In cases where there is not actually a choice for the child to make, I completely agree that you should not be offering them a choice. That’s why I introduced my example with “If I accidentally offer them a choice when I shouldn’t have...”
I also agree that it is okay to admit you made a mistake, apologize, and say what has to be done instead. I think it is good to have some of this, demonstrating what it looks like.
I strongly disagree, however, that the example I gave involves manipulating children to cover up a mistake, or that it is indirect about what the parent wants. Instead, the parent in the example walks the child through the consequences of the two options, explaining important trade-offs, and ensures that the child does not attempt to take an option that is unavailable (making a mess without cleaning it up). The parent is explicit that they don’t think the messy option is a good choice, but supports the child in making that choice anyway.
Children aren’t adults. They are an ML system in training mode, not runtime
It’s not like children spend their first 18 years in training mode, then go off to college and switch into running mode. Instead, they are continually progressing toward being adults, taking responsibility in more and more areas.
Instead, the parent in the example walks the child through the consequences of the two options, explaining important trade-offs, and ensures that the child does not attempt to take an option that is unavailable (making a mess without cleaning it up).
You did admit you didn’t want to clean it up—eventually. But you also could have just said, “Oh, wait, that’ll get the car messy, never mind. Eat it when we get home.” Thus modeling useful concepts like, “notice when you’ve made a mistake, be clear about what you want, and take decisive action to correct it”. And the entire rest of the conversation would be unnecessary.
What you modeled instead was that the way to get people to do what you want is to go through an elaborate ritual of persuasion to create a social illusion that you’re not exercising power over them—even though you are.
The parent is explicit that they don’t think the messy option is a good choice, but supports the child in making that choice anyway.
Based on the conversation, the child is not at an age where this has any functional effect—they lacked sufficient self-reflective ability to even predict the part where they’re not really going to clean up the mess. (Even with your bounty!)
Basically, you were trying to teach through explicit example a function their hardware isn’t ready to perform yet, and congratulating yourself for being a good teacher while what you actually taught was not anything you said, but the structure of what you did.
That kid can’t yet learn what you were trying to teach, and what you were doing instead was basically torturing them with impossible dilemmas beyond their ability to comprehend. What they could comprehend was, “this person is in power over me and won’t let me do what I want, and on top of that they’re making me jump through hoops that have nothing to do with what I want or think right now”.
It’s not like children spend their first 18 years in training mode
When I say “children” here, I mean pre-adolescents; most of our effective behavior/personality training happens before age 10, let alone 18.
Sufficiently-young children learn implicit context and behavior WAY more easily and efficiently than they learn explicit content; the explicit reasoning part of your scenario was going in one ear and out the other because his conscious mind was focused on guessing the teacher’s password and his unconscious was learning examples of how to exercise authority. Neither of these things really has anything to do with the explicit content you were theoretically teaching.
You should pretty much assume that explicit content goes in one ear and out the other. “What to do when” and “how to feel about it” is what’s actually being taken in, to be used later as the child’s basis for feeling and acting as an adult or adolescent, in relation to others and to themselves. It wasn’t your conscious intention, but AFAICT this dialog basically modeled something like, “when you want somebody to do something, try to convince them it’s all their own ideas and decisions instead of ever being clear about what you want, while feeling good about how compassionate and helpful you’re being, even as you deliberately thwart the other person’s goals”.
If this is the sort of examples this kid grows up with, I would also expect them to spend a lot of time trying to talk themselves into doing things they don’t want to do, trying to persuade themselves it’s a good idea, while only grudgingly going along with it, and not really taking into consideration what they actually want themselves.
You did admit you didn’t want to clean it up—eventually.
The first parent response to the choice is “That’s gonna make a mess everywhere. I don’t think that’s a good idea.” How is that “eventually”?
you also could have just said, “Oh, wait, that’ll get the car messy, never mind. Eat it when we get home.” Thus modeling useful concepts like, “notice when you’ve made a mistake, be clear about what you want, and take decisive action to correct it”
As I wrote above, I agree it’s good to do that sometimes. On the other hand it’s not good at getting me to stop asking non-real questions, so I wouldn’t want to fall back to it always.
What you modeled instead was that the way to get people to do what you want is to go through an elaborate ritual of persuasion to create a social illusion that you’re not exercising power over them—even though you are.
But in the example they’re not doing what the parent wanted them to do. Instead they’re making a different choice, and practicing ensuring that the choice is not unfairly burdening others.
How do you see the child being misled about power here?
Based on the conversation, the child is not at an age where this has any functional effect—they lacked sufficient self-reflective ability to even predict the part where they’re not really going to clean up the mess.
I’m imagining my older two kids (currently 8y and 6y) at about 5y. They totally know that the messy food will leave a mess they won’t want to clean up. So do I. The conversation is about verifying that we are on the same page, and getting them to confirm that the option bundle they are selecting is “eat and clean up” and not “eat and try to wiggle out of cleaning up”.
That kid can’t yet learn what you were trying to teach, and what you were doing instead was basically torturing them with impossible dilemmas beyond their ability to comprehend.
Completely disagree. Kids are smart. After a conversation or few like this, I would expect next time they would open with ”...and I’ll clean up after” and follow through on the cleanup.
“when you want somebody to do something, try to convince them it’s all their own ideas and decisions instead of ever being clear about what you want, while feeling good about how compassionate and helpful you’re being, even as you deliberately thwart the other person’s goals”
They have the goal of eating messy candy now. I have a goal of not having to clean up. Neither of our goals are being thwarted.
The first parent response to the choice is “That’s gonna make a mess everywhere. I don’t think that’s a good idea.” How is that “eventually”?
“I don’t think that’s a good idea” is not communicating anything in particular. It masks your personal preference behind an illusion of objectivity (“good idea”).
In contrast, “it will make a mess and I don’t want to have to clean it up” is clear on the subjectivity involved. It teaches (by example) that it’s okay not to want to do things and that it’s good to plan in advance to keep from needing to.
You eventually admitted to not wanting to clean it up, but waiting that long to say so implies that you’re not supposed to tell people what you want directly, only imply it.
It’s not good at getting me to stop asking non-real questions, so I wouldn’t want to fall back to it always.
If you believe on a feeling level that it’s better to ask your kids than tell them stuff, you’ll probably keep doing the same thing, yeah. If you are aware that doing this kind of “autonomy theatre” is not just not doing any good but actively doing harm to your kids’ models of agency and interpersonal relations, you might stop wanting to ask them questions that aren’t driven by curiosity.
To put it another way: if you’re asking them questions for any other reason than you want to know the answer, it’s probably manipulation. It might be relatively benign manipulation—a lot of adult conversation is, after all. But it may not be.
But in the example they’re not doing what the parent wanted them to do. Instead they’re making a different choice, and practicing ensuring that the choice is not unfairly burdening others.
Are you telling me that you didn’t know exactly how that entire series of events was going to go? That you weren’t steering it to your desired end state? (Specifically, the end state of “the car is clean and the child has outwardly agreed with a course of action leading to that”.)
IOW, you had an outcome from the beginning of not having to clean the car yourself, written on the bottom line of your report, and worked backwards to fill in something that gets that end result. But you didn’t actually say that was what you wanted until well into the interaction. All the stuff before the point where you said you didn’t want to clean it up was pretending to be about objective values or about what the child wanted, rather than being up front about what you wanted.
How do you see the child being misled about power here?
I didn’t say they were being misled, I said, “social illusion”. That is, a ritual of denying public common knowledge of who’s in charge of this entire interaction, despite everybody knowing the score.
They totally know that the messy food will leave a mess they won’t want to clean up. So do I.
Yes? I meant that they lack the reflective ability to process the higher-level concepts you were trying to teach, without treating them as teacher-password-guessing. On the explicit knowledge level, they’ve learned the password for this interaction, but the implicit learning was about how one should treat people (themselves included) when one wants them to do something.
Completely disagree. Kids are smart. After a conversation or few like this, I would expect next time they would open with ”...and I’ll clean up after” and follow through on the cleanup.
Sure, they know the password now. There are tons of ways to treat kids that will produce the results you want in the short run, creating kids who appear to be far more mature on the outside than they actually are on the inside. Society will perhaps even praise you for being a great parent. Then, as grownups, the kids run into problems because they find themselves doing as you did, not doing what you said.
Again, in fairness: I work with a very limited sample of people. I can’t say with confidence that interactions like this will screw over every child. Maybe the people I work with are more sensitive and introspective than most. Maybe there’s some other factor that allows some or even most children to be treated like this and come away with a sense of agency and boundaries intact.
I just know that I spend an awful lot of time helping people undo the effect of interactions like the ones you describe, where basically adults ruin kids’ boundaries by pretending they’re doing things to helpfully teach kids stuff that is actually for the benefit of the parent’s ego and/or convenience, or playing out patterns of concealment and manipulation they learned from their parents.
From my perspective, this is a bit like Temple Grandin’s Animals In Translation, where she talks about all the things where humans think animals are being well cared-for if their surroundings are clean and various other things that are important to people and not animals, while completely missing all the shit that is scaring or stressing the crap out of the animals.
In the same way, parents do lots of things that make them feel like they’re being really good parents even as they stunt their children’s growth as independent individuals and ignore the child’s real needs or wants—which often run paradoxically counter to what a child might say or even believe they want at the time.
What kids most want is for their parents to be in charge and discerning and to then pass their parents’ tests of discernment. So if they think there’s approval to be had, they will happily distort their sense of self to match whatever passwords they can guess you want to hear.
You can’t not test them, but it works better if the tests are simple actions. “Wait to eat” is a test they can win and immediately feel good about, and doesn’t require warping their self-perception. But the test you implicitly gave here is like, “be somebody who can reason about consequences and make binding pre-commitments while looking out for the implicit motives of others with power over you”—which is a lot harder to be sure whether they’ve passed, assuming they can even reverse-engineer the intent of the interaction that specifically and correctly!
And when a kid can’t pass the tests you’re setting, they will distort their sense of self to try to make themselves into someone who can (without even being aware they’re doing it), until their emulation of your apparent desired person is sufficient to pass the tests.
But maturity emulated in software (rather than grown in hardware) is fragile. It’s highly state-dependent, and it’s poorly aligned both internally and externally. It’s good enough to pass your tests (by definition), but when the kid leaves home everything becomes OOD and they don’t know how to act in the real world except by going through the motions of what they were (implicitly) taught.
To me, this is tragic, and not just because it’s a lot of work to fix afterwards.
They have the goal of eating messy candy now. I have a goal of not having to clean up. Neither of our goals are being thwarted.
The child has many implicit goals being thwarted here, including “receive good examples of guidance and leadership so I know what to do and how things work around here”, “make sure I know who’s in charge and what I can and can’t do”, “win my parent’s approval and respect through actions I can control”, “prove I am independent of my parent… up to the point where it’s detrimental to my well-being, at which point they should prove I’m not that independent”.
Most of those goals are much more easily met if you just tell them what to do, or at least what you want, as explicitly and clearly as possible without talking about abstractions like whether something is “a good idea”.
I appreciate what you seem to be animated by but very much disagree that Jeff’s post is an example of it.
I think maybe you’re conflating Jeff not ‘wanting’ to cleanup with someone he won’t ‘reasonably agree to do’.
I really do sympathize – if I didn’t ‘know’ Jeff from having read his posts for a long while now, I think you’d be (more likely) correct about someone sharing the same story.
Another factor that I think you might not be aware of is that the ‘negotiations’ described aren’t remotely the first such that haven taken place. Generally, I think Jeff probably does a great job at not making the mistakes you’re describing.
In cases where there is not actually a choice for the child to make, I completely agree that you should not be offering them a choice. That’s why I introduced my example with “If I accidentally offer them a choice when I shouldn’t have...”
I also agree that it is okay to admit you made a mistake, apologize, and say what has to be done instead. I think it is good to have some of this, demonstrating what it looks like.
I strongly disagree, however, that the example I gave involves manipulating children to cover up a mistake, or that it is indirect about what the parent wants. Instead, the parent in the example walks the child through the consequences of the two options, explaining important trade-offs, and ensures that the child does not attempt to take an option that is unavailable (making a mess without cleaning it up). The parent is explicit that they don’t think the messy option is a good choice, but supports the child in making that choice anyway.
It’s not like children spend their first 18 years in training mode, then go off to college and switch into running mode. Instead, they are continually progressing toward being adults, taking responsibility in more and more areas.
You did admit you didn’t want to clean it up—eventually. But you also could have just said, “Oh, wait, that’ll get the car messy, never mind. Eat it when we get home.” Thus modeling useful concepts like, “notice when you’ve made a mistake, be clear about what you want, and take decisive action to correct it”. And the entire rest of the conversation would be unnecessary.
What you modeled instead was that the way to get people to do what you want is to go through an elaborate ritual of persuasion to create a social illusion that you’re not exercising power over them—even though you are.
Based on the conversation, the child is not at an age where this has any functional effect—they lacked sufficient self-reflective ability to even predict the part where they’re not really going to clean up the mess. (Even with your bounty!)
Basically, you were trying to teach through explicit example a function their hardware isn’t ready to perform yet, and congratulating yourself for being a good teacher while what you actually taught was not anything you said, but the structure of what you did.
That kid can’t yet learn what you were trying to teach, and what you were doing instead was basically torturing them with impossible dilemmas beyond their ability to comprehend. What they could comprehend was, “this person is in power over me and won’t let me do what I want, and on top of that they’re making me jump through hoops that have nothing to do with what I want or think right now”.
When I say “children” here, I mean pre-adolescents; most of our effective behavior/personality training happens before age 10, let alone 18.
Sufficiently-young children learn implicit context and behavior WAY more easily and efficiently than they learn explicit content; the explicit reasoning part of your scenario was going in one ear and out the other because his conscious mind was focused on guessing the teacher’s password and his unconscious was learning examples of how to exercise authority. Neither of these things really has anything to do with the explicit content you were theoretically teaching.
You should pretty much assume that explicit content goes in one ear and out the other. “What to do when” and “how to feel about it” is what’s actually being taken in, to be used later as the child’s basis for feeling and acting as an adult or adolescent, in relation to others and to themselves. It wasn’t your conscious intention, but AFAICT this dialog basically modeled something like, “when you want somebody to do something, try to convince them it’s all their own ideas and decisions instead of ever being clear about what you want, while feeling good about how compassionate and helpful you’re being, even as you deliberately thwart the other person’s goals”.
If this is the sort of examples this kid grows up with, I would also expect them to spend a lot of time trying to talk themselves into doing things they don’t want to do, trying to persuade themselves it’s a good idea, while only grudgingly going along with it, and not really taking into consideration what they actually want themselves.
The first parent response to the choice is “That’s gonna make a mess everywhere. I don’t think that’s a good idea.” How is that “eventually”?
As I wrote above, I agree it’s good to do that sometimes. On the other hand it’s not good at getting me to stop asking non-real questions, so I wouldn’t want to fall back to it always.
But in the example they’re not doing what the parent wanted them to do. Instead they’re making a different choice, and practicing ensuring that the choice is not unfairly burdening others.
How do you see the child being misled about power here?
I’m imagining my older two kids (currently 8y and 6y) at about 5y. They totally know that the messy food will leave a mess they won’t want to clean up. So do I. The conversation is about verifying that we are on the same page, and getting them to confirm that the option bundle they are selecting is “eat and clean up” and not “eat and try to wiggle out of cleaning up”.
Completely disagree. Kids are smart. After a conversation or few like this, I would expect next time they would open with ”...and I’ll clean up after” and follow through on the cleanup.
They have the goal of eating messy candy now. I have a goal of not having to clean up. Neither of our goals are being thwarted.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea” is not communicating anything in particular. It masks your personal preference behind an illusion of objectivity (“good idea”).
In contrast, “it will make a mess and I don’t want to have to clean it up” is clear on the subjectivity involved. It teaches (by example) that it’s okay not to want to do things and that it’s good to plan in advance to keep from needing to.
You eventually admitted to not wanting to clean it up, but waiting that long to say so implies that you’re not supposed to tell people what you want directly, only imply it.
If you believe on a feeling level that it’s better to ask your kids than tell them stuff, you’ll probably keep doing the same thing, yeah. If you are aware that doing this kind of “autonomy theatre” is not just not doing any good but actively doing harm to your kids’ models of agency and interpersonal relations, you might stop wanting to ask them questions that aren’t driven by curiosity.
To put it another way: if you’re asking them questions for any other reason than you want to know the answer, it’s probably manipulation. It might be relatively benign manipulation—a lot of adult conversation is, after all. But it may not be.
Are you telling me that you didn’t know exactly how that entire series of events was going to go? That you weren’t steering it to your desired end state? (Specifically, the end state of “the car is clean and the child has outwardly agreed with a course of action leading to that”.)
IOW, you had an outcome from the beginning of not having to clean the car yourself, written on the bottom line of your report, and worked backwards to fill in something that gets that end result. But you didn’t actually say that was what you wanted until well into the interaction. All the stuff before the point where you said you didn’t want to clean it up was pretending to be about objective values or about what the child wanted, rather than being up front about what you wanted.
I didn’t say they were being misled, I said, “social illusion”. That is, a ritual of denying public common knowledge of who’s in charge of this entire interaction, despite everybody knowing the score.
Yes? I meant that they lack the reflective ability to process the higher-level concepts you were trying to teach, without treating them as teacher-password-guessing. On the explicit knowledge level, they’ve learned the password for this interaction, but the implicit learning was about how one should treat people (themselves included) when one wants them to do something.
Sure, they know the password now. There are tons of ways to treat kids that will produce the results you want in the short run, creating kids who appear to be far more mature on the outside than they actually are on the inside. Society will perhaps even praise you for being a great parent. Then, as grownups, the kids run into problems because they find themselves doing as you did, not doing what you said.
Again, in fairness: I work with a very limited sample of people. I can’t say with confidence that interactions like this will screw over every child. Maybe the people I work with are more sensitive and introspective than most. Maybe there’s some other factor that allows some or even most children to be treated like this and come away with a sense of agency and boundaries intact.
I just know that I spend an awful lot of time helping people undo the effect of interactions like the ones you describe, where basically adults ruin kids’ boundaries by pretending they’re doing things to helpfully teach kids stuff that is actually for the benefit of the parent’s ego and/or convenience, or playing out patterns of concealment and manipulation they learned from their parents.
From my perspective, this is a bit like Temple Grandin’s Animals In Translation, where she talks about all the things where humans think animals are being well cared-for if their surroundings are clean and various other things that are important to people and not animals, while completely missing all the shit that is scaring or stressing the crap out of the animals.
In the same way, parents do lots of things that make them feel like they’re being really good parents even as they stunt their children’s growth as independent individuals and ignore the child’s real needs or wants—which often run paradoxically counter to what a child might say or even believe they want at the time.
What kids most want is for their parents to be in charge and discerning and to then pass their parents’ tests of discernment. So if they think there’s approval to be had, they will happily distort their sense of self to match whatever passwords they can guess you want to hear.
You can’t not test them, but it works better if the tests are simple actions. “Wait to eat” is a test they can win and immediately feel good about, and doesn’t require warping their self-perception. But the test you implicitly gave here is like, “be somebody who can reason about consequences and make binding pre-commitments while looking out for the implicit motives of others with power over you”—which is a lot harder to be sure whether they’ve passed, assuming they can even reverse-engineer the intent of the interaction that specifically and correctly!
And when a kid can’t pass the tests you’re setting, they will distort their sense of self to try to make themselves into someone who can (without even being aware they’re doing it), until their emulation of your apparent desired person is sufficient to pass the tests.
But maturity emulated in software (rather than grown in hardware) is fragile. It’s highly state-dependent, and it’s poorly aligned both internally and externally. It’s good enough to pass your tests (by definition), but when the kid leaves home everything becomes OOD and they don’t know how to act in the real world except by going through the motions of what they were (implicitly) taught.
To me, this is tragic, and not just because it’s a lot of work to fix afterwards.
The child has many implicit goals being thwarted here, including “receive good examples of guidance and leadership so I know what to do and how things work around here”, “make sure I know who’s in charge and what I can and can’t do”, “win my parent’s approval and respect through actions I can control”, “prove I am independent of my parent… up to the point where it’s detrimental to my well-being, at which point they should prove I’m not that independent”.
Most of those goals are much more easily met if you just tell them what to do, or at least what you want, as explicitly and clearly as possible without talking about abstractions like whether something is “a good idea”.
I appreciate what you seem to be animated by but very much disagree that Jeff’s post is an example of it.
I think maybe you’re conflating Jeff not ‘wanting’ to cleanup with someone he won’t ‘reasonably agree to do’.
I really do sympathize – if I didn’t ‘know’ Jeff from having read his posts for a long while now, I think you’d be (more likely) correct about someone sharing the same story.
Another factor that I think you might not be aware of is that the ‘negotiations’ described aren’t remotely the first such that haven taken place. Generally, I think Jeff probably does a great job at not making the mistakes you’re describing.