Encourage curiosity

In the book Brain Rules John Medina writes:

from dinosaurs to atheism

I remember, when I was 3 years old, obtaining a sudden interest in dinosaurs. I had no idea that my mother had been waiting for it. That very day, the house began its transformation into all things Jurassic. And Triassic. And Cretaceous. Pictures of dinosaurs would go up on the wall. I would begin to find books about dinosaurs strewn on the floor and sofas. Mom would even couch dinner as "dinosaur food," and we would spend hours laughing our heads off trying to make dinosaur sounds. And then, suddenly, I would lose interest in dinosaurs, because some friend at school acquired an interest in spaceships and rockets and galaxies. Extraordinarily, my mother was waiting. Just as quickly as my whim changed, the house would begin its transformation from big dinosaurs to Big Bang. The reptilian posters came down, and in their places, planets would begin to hang from the walls. I would find little pictures of satellites in the bathroom. Mom even got "space coins" from bags of potato chips, and I eventually gathered all of them into a collector's book.

This happened over and over again

As Luke helpfully taught us, negative reinforcement doesn't seem to work as well as positive. Spanking, in particular, is right out.

I've seen this claim all over the comments to Luke's post, and I don't see Luke as asserting it (or being able to). In fact, there are only two things in Luke's post that even slightly resemble this claim:

First is a warning against punishing people in a way such that the punishment could negatively incentivize the effort instead of the failure. This is a good point, but doesn't apply in a lot of cases - for example, punishing a child for hitting a sibling.

Second is the following quote:

When trying to maintain order in a class, ignore unruly behavior and praise good behavior (Madsen et al. 1968; McNamara 1987).

So I looked up McNamara 1987. It's a book chapter that reports a few studies on students getting better when praised, then says they're very weak, no one's been able to replicate them, and then goes into how a better study McNamara clearly finds more credible shows that students do worse with the sort of hokey planned praise used in the previous studies.

Then I looked up Madsen et all 1968. It's a study on three problem children, Cliff, Frank... (read more)

One thing I noticed worked well with my cousin's daughter was teaching her sign language before she could speak. It was really cool that she could communicate what she wanted instead of crying. I'm not sure if there are any long term effects. One minor side effect is that when she started talking, she had to be encouraged to vocalize instead of signing.

Some random thoughts to consider:

1) The hardest part about reinforcement and punishment is determining what stimuli is reinforcing. Sometimes, attention is reinforcing - and that's really hard to keep in mind. I've let my son tantrum in public because I didn't want to reinforce his behavior, and that's very uncomfortable - especially if you haven't decided ahead of time to do that.

2) I personally don't believe in spanking, but you discuss the issue quite flippantly, and many people have strong opinions about the topic and could be offended by your flippancy. In general, you might want to discuss some more about how to decide what boundaries to set, by age. Further, physical discipline is not the only (or even the majority) of punishment of children. I shout at my son (2.25 yrs old) to stop whenever he walks into the road or away from me in a parking lot - that's punishing the behavior.

3) Talk more about children modeling your own behavior. It is a substantial drain on oneself to regulate constantly.

4) Even though negative stimuli (punishment) is sometimes the most appropriate response, negative instruction ("Don't throw your toys") is miles less effective than positive instruction ("We only throw balls.")

5) Consistency between parents - children will arbitrage discrepancies in rules between the parents, so try talk with you partner to minimize differences.

In my experience, when dealing with an average child, most of the day-to-day problems can be prevented or resolved by being proactive. This means modeling your child's thought process and behavior before it happens and addressing issues before they arise. You will still be blindsided on occasion, but much less so than if you simply react. This advice is fully general when dealing with other people "rationally", but it is much easier to follow with your own child, whom you presumably know better than anyone else.

Just one example: you can see unruly and crying children in a supermarket all the time. The child's mother (usually mother, not father), either ignores the cries and pleas for some item or some entertainment, or occasionally yells at (or even spanks) the child, or occasionally entertains for an instant or two, then goes back to the task of shopping. This behavior is quite predictable (at least after the first trip), so it is possible to prevent it from recurring by, say, having the child occupied by some solitary activity, or fed before the trip, or giving him/her the item they want for the duration of the shopping, or bringing another sibling along, or having a spare dummy or a milk bottle or... As long as you get yourself into the child's shoes, think what they think and feel what they feel, and know what they are likely to do, you are in a position to avert a disaster.

Unfortunately, an average parent often reminds me of this strip.

We have a nine y/o boy (an only child, by choice), and the one thing that seems to have made a difference specifically with rationality (for some value of "rationality"; children are not the first examples of the attribute that come to mind) has been constantly trying to phrase things in terms of simple scientific method: what do you think? why do you think that? what evidence do you have for that? how would you test that?

It would seem to me that parenting is one of those fields of knowledge where you don't know what you don't know until you've actually had kids yourself. If you find this hard to believe, then imagine how seriously you'd take your younger self if ey were to talk about how to be in a good relationship, before having had a significant other.

So, while I generally dislike discouraging people who are enthusiastic about getting something done, I would like to suggest that perhaps you are not the right person to write this post (or not yet). This is based on my reading of the rubber-ducking sentence as meaning that you have not yet had kids.

Outside of their siblings, American six-year-olds are socialized almost entirely with other six-year-olds. Historically, it has been possible for six-year-olds to be friends with 15-year olds -- to, I suspect, the benefit of both. The older children provide near(er)-term models for the younger children of their future growth, and the older children are thus encouraged to be role-models.

In some societies, it's not uncommon for older children to bully younger children, and I suspect the present-day US is one of the societies where this would happen a lo... (read more)

Before you criticize helicopter parenting: Remember, there is a strong correlation between parental involvement in a child's life and positive outcomes. Of course, the helicopter parenting and positive outcomes could have a shared cause -- intelligence, higher socioeconomic status, or the like -- and anything can be taken too far, including parental involvement.

But in all, kids of parents like Amy Chua are far more likely to end up successful along most metrics than children of parents who ignore their kids.

If punishment has the problem of punishing being noticed as well as bad behavior, reward also reinforces being noticed rather than good behavior. I don't think this is an airtight argument against either, but you seem asymmetrically down on punishment.

If the singularity is near, doesn't that defeat the purpose of having children somewhat? You do all that work raising them to be adults and then the singularity comes and it's all irrelevant.