll find parents all along the spectrum. This is how psychologists have found is a good way to deal with those situations. It's not entirely common sense.

Did you include 'express disapproval, then talk rationally about why' in your range of responses?

If you respect your kid as an autonomous individual, your disapproval will matter to them, and a rational explanation is the only way they can internalize a rule that will persist without the presence of an enforcing authority.

It won't work out of the blue, of course. Children that have not been treated as rational entities won't respond as such, and children that are very young have a limited understanding of the world. But explaining things to them even before they understand the explanation has a lot of value - they may not understand your reasoning, but they will definitely understand that you're trying to explain, even before they can talk.

Sometimes you may find that the 'bad behavior' you perceive isn't actually a problem at all. I instinctively tried to stop my child from stomping through puddles and getting her feet wet; in reality that's only important if she's about to walk a long way, or if she'll have no chance to change her shoes for hours.

The best thing my parents did was be consistent. Early on I learned how to behave because I could predict my parent's reactions. How can a child learn to behave when all adult figures are erratic and irrational? Even the smallest things, like telling a kid Santa Claus is real can cause them to discount the value of truth.

Reading behavioral psychology studies should require a skeptics hat. I'm not calling out these specific studies, but when it comes to miniscule sample sizes, unreproducible and sometimes out right made up results, this area is very suspect due to ease of fudging results. (Diederik Stapel comes to mind as an extreme case.)

The famous "marshmallow experiment" is great evidence for this. When the original experiment was re-analyzed, researchers found that children from stable, consistent environments, with reliable trustworthy adults, were better able to withold temptation and show patience to win a "2 marshmallow" delayed reward in exchange for a sacrifice of "1 marshmallow" now.

As soon as he was old enough to understand, I showed my kid the marshmallow experiment and taught him a few ways to mess with the experimenter, if someone were to try this on him. Bwahaha.

For comparison's sake, it's neat to look at the psychological outcomes for children of alcoholics (where the element of consistency and predictability gets thrown right out the window). I realize that I'm a single anecdotal piece of data, but the good news is that therapy can help get over it :).

Yes, that's a good trick to use.

The article actually covers this, note. The entire last section is about how children watch adults and decide based on their actions how they should act, paying comparatively little attention to their words.

It's not a trick. Be a good person, and treat your children like people.

Sounds like a trick to me. What, I'm supposed to be a good person just for my kids' sake? Yeah, right, buddy!

;)

I don't want my children to be like me, I want them to be better than me. I can try to be what I want them to be (said otherwise: I can try to be what I want myself to be, or what I should be), but acknowledging my fallibility and proactively anticipating flaws in execution in the 'lead be example' strategy seems to be more grounded in reality.

(think of it this way: how many athletics coaches tell their athletes 'just run as fast as I do'?)

Trying to get somebody to live the sort of life you want for them is a potentially harmful mistake. Why not pay attention to one's performance as a parent, and learn from that?

"Trying to get somebody to live the sort of life you want for them is a potentially harmful mistake."

Well yeah obviously, I was talking about the second-order effect of the parenting. Like a control signal being modulated onto the main signal (with the main signal being a child's endogenous drives, interests and character), or one-dimensional Perlin noise, the parenting needs to follow the primary amplitude.

Your children are not going to copy your skills and abilities, they're going to imitate your decisions, conscious and unconscious.

If you're an athletics coach that tells your athletes to run as fast as they can, and you personally half-ass it around the track and have a bit of a beer gut, then you're doing a bad job.

>Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be.

That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold.

Even your own example does this by assigning a direction to your actions based on how it will impact the child.

> That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold.

Try Emile from Rousseau. In general, what you are describing is the difference between the sciences of pedagogy an psychology. In one sentence, (since the enlightenment) pedagogy tries to find the optimal conditions for humans to develop their true self, while psychology usually observes a misguided development and tries to find a treatment. Psychology therefore has to have some model of what constitutes normality to compare against. These specific studies and treatments are easy to write about as a scientific journalist or parenting literature author. It's telling that practically none of the parenting books I've skimmed through are based on pedagogy.

(that's no dismissal of psychology at all, but you have to use the right tool for the job).

>pedagogy tries to find the optimal conditions for humans to develop their true self

"True self" is not a real thing - it's mystical psychobabble. In reality you are a product of your genetics and experiences, the ratios of which are still contested, however as of now the latter is much easier to influence than the former and as a result is really the only medium we have to work with if we want to influence outcomes.

>>pedagogy tries to find the optimal conditions for humans to develop their true self

>"True self" is not a real thing - it's mystical psychobabble.

Yep you are right, but I don't speak English natively and did not have much time :) A better phrasing probably would have been the true potential of the species, not of an individual. But true potential sounds too elitist... I'll try more verbosely: Mostly since the enlightenment (let's say the second half of the 18th century, one landmark was Emile by Rousseau), most central-european theory of pedagogy has a specific vision of an ideal of a developed human being (or species) to strive for. It's centered around development of practical, cultural and emotional skills, reasoning, the ability to assess the own actions relative to the state and necessities of society as a whole. Something like the living according to the categorical imperative of Kant while not feeling deprived of the own needs.

> Throughout most of history, parenting was largely focused on equipping one's children to survive. The idea that one could impart specific qualities onto one's children is very new - until recently one instead struggled to impart religious rules onto them, with sufficient impact that they would continue to be followed.

That's a big pile of self-contradiction. Both survival skills and religious rules are specific qualities.

Skills are skills, and religious rules are behaviors or habits (depending). You can of course define 'quality' incredibly broadly if you want, but I meant it in the sense of 'personality characteristics' or 'character attributes'.

What is the objective distinction between each of the following: a skill, a behavior, a habit, a personality characteristic, and a character attribute?

Seems to me that all of them, when they describe anything that is objectively meaningful, refer to patterns of action adopted in particular circumstances. The only thing that changes over time seems to be the name applied to the patterns of action that parenting seeks to impose on children, not the actual substance that parenting is about creating desired patterns of action.

While I don't want to get bogged down into details of definitions, I'll take a swing at it:

A skill is a capability learned through experience which is wielded with intention.

A behavior is simply a way of acting - it could be conscious or unconscious, it could be enforced or intentional.

A habit is an unintentional behavior.

A personality characteristic and a character attribute are basically the same thing: unconscious ways of perceiving value and making decisions.

There are of course dozens of ways to define each of those terms, and I'm not interested in debating which of them is 'correct' - I am here primarily focusing on the distinction between instilling value-judgments via rituals and enforcement and attempting to control the self-perception or decision-making styles by behaving in artificial ways.

Describing them all as 'patterns of acting' is like calling all matter 'arrangements of chemicals'. It is of course accurate, and even in some cases useful, but you muddy very important distinctions by generalizing to that degree. In the case in point, the distinction lost is between valuations and perceptions.

I think the distinction you are making is illusory in the sense of the discussion -- you cannot influence outward action of the type you describe as skill, behavior, and habit without describing the internal processing you describe as "personality characteristics" and "character attributes", and you cannot observe "personality characteristics" or "character attributes" except as they manifest through skill, behavior, or habit.

The first half is very common sense.

An other common sense thing: you don't magically get the child at 5, there's this long long process from the baby that can't feed himself and is pretty close to resistive clay on the moral point of view, to the 2 years old that becomes pretty good at understanding what's going around, the 3 years old that can do and think so much more by himself, to the 5 years old who's quite socialized etc.

There's many many stages, the kid has limited abilities, and and you actually have go teach a lot of things, not just sit you kid on some watch tower and wait for him to understand. For a long time he just won't get it if you don't make an effort to teach him. This is where you'll want advices on what ways you can teach him, what 'works' and what doesn't.

This argument is not only wrong, it is actively harmful to people who seek to be better parents.

Cognitively, little kids are not people, at least not the way we typically think of what a person is. The analogy of a delicate and hard to work piece of clay is not a bad analogy for the reality of the situation.

What you dismiss as "tricks" is actually highly valuable technical knowledge. We would laugh at someone who said that all it takes to program a computer is to just "act smart." Well when you are raising a kid you are helping to program the most complex computer ever created.

"you are helping to program the most complex computer ever created."

I get the basic idea of what you're saying, but that sounds like a lovely way to raise a serial murderer. Sometimes, engineering doesn't translate well to other parts of life.

Look at it this way: a parent is choosing a preschool and asks what training the staff has. At one school the answer is "we don't have any training; we just try to be good people." At another school the answer is "every member of our staff has an associates degree in early childhood development." Which school would most parents prefer for their children?

If ignorance is no virtue for preschool staff, why would it be a virtue for parents?

Children are not mechanisms, and you cannot engineer them into shape with your 'highly valuable technical knowledge'.

(implied insult redacted - sorry about that.)

All humans are mechanisms, and developing a better understanding of how the mechanism works does not harm parenting.

You're trying really hard to claim some sort of moral high ground here, but there is nothing immoral or harmful about knowledge.

You've set up a false dichotomy between parents who are "good people" and parents who are interested in scientific knowledge about how children develop. Any parent can be both. In fact I would argue that parents who seek to learn more about child development will arm themselves with better tools for being good parents.

I don't know why you perceive scientific studies of child development as a threat, but you obviously do.

You're clearly making value judgments when you use words like "manipulate" and "deceive," neither of which occur literally or conceptually in the article.

Edit: the article does use the word "tricks", although I would argue as shorthand for technique rather than deceive. Nevertheless to be fair I replaced it above with "manipulate".

I definitely and totally judge the article.

It's exactly the kind of junk I invariably see when a good journalist attempts to write about any kind of science - they try to draw conclusions from the study that the study does not draw, because the conclusions drawn from a real study are never interesting to a normal readership.

The study most likely does not prescribe behaviors or approaches on the parts of parents when raising their children. The study ought to be purely about how individuals react to controlled and described stimuli - the study will draw reasonable conclusions, make appropriate cautions about the mapping between reality and experiment, and be very careful about inferring any real-world implications. I haven't purchased a copy of this particular study, so I can't judge it on its own merits, but it's from a reputable source, and the abstract makes reasonable claims.

> You know what works extra- extra- well? Be the kind of person you want your kids to be. Treat them like a decent person treats other decent people and that's the behavior they will learn.

Absolutely. And be consistent, that's the one main important result of developmental psychology for parents. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory and grep for Bowlby.

> Your kids are way smarter than you think. They know what you're doing, they know you're trying to encourage certain behaviors, and they eventually know how to manipulate you much more effectively than you know how to manipulate them.

They are smart as in emotionally smart. And that heavily depends on trust in the social environment they are able to build from experience. A child having made consistend experiences of trust will have it easier to develop a model of self-efficiacy, and that in turn is fundamental for learning other things about the world. The emotional experiences are fundamental - but harder to see than a kid talking early or similar.

Authentic actions by a stable individual are inherently consistent. Whereas forced behaviors that are intended to be consistent rarely are.

> Authentic actions by a stable individual are inherently consistent. Whereas forced behaviors that are intended to be consistent rarely are.

I think we mean the same thing, but to be sure: I tried to exclude the following authenticity with my phrasing:

If I am relaxed on a saturday afternoon and my child spills it's cornflakes over the print outs I left on the desk, it's no big deal. Me or both of us clean up the mess and I just print them out again. If the same thing happens on a stressfull thursday evening, I am angered and let that anger out.

In that example I am authentic, but from the view of the child my response to the same action of the child is not consistent. The child has to have reached a certain age to grasp that my anger is mostly about my stress and not about the actions of the kid (specificially the ability to empathize has to be developed).

tl;dr: What I meant with consistency is mostly the parents having a certain amount of affect control. That's probably what you meant with 'a stable individual'.

I agree with that. Following Gandhi, I'll say: be the change you want to see in your family.

Please point to the studies that show it works extra extra well.

Father of recent 3 year old. Big believer in modeling. I see other parents tell their kids to clean up, put stuff away, etc. I simply embrace cleaning up and my daughter follows suit quite often.

We also do whatever we can to enable her to participate in what we are doing (sadly computers are a big problem in that regard, much more than say chopping with a knife). Our kid is very well-behaved and cautious (except for tired/hungry breakdowns, of course).

I am also a big believer in the see-what happens school of action. Other parents are always encouraging (yelling at) their kids to share, particularly in support of aggressive children trying to take from their child. We believe in letting children experiment and realize that sharing leads to fun, greediness not so much. We demonstrate the power of choosing not to play others which is really the best way of handling unpleasant people/situations.

But at the heart of it all is simply being, authentically, the kind of person you want your child to be. They are programmed to learn actual behavior from their parents who 1) have been successful enough to reproduce and 2) have a similar genetic makeup meaning their behaviors are likely to be compatible with the kid's abilities.

So be a better person and relax. Oh, and look into Sudbury education for your kids which really teaches them how to be moral in a community.

The wikipedia quote is correct. Your assessment seems to be not based on anything. Ask yourself, what is harder to learn: (1) knowing who you are and how to work with others or (2) solving an algebraic equation?

They pretty much all learn how to read, write, do arithmetic. Those who want to go to college (about 80%) do so without difficulty, learning what they need in a few months. They are serious, engaged students in college because they know why they are there. They find college kids goofing off to be quite a mystery. They are free to become themselves when they are supposed to -- puberty. That's what that stage is for. Most schools prevent the self-exploration that is necessary to allow for that. So then it gets delayed until people's 20s.

--

Visit such a school and you will see that they are much less nasty than those in a public school. Bullying is virtually unheard of. They work together as a community and take responsibility for it. They are collectively responsible for all the policing and judgement of others as well as themselves. They adjudicate quite fairly.

I saw 8 year olds wrestling with determining an appropriate punishment for their friend vs. their own desire to help their friend. They really struggled to find a balance. 8 year olds. This is an issue that a lot of adults struggle with.

They also write themselves up when they break a rule. They all buy into building a community. The school I visited was full of energy and respect.

So you can either choose to believe the fiction of "Lord of the Flies" or believe the results of forty years of actual experience with the model.

I can't help wondering whether the Sudbury School model would work quite so well in encouraging moral behaviour if it was filled with problem kids with gang affiliations rather than the offspring of well-to-do parents with a deep interest in finding their kid a suitable environment.

I think you are right that that is an issue. But what school does handle that well? Also, the value of Sudbury is community. If someone is in a gang, they already have that (I presume).

They do have experience with "troubled" kids doing just fine and thriving, but these are a small number injected into an otherwise pleasant environment.

They also do occasionally expel students. But I also remember a story from the Jerusalem Sudbury school in which one of their students left and fell into drugs, etc. Later, the founder of the school asked the kid if they had failed him. He said "failed me? You were the only ones that didn't fail me. You are the reason I sought rehabilitation instead of dying on the streets. I always carried you and the school with me, voices of support." Take from that what you will.

The most important thing is to have a good environment for students to come into. People adapt to their environments, for better or worse. If you were to take a single gang member away and put them in a strongly functioning Sudbury school, I would give them great odds of succeeding. But if you plopped a number of gang members into such a community, I bet that would be a major problem.

The hardest part for a Sudbury school is starting and dealing with huge influx of students. It takes time to assimilate to such an environment.

There is also another big question along these lines. The students at Sudbury learn the R's quite well on their own. But their parents are generally well-educated, demonstrating the value of those skills. Would kids from homes without those values do so well? Again, injecting a single kid from such an environment into a Sudbury school would be much more likely to succeed than having a majority of the school from such an environment.

But, as far as I know, no one has attempted it. Perhaps someone should.

Man, I just learned to compliment actions rather than talent, and now I have to do it the other way around.

I get why, though. Moral actions are choices. Being smart isn't. If you praise a kid for being smart, he won't be able to choose to be smart. Instead, he'll assume he's smart and won't have to work so hard. I suppose praising an innate tendency to work hard might be more effective.

My fiance made the point that praising a child for his hard work (rather than smarts) is actually praising his tenacity -- a moral virtue.

Your comment really made me stop and think. It does seem like a contradiction at first: when your child does something good praise their character not their action, when your child does something well praise the action rather than calling them smart or talented.

After some thought though I can see it as consistent since when they do something well you can praise them for being hard-working (character).

Some of the article seems more obvious if flipped around... watch some teens/kids tease each other, you'll hear a lot of language along the lines of one kid defining what the other kid "is", not much oblique talk about the success or failure of one individual purchase of clothing to match their current little tribal affiliation. Enforcement of conformity is enforcement of conformity, regardless of the morals/ethics of the conformity itself, so a study of it is incomplete if it only includes the behaviors of the happy sunshine people or only includes parent/child interactions.

The interesting part of the article was the quantitative analysis of experimental evidence, not so much that evolution seems to have produced a species that's pretty good at tribal-scale interpersonal dynamics and learning everything by copying superiors. The qualitative analysis seems obvious given the model, so good experimental numbers indicates the popular qualitative model is likely correct.

You just praise the kid personally for displaying values that are healthy and helpful to internalize and base an identity on, while for other behaviors (mostly negative ones), you express disappointment (or some other emotion) about the behavior not the person. Looking at it that way it seems pretty intuitive to me. Try and minimize the amount of therapy the kid's going to need as an adult. It's fine to make occasional mistakes, but if you find yourself constantly wanting to put your kid down or praise them for innate but effortless strengths, maybe you're not being quite fair to them and need to reexamine how you approach the relationship. But for most people (and a lot of good parents already), I'd think that most of these prescriptions are pretty natural and mostly effortless.

I'm sorry, but what you are saying just does not match my personal experience, nor what the empirical studies suggest, which is the exact opposite:

> When a child is praised more substantially for trying hard, you get things like staying up all night studying for a test. When you emphasize being smart and not needing to study, the child is more likely to push themselves such that they can land good grades without needing to study.

The way I've heard and personally experienced it, kids who get praised for being smart are more likely to procrastinate ("eh, I already get that anyway"), then try to cram everything in in the last minute.

> And the same thing applies to sports. If you emphasize effort, you might get a child practicing repeatedly something that they are already good at.

Similarly, studies suggest that by praising talent, you teach kids to stick to what they are good at immediately ("that's what I'm talented at"), instead of putting in the effort to learn stuff that they don't get immediately.

EDIT: Perhaps it depends on whether you praise below-average, average and smarter-than-average kids?

I don't mean to de-emphasize effort, it's still important to try hard, but I've seen a lot of cases where effort was focused on as the only thing that counts. For the smartest kids, that's not usually where the parental emphasis lies.

It depends on how you emphasize being smart. If you emphasize overall smartness, the kid will be more self-conscious about their weak points, which is what I wanted to convey. If you emphasize particular moments where they are good, they will be encouraged to repeat that specifically. It's a difference between emphasizing being good at [subset like shooting hoops] vs being good at [basketball as a whole]. Academically, the emphasis should be on the grades instead of on being good at taking tests. Or if you're more high-level, the emphasis should be on learning what's going to be most useful to you later in life as opposed to specifically effort or grades.

As for procrastination, in my experience the smarter kids procrastinate substantially more. But for the most part this doesn't come back and bite them. They leave exactly as much time as they need to pull off the good grade and most of the time it works out.

How can children "push themselves such that they can land good grades without needing to study"? I can see not needing to cram for an exam, because a child has already put the effort in, but learning seems to require some form of study.

I think the real danger with this strategy is that when kids are praised for being smart, they seek out things where they are smart, and avoid things that would require hard work. Most worthwhile things require hard work at some point.

> it really seems to me like praising a kid for being smart is going to be better than praising a kid for working hard.

This does not line up with research in the matter.

>This sort of gets coupled with the idea of 'work smarter, not harder.' When a child is praised more substantially for trying hard, you get things like staying up all night studying for a test.

No. Not if you teach balance.

>When you emphasize being smart and not needing to study, the child is more likely to push themselves such that they can land good grades without needing to study.

This is just so ridiculous I can't even comment.

i had to learn the opposite message here. our society tells us so much stuff about being kind and caring, and there are very few messages about being able to stick up for yourself, being able to make reasonable requests and being able to say no to people who are not treating you fairly.

i had a roommate who didn't pay rent. i couldn't bring myself to confront the roommate because i felt like i "made of lot of money" and they didn't make much money and they had problems. i imagined them arguing with me and was scared and hurt by this image; i have no way to tell someone 'i deserve what i have and you don't' because i know i was born into a loving family that raised me and took care of me and pushed me to succeed. i can't take credit for those things.

i finally had to tell myself "it's not just ok to put yourself first. you have to insist on it; if you don't get rent from your roommate, you're letting them take from the people you love took; when your roommate doesn't pay rent, they are ruining your mood which hurts your friends and family."

it's hard. i finally said 'fuck being a good person, i'll do what i want and what benefits me and those i love.' this doesn't mean i go around being an ass to people all the time; i'm still generous when i tip and i try to look out for people.

but now i'm different. if i sense someone is trying to abuse or push me around at all, i see them as a predator. when homeless people asking for money used to make me feel like a bad person for being successful, now i see them as predators who use negative emotions to try and take my positive feelings away. yes, they're suffering. but i can't help them, and giving them money doesn't help them either.

show your kids how to be good, sure. but for god's sake teach them to say no to people who make unreasonable requests, and give them practice asking for things they are owed.

Don't go so far as to say "fuck being a good person", but understand that not everyone deserves unlimited trust and good faith. --which is I think what most of your comment is expressing.

Your story is the topic of one of the most famous West End /Broadway songs of recent years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6h1eBEmY6U

    Even if you find that life's not fair, it
    Doesn't mean that you just have to grin and bear it
    If you always take it on the chin and wear it
    Nothing will change
    Even if you're little you can do a lot, you
    Mustn't let a little thing like little stop you
    If you sit around and let them get on top, you
    Might as well be saying you think that it's OK

> homeless people asking for money ... i see them as predators who use negative emotions to try and take my positive feelings away.

Or they are asking for money who using asking for money as a way to get money. Your "predator" description fits panhandlers with manipulative stories, but not all "homeless people asking for money". Also, it's worth considering , if someone is telling you a story that upsets you, but is a true story, maybe the negative feelins you feel are appropriate, and there is something wrong with economic inequality.

Quote: Your "predator" description fits panhandlers with manipulative stories, but not all "homeless people asking for money."

The genuinely needful have long been run out of the public spaces/territories that have the most pay-out. The 'predators' in traffic making more than working at 7-11 don't abide threats to their income and will defend it unscrupulously. Stop and walk on that center median sometime and see what response you get.

Edit: I'm referring to occupied PH zones, I'm also half kidding. Be prepared for a confrontation if you do that.

i understand your perspective. i do, for example, think there is something seriously wrong with income inequality. limiting the good faith i give to people is hard for me; it feels to me like being a 'good person' wouldn't require me to do that. saying 'fuck it' was my way of saying 'i need to be ok with the knowledge that i will hurt people, and i even have to err on the side of not helping someone who genuinely needs it, so i can keep myself safe.'

I think you are trying to separate things into "morally good" and "morally bad" that are really just morally neutral. If your roommate isn't paying you rent, kicking him out is a neutral course of action in most cases.

A moral and caring person doesn't let themselves get walked all over, a passive person does.

You hold the cognitive distortion that your wants and needs are less important than others because you grew up in a more healthy manner. This is incorrect.

You can make a request and say "no" to one and still be a kind, caring, and moral person.

Oh good. More ways I can mis-raise my child. I complimented the object instead of the subject in a sentence! Oh shiiiiiiit.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2014/03/new-par...

My personal experiences doesn't lend me to think much about news articles regarding such studies.

>I love [...] science

>So guess what I think about these studies.

My guess is that you think your experience alone is not statistically relevant.

My experience is definitely anecdotal. I probably misspoke, my problem is with the reporting of the studies, not the science itself.

Congratulations on overcoming that.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. As a parent, every single time I read something about 'raising your kids X', Dr. Lipschitz (from The Rugrats) comes to mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNTesmh1wpI

I would say that, no, parents should not be expected to internalize all of the thousands of different things we're finding out about the best ways to raise kids. It's far too much to know, and the knowledge is currently too tentative. But, it's also pointless to bring that up every time a new study comes out, because these things are good to know. That's probably why the GP is catching downvotes.

I've seen how parents can get amazingly OCD with these studies. They'll form cliques and look down on parents who don't perform what the current best practice is. Because of that, I think it always bears repeating.

Probably because most of this is common sense that you do anyway. Generally speaking, you don't tell you child that he's and evil human being because he didn't pick up his toys.

But you want a kid to self-identify as a "good" person, and do what good people do. For most folks, this stuff either happens pretty naturally, or the parents adapt as their kid learns how to game them.

That video is...something else.

To the person who downvoted me, did you watch the video?

lol

Reading this, I'm pretty sure I can apply it to adult contexts too. Think about all the cases in organisations where 'values' are touted but the behaviour of people tells you how you really get ahead. Everything here is useful if you care about the organisational culture you want to create.

Funny you should say this. The author Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton and has a book called "Give and Take" that talks about a lot of this. And unlike most business books, it's all backed up with well researched data.

I know of three people who have been severely injured from a project I walked off last year. The Fortune 20 company's guidelines(and national safety codes) were ignored in their entirety. The project manager who was going to save $4.5 million at the risk of others' welfare is now shopping for bids to "do it by the book". Apparently his plausible deniability has sprung a leak or one or more of the injured have lawyered up. Vindication is bitter-sweet.

I didn't get the don't be a cheater part. seemed like that would cause shame instead of guilt and confilted with the rule praise the child as a good person. expect them to do better when they do bad and seperate the bad action with fromt the good person. With hard worker being a good trait.

Sure, so the author's advice boils down to:

(1) If your child does something good,

DO tell them that they are showing traits of a person who does good things (praise character).

DON'T let them think that they're merely a person who did a good thing (praise behavior).

(2) If your child does something bad,

DON'T tell them that they are showing traits of a person who does bad things (shame).

DO tell them that they did a bad thing (guilt).

The situation is vaguely reminiscent of that old social psychology favorite, "fundamental attribution error", which is about how when other people do bad things, we blame internal traits, but when we do bad things, we blame external factors.

This is a good breakdown, but to address sharemywin's question:

When you tell your child "don't be a cheater," the focus is on character. You don't want them to do things that a person with bad character does.

When your child cheats, on the other hand, you say, "I'm disappointed, because I know you have a good character, but your action didn't reflect that." So, the focus is on the bad action, rather than the character.

Is some of this mere semantics? Possibly. If a person who does bad things can be a person of good character, and a person who does bad things can be a person of bad character, then how do we tell the difference between a person of good character and a person of bad character except by their actions?

But, if we're merely talking about what strategy is effective, then we can indeed say to focus on character when praising and on the action when admonishing.

Yeah, it's a matter of past-vs-future. Identity is important, but when a child makes a mistake you don't want to "lock it in" by confirming it as an unalterable quality.

This is exactly how my train my dog too.

Am I missing the sarcasm, or how do you express a distinction between actions and character that you think your dog understands?

Thats a bogus distinction. If it matters, animals have shown to have the concept of 'self', its not unique to human beings.

The way I look at it, it's that the admonition, "don't be a cheater," is stated BEFOREHAND, before any cheating has taken place. The child then still has the opportunity to make being a "not-bad" person (i.e., a "good" person) a part of his or her identity.

If, on the other hand, the child had already cheated, you would express disappointment in that the supposedly good child had displayed uncharacteristic behavior.

I think it's large point was that instead of talking about actions as a one time item, it's better to help the child craft an identity of a moral person. IE make about who they are not what they did.

There's a lot of overlap here with what Paul Tough says in his book "How children succeed". Basically he also emphasizes the focus on a child's character, but to an extent that they regularly get graded on their character not just their performance academically.

It's a great read: http://www.amazon.com/How-Children-Succeed-Curiosity-Charact...

    Act according to that maxim whereby you might
    will that it should become universal law.

Active and passive forms are quantifiable, testable under contextual and relational analyses (highly frequent circumstantial virtuous, altruistic behavior versus less frequent) of Self and Other. Kant is providing à la Spinoza a chart for the geometry of ethical behavior, so we can treat ethical behavior in terms of non-locality to specific norms — whereas Spinoza does this in terms of a calculus of the emotions w/r/t Self, or the Ethical Self.

By Bernard Williams's standard, the amoralist cannot even conceivably have an intermittent feeling of sympathy[0]. The person is at minimum embedded within and embodied by sympathetic behavior (to self or to other), but this is not a necessary condition to morality.

At the same time, the kinds of experiments we run, and the types of questions we ask, potentially distill or deauthenticate the model with the widest representation of moral truth — however the narrative of science may belie institutional refactors at meta-ethical descriptions.

–

[0]: http://bobnoxiousthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/08/challenging-b...

Just for the record, J. Philippe Rushton, whom the op-ed draws on as a classic source of this kind of work in psychology, was a white-supremacist race "scientist" who argued, among other things, that black people have narrower hips because they have smaller brains.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a file on him: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/pro...

While that doesn't invalidate all the findings outlined in the op-ed, it's not exactly confidence inspiring either, as this essay persuasively argues: http://africasacountry.com/the-racesciencefiles-the-new-york...

One can start by not associating oneself (and thus one's child) with words such as 'Israeli', 'British', 'Catholic', 'Hindu', 'Communist', etc.

"The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time." -- Jiddu Krishnamurti

[Think on These Things, Chapter 1](http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/think-on-these-things/1...)

[Some info from UNSECO Bureau of Education on Krishnamurti](http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/krishnamu...)

"A couple of weeks later, when faced with more opportunities to give and share, the children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been. Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities. The children learned who they were from observing their own actions: I am a helpful person."

Probably true, but there's an alternate explanation I think. Praising their character invokes a feel-good, I'm a good person, pride response. Praising their action doesn't nearly as much. People like the reward of the 'I'm a great person' feeling and thus are more likely to be nice if this is the result.

What stood out the most to me was the distinction between guilt and shame. When you belittle a child and insult their character, they're less likely to make amends and more likely to withdraw.

I draw parallels to the way we treat criminals in our society. We cast them out and question their character and distance them from ourselves. This dumps a lot of shame on them, and might produce the same results as seen with the children; rather than feel guilt and make amends, they feel shame and withdraw.

I find this article very interesting because it suggests that the effects of moral attribution to the self vs. the event has the opposite results of achievement attributions. There are numerous studies that show when you praise a child for being smart instead of working hard, they become less curious and motivated. Perhaps this dichotomy is because of the commonly-accepted distinction between talent and work ethic, whereas being good and doing good are largely the same.

That made a lot of sense, especially when illustrated with the "that was a bad thing to do" rather than the "you're a bad person for doing that"

Yes, that part seems really important, defining the separation between the things that you do and your sense of self identity sounds like it's a critical part of creating a healthy sense of self esteem.

Looking inward it feels like I still struggle with this pattern of thinking sometimes, as I suspect many people do (the feeling of "that project failed" vs. "I'm a failure, this project is evidence of this fact" is worlds apart).

For anyone who wants to know more about the topic: Adam Grant (the author) has been doing a lot of work around this concept of "givers" as a personal trait and how behaviors around the actions of giving/taking/matching results in various levels of success or early indicators for other things. This article is really a subset of his research applied to just this one case.

I just finished his book Give and Take. It was a great read.

Haven't read the article as it's probably full of psycho-babble. Just live your life with integrity and the kids will follow. And don't force-feed religion on the poor kids, morals are not from fairy-tales; morals are real. My kids see the value of being moral via me and then these morals are confirmed as they wander thru life.

I find this article directly interesting, as a parent, but also sort of "meta" interesting as someone who's always been fascinated by the differences between shame-based societies and guilt-based ones. I'm not discounting the author's insights, but they are very clearly influenced by western thinking.

I grew up and live in New York City - where people are not very caring. But how do we measure that?

  In an Israeli study of nearly 600 families, 
  parents who valued kindness and compassion 
  frequently failed to raise children who shared those   
  values.

How do you quantify kindness and compassion?

Confusing "valuing" and "are". For mere valuing a simple survey should be adequate.

An analogy would be valuing wealth while being poor. Or innumerable examples of reportedly valuing a certain religion's beliefs, yet ridiculously bad, often opposite, implementation of those beliefs.

are they unfriendly or merely conditioned to look away?

There is some irony of an article about generosity coming from a Wharton professor. :-) I do like the outcome though - model the behaviors that you want your kids to follow.

Why limit these concepts to raising children? It seems like they should apply to adult interactions as well.

Has anyone see discussion about the relation of these kind of empirical ideas to virtue ethics?

I would like to raise a moral child, and I aim to do so, but I'm sure they'll be less successful for it.

In today's oligarchy it seems like the great majority of successful people today are either criminals or general pieces of shit.

Now, of course, being a success is not the end all and be all, but seeing your skills greatly outdistance your results can be quite frustrating.

That only makes sense if by "being a success" means having more stuff then the next guy.

I'd prefer to define success differently. If I had all the worlds goods/power and treated others like dirt I'd chalk myself up as a total loss.

Why?

Thanks for pointing out that am doing a lousy job of putting across Dr. Harris's work, :) And I think that is mainly because of the way am putting the thought experiment across without a lot of premise being set, which is clearly set in the talk he gives. Many people misunderstand that non-existence of free will means everything is predetermined, which is not the case we all know. It does not matter if you have a lot of skills, but it matters if you use them. It does not matter if you have not understood some subjects, rather than blaming someone else about it, it matters if you improve on them. And he is not the only one whose work lead to the conclusion of free will being incoherent, there are many other biologists who prove the same. Now what is remarkable about Sam's work is that he also takes care of proving that the illusion of free will is also an illusion. When Harris is saying methods of science being applied to look at morality, he is not the first one to propose so, there have been many prominent schools of thought, to name one Hindu philosophy, which have also spoken the same. The way Harris is speaking about methods of science is that every individual can apply it for themselves and see it for themselves. There need not be any investigating authority other than the privacy of our mind :) I have applied methods of science myself to what Harris is saying and then coming and posting here. Please do not criticize him or his work without even looking at it :) Methods of science mean that results of an experiment being verifiable by all.

IANAP, however, the entire concept of performing 'experiments' on your child is repugnant to me.

Why?

Because a child cannot give consent.

Note that in reality, all parents are experimenting. Nobody _knows_ the right way to raise a child. I'm the father of a 3yr daughter but I dare not claim that my way is the right way...

There's a difference between 'experimenting' and experimenting. The explicit variation is what I'm referring to — and I don't think it's a matter of semantics. It's the intention that I'm taking issue with.

They can't give consent to what they eat, when they go to bed, where they live/vacation, when/whether they see a doctor, whether they are vaccinated, whether their caregiver drives obeying all traffic laws/not drinking, etc, either.

I believe that parents (/guardians) have responsibility for the children and that responsibility logically extends to giving consent for choices like this. My mother performed "experiments" on me in conjunction with her master's degree work in education; I was probably 8-10. It was clearly her call; I couldn't give fully informed consent, but there wasn't any risk of physical harm and vanishingly small risk of any possible harm, so I believe her consent by proxy was appropriate.