I often think, and find it amusing, that as adults we think we've grown out of many childish tendencies, but collectively we haven't. Our interactions are just a bit more complex, but fundamentally the same. In this case, it's very obvious: How often do you give your political party the benefit of the doubt, yet anything you hear or see from the one you disagree with, you immediately think of in the worse possible light? Or how often do you see one person at work do one or two stupid things and then ever since you just think they're an idiot and can't provide any value to you? We often decide we don't like some person, and it's very hard to change our views after that.
I think we're childlike in other ways too. There was a documentary I saw once which followed some 6 year olds around a school. They got into exactly the same kind of silly drama us grownups do: love triangles, fights, lying, groupthink, etc. Exactly as grownups do. It was hilarious, frightening and enlightening.
Sometimes we can break out of these immature tendencies of course, but it definitely requires maturity and mental energy, something I don't think anyone is capable of 100% of the time.
This is why the best thing I ever did for my software career was be a stay at home dad for three years. If you can make your gaggle of kids keep making forward motion towards some arbitrary goal, you can do the same with a gaggle of software engineers. Judging what people aren't saying but are feeling; assessing hunger and irritation that rule out rational conversation for the time being; framing things in a way designed to get "yes," etc. etc. The learnings are infinitely useful. Plus of course, even tho my gaggle has grown up to opinionated young adults, we still seem to enjoy a warm and fulfilling connection which I enjoy quite as much as a refactoring that shrinks the code base.
Also you learn the importance of self-mastery, of taking care to keep yourself in your rational side where you can provide the missing pieces, of support, creativity, steadfastness or flexibility, that the group needs for happy outcomes.
I totally relate to this. I didn’t take time off, but I am the stay at home parent/primary care giver. Having children also led me to volunteer teaching ski lessons to 4-5 year olds and occasionally help out in the classroom. The things I’ve learned on how to cajole, incentivize, and motivate my/others children transfers surprisingly well on how to deal with adults. After a brief dip in very early childhood (AKA the sleepless time) it felt like my career took off after children, as I gained a reputation for being a leader people wanted to work with/for. Now correlation is not causation, but I definitely think I gained experiences having and raising kids that made me more capable as a leader.
As another point of anecdata - kids did help when working with direct reports, and, flipping the arrow categorically, there came a time when leading a team helped with my children as young adults.
My mother has an associate degree from a community college in early childhood psychology, and was a kindergarten teacher for a couple decades. Eventually it got physically tiring, so she left to take a grunt-level desk job at our local ISP.
She immediately rocketed up the corporate ladder. Even as a middle-aged woman with zero relevant experience and no bachelor's degree, she was put in charge of ~100 people within a few short years.
She said the same thing as you: many of her learnings about how to manage a classroom of young children also happened to apply to managing a team of full-grown adults. (She was also killer at speaking in front a group because she'd been doing it for decades in the front of a classroom.)
I think the last episode of The Rookie has a scene where a lady is trying to talk to one of the main characters while they're trying to wrangle a daylight drunk individual. The lady intervenes and gets the drunk to sit quietly on the curb.
Then announces, "I teach fourth graders," by way of explaining how that worked.
I would argue the same thing, but rephrased for "our species" as compared to other "social mammals" like cats/dogs/cows/pigs/squirrels/otters/etc. I think people greatly underestimate how much of our brains are still from the millions of years of mammalian evolution prior to tool-use.
I think we all have mainly the same feelings and motivations, although obviously each species, and each line of each species, have varying proportions and defaults. The primary difference, I think, is that we can use complex speech to communicate these feelings, and use complex tools to manifest what we are motivated towards.
I think this book about training dogs has a huge wealth of actionable knowledge needed to interact with humans...because while we do have other additional complexities layered on top of this, we also still have everything in this book. And the base layers (which we share with dogs) are potentially more "powerful" and fundamental to who we are than the final complex (and fragile) layers that we've evolved only very recently.
> "...training dogs has a huge wealth of actionable knowledge needed to interact with humans..."
yah, i couch this as 'dogs are first-order humans', feeling many of the same emotions (joy, pleasure, contentment, anger, fear, hurt, etc.) but more plainly and openly, without language (standing in for our more developed frontal lobes) as an indirection layer.
that (indirectly) leads to the notion that in the best of circumstances, you don't train (or own) a dog, you develop trust (and a relationship) with them, for which they're willing to cede their independence to your judgement, much like humans and leadership. the leader has to prove their worth to the group, not the other way around.
I strongly agree. Reading books about parenting like "The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child: With No Pills, No Therapy, No Contest of Wills" has done wonders for dealing with adults in my personal life and at work.
At least in my social set, "toddlers and adults are about the same - except the adults mostly have filters [between their feelings and their words/actions] and the toddlers mostly don't" seems to be common wisdom.
Not sure why you keep emphasizing the immaturity aspect. If you look at animals they pretty much do all the above too. It's a deep part of who we are and something much more fundamental than simply not being mature enough.
It's like saying humans need water at an early age, but as they grow older they can sometimes resist that temptation. Therefore thirst is a sign of immaturity.
There could be very valid game-theoretical reasons for why we evolved the way we did.
I would argue these tendencies are not all necessarily childish. From the OP the very act of judging someone based on your interaction is akin to the lesson: If someone fucks with you then don't take their shit. Which is good life advice for anyone.
I have kids. Children are pure of emotion. That's not helpful, because they lack nuance. It's also why militaries prefer the youngest they are allowed to recruit. When a young child is angry, they are consumed by it. There is no restraint. When they learn rules, they are binary about them. When they learn to lie, cheat, steal, they go hog wild with it. Yes, your angel will do this, too. This part is hilarious if you're careful to keep it in check.
Military prefer young people, because they are amenable - it is much easier to change their values, habits and opinions. Socializing young people into new military values is easier and quicker then socializing old people who tend to be less flexible.
Physical strength, stamina and agility all also plays huge role.
Military does not want you angry, military wants you to obey and be easy to control. Anger makes people less controllable. They want to you to do what you are told, anger is not important.
The point is the military wants people who are easy to control: people who are controlled by their emotions are easy to be controlled and molded. Being amenable plays into it, but so does having emotions without life experience to judge and harness those emotions
It depends on the military you're talking about. Militias in the Congo? Maybe. Modern militaries? No. They look to break you of your individualism. That little bit of attitude that says, "I matter more than we" is an absolute detriment to small team operations in the military. They spend a significant amount of time, after breaking the individual, teaching recruits collectivism. The military I was in absolutely advocated stoicism and restraint. It's what they call "bearing" and you're continually graded on it. You're also encouraged to read a lot of warrior culture literature that talks about these things in great detail.
Good faith question for you: where did you get the knowledge about the military that you used to make that comment from?
It's also because in an advanced economy, the older folks are busy with production, which funds the war. In less advanced economies, maybe not so much, but those economies also have an earlier transition to general purpose adulthood including employment and parenting.
Also, children are quicker to replace. It takes only 12 years to produce a 12 year old soldier, and war-torn countries tend to have a skewed age distribution.
> It's also why militaries prefer the youngest they are allowed to recruit.
Militaries recruit young adults primarily because they’re at peak physical shape but they haven’t settled into careers yet. It would be hard to build an effective military if we recruited a bunch of middle-aged men out of desk jobs and tried to get them back in young person shape.
> When they learn rules, they are binary about them. When they learn to lie, cheat, steal, they go hog wild with it.
Your post is also quite binary, without nuance. I also have kids and haven’t seen this unilateral sociopathy at a certain age. On the contrary, kids are relatively complex emotionally and are capable of empathy from a young age. That doesn’t mean they never test the limits, but they don’t (generally) turn into lie-cheat-steal machines like you’re suggesting, nor are they completely incapable of controlling their emotional impulses. Give kids a little more credit. You haven’t completely figured them out as an adult (or maybe you forgot how frustrating it was when overconfident adults assumed the worst of you and thought they had it all figured out)
Our (your) military recruits young adults, a term we've decided on, but many poorer militaries recruit as young as 10 years old. Having rules restricting military recruitment is a luxury of our wealth.
As for "lie-cheat-steal machines", I've personally observed it across thousands of children. It mainly happens at 11-13 years of age, middle school in the USA. When I worked for Southland Corporation (7-11), we tried everything to keep a store adjacent to a middle school operating. Finally sold it. Kids go through earlier phases of this when they first discover lying. Each kid differently, of course.
"On the contrary, kids are relatively complex emotionally and are capable of empathy from a young age."
That's not "On the contrary". Kids are, indeed. Emotionally complex and empathetic doesn't preclude naive innocence at all.
That's a biased sample. Children are more likely to lie/cheat/steal when they're from shitty circumstances; if you grow up knowing that adults will not help you when you need help (for instance, asking for food doesn't work, or that telling the truth will result in punishment), then once they're old enough to take care of their own needs/protect themselves, they do. They just have shit judgement because they're kids. Basically, it's what happens if you teach kids that the system/adults/authority only exist to punish and hurt them. (I'd also bet those kids have a decent amount of empathy for EACH OTHER. Just not you.)
Any school is going to have a population of those kids, and those kids are indeed a problem for nearby businesses, but that 10-20% can't be generalized to biological developmental stages.
Any "military" recruiting that young will get chewed up by a serious state. Of course it happens, but in the context of failed states and serious social chaos.
I find it incredibly dubious that you've personally witnessed thousands of children transform into "lie-cheat-steal" machines firsthand. An anecdote with no other context about a 7-11 that had to close because it was next to a middle-school is pretty weak evidence.
That's because it's not offered as evidence. As you said, it's an anecdote. I've observed this pattern so often because schoolkids offer masses of kids. Every store had this same problem. I personally found it fascinating, but then, it wasn't my money.
I observed it from the other end. There was a group of kids who got together and stole from the neighborhood 7-11 and then everyone got punished with regulations like “no more than 2 kids at a time in the store” because the stores just thought in terms of “it’s always the kids stealing” and not “I’m not prepared to handle an influx of customers some of whom suffer bad impulse control”. Such a policy was problematic for us because the 7-11 was a 15-20 minute walk which meant that trip was the bulk of the lunch hour.
> As for "lie-cheat-steal machines", I've personally observed it across thousands of children. It mainly happens at 11-13 years of age, middle school in the USA.
Nonesense. First, you did not personally observed thousands of 11-13 years old.
Second, 11-13 years are pretty empathetic and already have a lot of values in them. They do lie, just like most adults do, but they don't steal and don't cheat all that much. They are already building pretty nuanced value system.
Exactly. There's a big difference between how much sleeping on rocks an 18yo can tolerate before their work performance degrades vs a 26yo who's sleeping on the same rocks.
The other problem with older people is that once you stop spending your workday taking orders from a capricious bureaucracy (school) it's hard to get people to voluntarily go back. Draw whatever trope-ey parallels you want with working for an employer but private industry is very different from school and military in its level of seemingly capricious micromanagement.
A bunch of 20 or 30-somethings who've been exposed to the realities of life and how dirty the world is are probably more likely to be able to deal with the more morally questionable aspects of military service but it's not worth the other tradeoffs of working with those demographics.
> There's a big difference between how much sleeping on rocks an 18yo can tolerate before their work performance degrades vs a 26yo who's sleeping on the same rocks.
Nah, there's a big difference between how much an 18 and a 26 year old will tolerate, not what they can. The reason the military wants 18 year olds is the same as why unhealthy startups want kids fresh out of college. They're too stupid to know when they can get away with asserting themselves.
> A bunch of 20 or 30-somethings who've been exposed to the realities of life and how dirty the world is are probably more likely to be able to deal with the more morally questionable aspects of military service but it's not worth the other tradeoffs of working with those demographics.
To strenuously disagree while agreeing: 20 or 30 year olds are more likely to be able to deal with the morally questionable aspects of military service, and that is an absolutely undesirable characteristic for a military. Militaries want you to deal with morally questionable situations in the way they've told you to deal with morally questionable situations. Using your own moral initiative, even resulting in a good outcome, deserves punishment. If you make a mistake in applying the rules you've been given, even resulting in a horrible outcome, you will get absolutely protected by the military.
That's the contract: try your best to do what you've been told. and we'll move heaven and earth to protect you.
Remember that we stuff toddlers full of stories from books and telly and games where, to simplify, we present antagonists whose sole motivation is that they are 'baddies'. Culturally we push ideas of absolute moral character quite hard, and only add nuance later.
1. This isn't just the adults deciding. Children are attracted to certain types of stories too.
2. It doesn't stop. And it's why CNN and Fox are successful. But it is how we as humans want to see the world. Suprisingly to some, neither democrats or republicans are actually evil, they just have different perspectives on the world, and probably have more in common than in disagreement.
> neither democrats or republicans are actually evil
Surely this claim requires moral relativism, right? If women have a right to an abortion, then attempting to outlaw it outright in virtually every case is surely evil, and thus (most) Republicans are evil. If it's wrong to give people welfare or health care that they can't afford to pay for, then (most) Democrats are evil. If it's wrong to mandate vaccines, then (a handful of) Democrats are evil. If it's wrong to prohibit refugees or economic immigrants from crossing your border in search of a better life, then both Democrats and Republicans are evil to the extent that they do that. Same for drone strikes on purported terrorists.
Moral relativism is not as promising a position as most ordinary (non-religious) people believe. The majority of trained ethicists (in the field of Philosophy) are moral realists: they believe that certain things are actually right and wrong.
"Evil" sometimes connotes a special level of immorality than no one can ever reach - they'd have to be demon possessed, or act against the will of God (provided one exists), etc. But I think ordinary evil is quite banal. It's just a matter of large-scale injustices being perpetrated by ordinary people who think they're in the right, when they are not. I think it's almost certain that quite a few Republicans and Democrats are evil in this sense. I have opinions about which group is more systematically evil, but those aren't relevant to this comment.
> Moral relativism is not as promising a position as most ordinary (non-religious) people believe. The majority of trained ethicists (in the field of Philosophy) are moral realists: they believe that certain things are actually right and wrong.
This is a poor argument because response to it is just that that is selection bias. Those who settle on moral relativism don't become ethicists (since there's nothing much to say on that, they specialize in something else) and those who do become ethicists can't settle on moral relativism (since again, there would be nothing much to say and they'd have no job.) Or take it the other way: in order to be an ethicists, you'd have to be a moral realist. Something along these lines anyway waves hands.
> since there's nothing much to say on that, they specialize in something else
This is not really true. There are plenty of different forms of relativism and plenty of philosophers who have taken a stance in ethics that is consistently anti-realist and published countless papers defending various aspects of that.
It's more or less the same argument as "all climate scientists believe in climate change because they have to or they wouldn't be able to publish anything, therefore we should discount what they say about climate change". Except in this case it's even weaker, because a significant proportion (though a minority) of ethicists take this position.
>Surely this claim requires moral relativism, right?
No, it just requires not calling mistakes evil unless you should have known better. And not every example where you might hurt someone is one where you should have known better.
Mostly agree, though it's probably fairer to say that both republicans and democrats are corrupt, they just get payed by different interest groups. And this mostly applies to the vast majority of political parties in most democracies on Earth, unfortunately.
And it's still fairer to say not that party X and party Y are both corrupt but that both are corruptible. Rather than say everyone is bad, say everyone has the potential to be bad. Then you can react to individual instances of badness and hope to improve things. If you say goodness is impossible you are optimizing for badness.
Maybe for a lot of people the media they consume actually shape their preferences?
But I would steer clear of generalizing, I think a lot of people have a strong preference for stories where the lines between what's moral and not are much more blurry and where you have reversal of preferences for various characters and where the main character is somehow sketchy. I think at the acclaimed Parasite for instance.
It's relatively easy to elicit a strong emotion, but that doesn't make a story, just a news.
Re: 2, I see your point, but I think you've taken just an extreme view as those that would categorise firmly into goodies and baddies. It's still possible to recognise that different people's intentions may be more or less selfish, without either going for "good"/"evil" dichotomy or lumping everything into an "only human" bucket.
Comprehension is different than approbation though. Maybe it becomes too philosophical but for me we can grow to appreciate the different perspective of others, what we have in common as human beings, and not judge them harshly because we are not sure we would do better in their shoes, but still actions can be evil.
I tend to agree, since shotty kids TV/film far outnumber anything decent.
However, it's not all bad. I just watched The Grinch with my three year old. Despite some of the subtle adult oriented jokes aging poorly, the characters are surprisingly nuanced.
Initially my daughter was scared of the Grinch, then she decided he was naughty (like her, she added). Soon she was asking why children were mean to him when he was little etc. There was admittedly a bit of explaining (shaving cuts etc.), but by the end of it she seemed to have a pretty solid grasp that children being mean upset him, and so he did naughty things because he was upset.
Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.
- CS Lewis
This is a reason I love watching Peppa Pig and so do kids. They present characters with obvious flaws, but those characters are not judged for it and also make up for it with good traits. Just like real people.
One of my earliest memories is vehemently accusing my father of stealing because he borrowed the neighbor's ladder without asking. Of course he didn't ask because the neighbor wasn't home and they were good friends. We still laugh about that.
I remember our son when he was about 3 or 4 becoming irate in the baggage area of Geneva airport because some kids were sitting on the stationary luggage conveyor belts even though there were announcements telling you not to do that. He stormed off to protest to a deeply amused airport worker about this terrible situation.
I have a 2.75 yr old daughter. I’m amazed at the mental growth at this age. Anyone have good recommendations for pop science books on toddler psychology? Another post mentioned the author Michel Tomasello.
I’m curious how punishment and corrective behavior is interpreted. Theres a lot of situations I don’t know how to handle. Recently my daughter has been spitting up juice, including on me, because she thinks it’s funny. When something like this happens I give her a light thump on the head with my finger and a stern “no, that’s bad”. But she doesn’t like it and starts crying. She then runs to her mom who then hugs her and says it will be OK. I feel like this is a lose-lose situation. She needs to learn this behavior isn’t acceptable but it makes me the bad guy and mommy the nice one.
Stop the head thumping or any physical punitive action no matter how light. You might have to restrain her at some point but that's different. The only thing you're teaching with those actions is "violence solves problems" and you will see her hit other children and you a lot more as a result. Walk away, put her down, tell her you don't like it when she does that, take the juice away, etc. Don't thump.
I like to think "what would I do in this situation if this were an adult?" and respond accordingly. If you hit someone for spitting in your face you'd end up in jail. Is that the behavior you want to model? I don't understand why we think it's OK to treat kids that way. Violence is violence in my book.
Edit: You MUST learn to set boundaries without violence. A lot of bad parenting stems from our own upbringing where boundaries were set with violence so we don't know how to set them in other ways. Many of us just end up not setting any boundaries at all rather than use violence which can end very very badly with a boundary-pushing child. Learn to say "no" and stick to it at least some of the time (and flex when they negotiate well). I've gotten a ton of mileage out of taking away part of TV time if they act poorly or refuse to contribute to chores.
This book holds a surprising wealth of knowledge in how to encourage replacement behaviors[0]. Can view it in "SumatraPDF" (reads a very wide variety of formats, not just PDF). Even just the first few chapters are amazing. Generally seems to work to:
- accept that their current behavior is probably an effective way to get what they want
- identify what they want
- get them to do something else instead which is either more productive or at least more acceptable to you
- immediately reward them by giving them lots of what they want
Repeat the last two a lot and eventually the new behavior replaces the old one. The trick is that, once learned, the old behavior is never "unlearned"...it just slowly fades away and is used less and less. But even after a very long time if the new behavior stops working, eventually they'll try the old one again. Generally you'll have infinitely more success rewarding FOR behavior, rather than giving feedback AGAINST behavior.
> When something like this happens I give her a light thump on the head with my finger and a stern “no, that’s bad”. But she doesn’t like it and starts crying. She then runs to her mom who then hugs her and says it will be OK.
Growing up there is always the good cop bad cop but there needs to be lines drawn. Talk to your partner about the situation and make sure she knows this needs to be corrected so when she cries to mommy, mommy backs you up and and supports you by telling your daughter "You shouldn't spit juice on daddy. Its not nice to spit juice on people." She can still comfort her, but she has to back you. If not then good luck.
Have you tried just making an distinctive sound (like a buzzer sound with your mouth) and taking away the juice? Nothing said, nobody hurt but a clear indication of a boundary violation with a non-painful consequence?
If you want to continue “thumping” her, it may be something you want to get her consent and make it more of a game. “If you spit up you get thwack from me flicking your forehead and if you swallow I pat your belly”. Kids love games and are insanely easy to trick. Boundaries should be opted into and the rules clear ahead of time. Learning the rules should not be penalized (eg if she spits up you remind her “we agreed I’d flick your forehead if you spit up - gimme your forehead”). Imagine what your reaction would be if someone randomly thumped your forehead for breaking some kind of social norm you didn’t understand.
She thinks she's funny, you don't, she is upset at your disapproval and reprimand. She goes to another adult for comfort and reassurance. The other adult provides it and says "It will be OK"
What will be OK? Spitting juice on people will never be OK. Her anger will subside yes, but I do think She needs a consistent message that doubly reinforces the immorality of her action.
I'd also state, if she goes to daycare, she may be picking up and reinforcing behaviors there, so to some extent home may need a different set of rules, lest she bring back any bad habit she finds and Mom tacitly approves it. Good cop bad cop, eh, I'd say there's no good cop who would approve of juice spitting.
I can’t imagine hitting my child on the head, even lightly. The messaging that sends is so wrong on so many levels. Besides which, they will likely end up hitting someone else on the head when they don’t like what they’re doing.
But, aside from that, if you’re looking for a mental model for teaching children, I think Reinforcement Learning is highly applicable. If you consider their observation space, action space, and reward signals, you start to see that you have quite a lot of levers for helping them learn and grow.
This sounds a lot like my daughter (3yo). She likes to play up, but also craves approval from her parents and stern words can be devastating to her.
The best approach we've found is to progressively and predictably escalate our language and tone. Starting with a friendly "now, now" and ending with time out if she hasn't fixed her behavior. At some point along the way she usually recognizes The Voice and course corrects voluntarily without needing to be reprimanded.
Kids want attention, good or bad. So try walking away and giving her the cold shoulder the next few times she does that and see if it works. Don’t forget to also give her a lot of positive attention when she drinks juice and doesn’t do that to you.
Never use physical force unless the child is in danger. Instead simply take away a favourite toy and tell her she will get it back when her behaviour improves.
I'll agree that thump was a poor choice of words, but child abuse? Seems like a completely unwarranted assessment.
I'm guessing they meant something along the lines of a tap on the head to get the child's attention, not a painful physical punishment.
Agree here. The initial personality and mindset development happens in childhood..
1. How parents treat/behave with kids, among themselves and others are observed and adopted or disliked by kids.
2. Bullying in schools are another one.
3. How elder kids treat the younger one.
4. Beyond that, every kid has his/her own nature and character by birth. All Siblings are different despite having same parents, same upbringing, same environment at home.
All Siblings are different despite having same parents, same upbringing, same environment at home.
But we don't all have the same home environment. There are generally some years between births, and things happen in those years. Good things, bad things, and things. It'll be more pronounced if there is more time between children.
I mean, just myself: I have two siblings. One is 6 years younger, the other 11 years younger. Between me and the older of the two: My dad graduated college and got a decently stable job. My parents moved away from my mom's family, who helped take care of me while my mother worked, and moved to a small town. My mother started staying at home since the finances allowed it.
We moved yet again before my younger sibling was born: My father switched careers and made more money than before (which was rich compared to their finances while I was young and my father was in college).
All this meant that we got attention from different sorts of folks while young. Our parents had different finances: While I had poverty while young, my youngest sibling had nothing of the sort. My parents were more experienced by the time my brother was born, too. We all had different sorts of challenges which definitely affected the ways my parents communicated with us - their continuing maturity did this as well: I was born before either were 25, but my siblings after.
But what OP refers to is that kids are born with their own personality which already emerges from a very young age in the first year.
I've seen it with my kids, and also other young kids in my close environment. For instance, some are just naturally extraverted, or wild, while others are careful by nature. Some of it changes when they get older, but a lot stays the same. So yeah environment matters, but most parents I talk to agree with me kids come with their own character.
Can confirm. My son was definitely born with most of his behavioural patterns already formed. It appears to me that we as parents can only guide what is already there, and not completely reshape our children into whatever suits us.
I expect parents expectations of how much they can shape their children has caused more broken adults than anything else.
This brings up an interesting question, where does innate character come from?
In the case of identical twins, their (biological) nature and nurture (upbringing) are the same or very similar, yet their innate character can be very different.
If you believe in the existence of a non-physical soul/spirit, that could be an explanation.
Surprisingly, how parents treat/behave with their kids has no correlation on personality and mindset development! It's mostly in the peers, so parents affect only indirectly by shaping the culture and environment in which children grow up. (See Harris, 2009: The Nurture Assumption.)
I wonder if that applies to children who are growing up isolated from their peers during toddler years due to the pandemic, whose only social interactions are with their parents.
> All Siblings are different despite having same parents, same upbringing, same environment at home.
I think none of these are the same because "everything flows". With each child the environment changes significantly. The first child doesn't have any siblings to grow around, then it exerts huge influence on the second child, the third child brings in yet another dynamic. Parents also change a lot with each new child. So, except for twins, nothing is really the same.
I don't think the claim relies on siblings' environments being the exact same. The point is just that the degree of intra-family similarity is almost always far greater than the degree of average inter-family similarity. To a reasonable approximation it's fair to call it 'the same' in the context of the comparison with non-siblings.
I don't think that's true - the difference between being an only child and having older siblings is much more than the difference between two only children in relatively similar (from a socio-economic point of view) families, I would say.
The way parents interact with their first child and subsequent children is significantly different, and the added interaction between the children themselves compounds these.
OK, but the claim is that siblings are different, despite growing up in the same environment, because they have their "own nature and character by birth".
I guess what I'm saying is that they might become different due to the environment necessarily changing in pretty significant ways for each of them.
The oldest child definitely gets the most parental attention and investment in most families - this is pretty much a universal finding across cultures as well.
Beyond that, every kid has his/her own nature and character by birth. All Siblings are different despite having same parents, same upbringing, same environment at home.
Ignoring changing circumstances of a family, is the environment the same?
Suppose you like sports, and get your kid a ball, but your kid likes books more, are you going to persist with the ball or get a book to read together?
If your next kid likes the ball are you going to buy more books or try more sports?
Overly simplistic but a kid is probably affecting their environment.
Even days after birth you can see differences. One kid settles really easily, yet their sibling would cry and need much more holding. After a few weeks, you might have a child who smiles at everybody and doesn't mind being held by others, but their sibling at that age might have avoided people they didn't recognise. etc. etc.
While I'm sure plenty does come from nurture, it's actually incredible how different they can be even before books and toys come into the picture.
OP here: Since the #4th point got maximum reaction, let me add more to it from a very different perspective. Far east text has concept of Samskaras (Impressions). These are earned by us as we do karma (work) and react to outcome of it. The impressions are "carried over" to next Birth. This forms the core nature and characteristics of the person. It's a theory to explain how do we have different nature/character. This is concise explanation of it https://www.sivanandaonline.org//?cmd=displaysection§ion... (Grep for "Past Samskaras Constitute Prarabdha" to jump to exact that point)
Oh please. To even compare scientific models with "someones interpretation" neither does justice to the discipline of psychology, nor to your readers here. Its almost insulting. I consider myself very open minded, but don't bring supernatural stuff to a conversation where the participants actually seek to understand. That's just off.
> But there’s a catch — it turns out that seeing an individual mistreating someone else does not always cause children to expect them to behave immorally in the future. The researchers saw this when they repeated their experiment, except this time the toddlers first witnessed a dog puppet mistreating a rabbit (as opposed to a fellow dog) before watching the dog share out a pair of toys.
> In this scenario, toddlers gazed longer when the dog went on to make an unequal sharing decision, suggesting that they still expected the puppet to be fair.
> Only when the researchers ensured that the dog engaged in three sequential acts of bullying towards the rabbit did the children’s gaze patterns suggest that they no longer expected it to act fairly in the next social interaction.
This kind of study can't become very rigorous. Even the acting makes it impossible to be double blind. There's the possibility that the toddlers are staring because they just saw 'violence' - or because it's later in the day and this group is more tired.
That's a happy thought on the eve of Christmas, and IMO another one to include in Rutger Bregman's book De Meeste Mensen Deugen (Humankind: A Hopeful History [1]).
On this topic, definitely check out the fascinating work of Michel Tomasello[1]. He's the foremost developmental and comparative psychologist. As I expected, his work is copiously cited in the papers[2][3] in the article. Tomasello did studies for over 25 years with human children and other primates on understanding what separates humans from the great apes ("joint agency" and "shared intentionality") and many other topics on developmental psychology.
• • •
In his recent book, "Becoming Human"[4], he summarizes his decades of research and proposes:
... a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that starkly differentiate humans from their closest primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities. But then, Tomasello argues, the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities—through the new forms of sociocultural interaction they enable—into uniquely human cognition and sociality.
The first step occurs around nine months, with the emergence of joint intentionality, exercised mostly with caregiving adults. The second step occurs around three years, with the emergence of collective intentionality involving both authoritative adults, who convey cultural knowledge, and coequal peers, who elicit collaboration and communication. Finally, by age six or seven, children become responsible for self-regulating their beliefs and actions so that they comport with cultural norms.
It kind of makes sense from an evolution perspective - as a toddler you're extremely vulnerable and you must avoid and chance of harm. It's better to overreact in the short term but survive in the long term
Also you're much more likely to benefit from someone else sharing than to have something worth sharing with others. Easy to be a Marxist when you're broke!
I would argue that perceptions of fairness and morale is not the same. In fact they can even be the opposite. When we grow up we learn that the world is not fair, and that even tough we where being mistreated we can not mistreat others to make it "fair". Morale is the ability to go against your gut feeling and do what is intellectually right.
Children have a strong perception of fairness. If cookies are being handled out there better be a cookie coming your way too. If you keep this mentality going into adulthood you are most likely a psychopath.
> If you keep this mentality going into adulthood you are most likely a psychopath.
You make it sound like this is selfish. The toddlers aren't expecting a favorable treatment to themselves, they expect others to be fair towards everyone else.
I'd argue the real damage happens once toddlers lose their altruistic mentality and get into the selfish competitive mentality we enforce today. Keep in mind, this only happens as a form of natural selection, as those with these traits have a better chance at survival/success in this environment.
It's fundamental to remember that better fit doesn't mean better overall. As I've read once here on HN (one of those life changing sentences that I happen to read here every once in a while), if you have a stupid environment, you get a stupid fit.
Also, perceived and actual fairness can have quite a gap between them. People often feel like they're being treated unfairly when an outcome is not favorable to them, even when they're being treated by exactly same rules as anyone else.
Well, he certainly doesn't have to. There's no worldly force automatically granting you a bonus as well. But on the other hand there's no worldly force keeping you at your job either.
But if you feel you can demand complete fairness, then everybody else on this planet can too so why don't you give a "bonus" to someone homeless who doesn't have anything – even tough you didn't get one from your boss? That is true morale because it requires strength to exclude yourself from the equation.
> But if you feel you can demand complete fairness,
Never said I did.
All I'm saying is that being pissed off that my boss was unfair doesn't make me a sociopath. Maybe immature, but even then it's, clearly, a natural response. The fact that Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $200B while people are homeless is more of an issue than how much I donate a year and also pisses me off.
Demanding that I don't have an emotional response to unfairness actually seems more sociopathic.
I don't agree with the GP either but your understanding of what it means to be a "psychopath" is even less correct. Psychopaths are highly impulsive and emotionally volatile. They would be far more likely to lash out in situations where they feel slighted than normal people would be.
There's this tendency (both among self-described high-functioning psychopaths and in the media) for people to think that psychopaths are highly rational and less emotional, but it's closer to the opposite - psychopaths are impulsively driven by the present emotions.
The main sense in which they are less emotional is that they react less emotionally than normal people to how other people feel and how they themselves would feel in the future. Because empathy generally acts as a check on your present impulses in most humans, this leads to more emotional, impulsive behavior, not less.
I'm not saying psychopaths have no emotions at all, I'm saying psychopaths in general don't react to this kind of thing, unless it pays to react.
I've worked with sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists in my career; psychopaths very much do not have "emotional, impulsive behaviour". At least, not at the CEO, SVP, Chief of Surgery, etc. levels. The type of behaviour you are talking about I have seen from narcissists (NPD) and sociopaths.
> If cookies are being handled out there better be a cookie coming your way too. If you keep this mentality going into adulthood you are most likely a psychopath.
That's the point, toddlers don't really discriminate in this case. I'm not even sure if they have the same concept of "strangers" that you have. If we could all preserve this mindset, we would all be better of.
Natural and innate != good. Deception and tribalism, for example, are innate. You need to make the case for something on its own merits, otherwise it's just the naturalistic fallacy.
I also take issue with your caricature of 'greed is good'. The non-strawman version just says that people following their own self-interest can often lead to more overall output, because people are more motivated if they're pursuing something in their own interest rather than someone else's. That works amazingly well when the price accounts for all the costs and benefits - you get lots and lots of output of a good thing - and less well when it does not.
> Natural and innate != good. Deception and tribalism, for example, are innate.
We still have deception and tribalism anyway. Wouldn't it be wiser to at least preserve also our better innate traits? Altruism is universally recognized as a positive trait, no matter what economist try to tell you.
> can often lead to more overall output
which translates in institutionalized theft, as we clearly see today when the output is not then fairly distributed but only goes up
> people are more motivated if they're pursuing something in their own interest rather than someone else's
That's your huge assumption. There are plenty of incredibly relevant scientists who never cashed on inventions/discoveries that changed the world. How do they fit in your scheme?
We can also discuss how the USSR turned from a starving rural economy into an industrial world power in decades, based on a completely different incentive system than "my self-interest". Or how most of the poverty in the past century was solved by China and not by "greed first" countries.
> That works amazingly well when the price accounts for all the costs and benefits - you get lots and lots of output of a good thing - and less well when it does not
Another big assumption. I have countless examples of the market not self adjusting for the greater good.
Greed has always existed troughout history. It never changed things for the better. What changed things was the scientific discoveries that led to the industrial revolution and social struggle.
To say greed caused our modern lifestyle is like saying that drinking water causes death, since everyone who dies has drank water at least once.
> Wouldn't it be wiser to at least preserve also our better innate traits?
I agree with this. I just disagree that the innateness of a trait helps to justify it.
> Altruism is good
Yes, I agree with this too. But altruism is distinct from desiring equal distribution of resources.
> There are plenty of incredibly relevant scientists who never cashed on inventions/discoveries that changed the world. How do they fit in your scheme?
There's still extrinsic motivation in the form of prestige in one's field, as measured by citations, impactful papers, awards and tenure. Even people contributing to open source projects know there is social prestige and job prospects that are attached to that activity.
I am not saying that intrinsic motivation doesn't exist. I am only saying that extrinsic motivation also exists. Many people are programmed to seek status, whether that's wealth or fame or social credit or popularity or power (often these are related). This helped their ancestors find a mate, which is why they're programmed this way.
> We can also discuss how the USSR turned from a starving rural economy into an industrial world power in decades, based on a completely different incentive system than "my self-interest". Or how most of the poverty in the past century was solved by China and not by "greed first" countries.
So you're sweeping under the rug the millions that died to famines in multiple communist countries and the role that economic surplus from international trade and the "we need to let some people get rich first" mindset of Xiaoping's market reforms played in lifting China out of poverty. This is an unhinged perspective.
> I have countless examples of the market not self adjusting for the greater good.
I didn't dispute this. I said if the price is fairly accurate, then the enhanced output that comes from leveraging extrinsic motivation is a good thing. My claim is that the price is not fully accurate in almost all cases, but that doesn't mean we're most often pointing orthogonal or opposite to the ideal direction. Sometimes we do point in the opposite direction, and government should step in and address that, but mostly we don't.
I don't know, my experience of toddlers is that while they are good judges of character (as the article says), they are often hypocrites themselves! Lying seems to come pretty naturally, as well as selfishness.
Of course, their judgement of moral character is often distorted if it affects themselves. Deny them anything they want to do (like, no, we can't eat candy for dinner, or no, you can't touch the hot stove), and it can be basically as bad as the end of the world!
I've never heard the phrase a natural walker or natural talker, but I have heard the phrase natural athlete, and for someone to be a natural athlete they have to be sort of good at athletic type things.
having spent time around my own, and having had a mormon step-family I would think I had spent a reasonable amount and should not be required to sacrifice any more of my life in that regard.
I'm not using the word in quite that sense, just that young kids will start to lie pretty quickly after they learn to talk without being taught to.
It's true that they're not very good at it (like, "no, the dog didn't draw on the wall"). Don't get me wrong, I love kids, I'm just pushing back on the idea that they're perfect little angels until we corrupt them by teaching them to lie or anything like that.
Children start lying almost as soon as they are born (they often learn to mimic cries of distress even when they only want attention). Toddlers are even worse, and will often indiscriminately lie to fit their ends. Telling the truth is a value we actually have to very consciously impart to children, especially when it's an unpleasant truth (such as admitting guilt).
Sure, toddler lies are laughably naive, but they learn how to tell more convincing lies all on their own (well, by judging others' reactions, but without explicit "here's how you can lie better" wisdom). And toddlers admitting guilt without prodding and overwhelming evidence is quite rare - rarer than even in adults, I would say.
I think we're childlike in other ways too. There was a documentary I saw once which followed some 6 year olds around a school. They got into exactly the same kind of silly drama us grownups do: love triangles, fights, lying, groupthink, etc. Exactly as grownups do. It was hilarious, frightening and enlightening.
Sometimes we can break out of these immature tendencies of course, but it definitely requires maturity and mental energy, something I don't think anyone is capable of 100% of the time.