[ikanreed]

Children are most hurt by low expectations. Especially young children.

There's subtlety to this, high demands are not high expectations. If there's consequences for not meeting some high standard you set for children, you're going to create a very life-destroying kind of learned helplessness. Kids shouldn't be punished for failure.

And if it's something dangerous to try, then of course it's gotta be something you limit.

But beyond that, just don't assume kids aren't ready for something without evidence. Let them try.

[DiggyJohnson]

Completely agree. In various volunteering capacities (think STEM fairs, youth baseball umpiring, etc) I end up working with 8-12 year olds a lot and I seem to be better at this than a lot of my counterparts. You nailed it.

The secret is to treat the kid like an adult until they demonstrate a reason(s) not to. A GF one time asked me why I talked to her nephew “like that?” and I was so confused. She said “you talk to him the same way you talk to me” (ie. the way I talk to anyone). Nephew and I were shooting free throws in the driveway. We get along great. This was very rambly but I think about it all the time.

I’ve gotten the brattiest kids to calm down and accept the situation in meltdowns in youth baseball with the same approach.

I’m not claiming this always works. Many times the situation or kid themselves demonstrates they must be treated like a kid. That’s fine too.

[tmpz22]

I have very similar lived experiences to yours and would extend the age range well into the teenage years (and even sometimes beyond) due to the fact that many young adults are still very sheltered and suffer from the same environments and mindsets established 8 - 12.

Some warning signs are medical illnesses where a young adult is being sheltered as if they are still in a crisis state of that illness, even though they've grown well beyond it and may benefit from being treating like any normal individual.

[dgfitz]

I have the same knack with kids, I’ve had it forever. “Oh you’re going to be such a good parent” was something I heard constantly.

It’s different when one’s own kids, and it takes extra patience to have the same skill set as you do with “stranger” kids. Without getting into it too much, being in a position of “authority” with a “stranger” kid changes the dynamic as compared to one’s own kids.

I dunno if that makes sense, but I’ve found it to be true for me.

I also seemed to have figured it out with my own kids, it just takes more work and more patience.

[ty6853]

Kids generally are nicer and more well behaved to people other than their parents. It's masking, their parent may feed and love them no matter what but a stranger has little obligation and could do God knows what. It also just takes energy to mask so they may have to take it out of their parents instead later, when they run out of that masking energy.

A normal life preservation strategy is to be more neutral around people you know less, which seems baked into human instinct.

[DiggyJohnson]

That definitely makes sense. Appreciate the point.

[jxjnskkzxxhx]

It makes my blood boil that my kid comes from the nursery saying things like "I did an ouchie". Kids don't naturally speak like this, they are taught like this. He's 3. At home he speaks his parents languages and he sounds like a 5 year old because we don't dumb it down for him. In English he sounds like every other English 3 year old in the nursery.

[dismalaf]

As someone who has a 2.5 year old learning multiple languages, I think a problem with English is that it's very verbose; we use full sentences to express things that can be expressed in other languages with only 1-2 words. And of course shorter sentences are easier for children as there's less grammar to be learned.

And specifically for expressing you hurt yourself, we teach children to express that they're hurt far earlier than they learn actual speech. So from ~1 we teach them to say "Ow" (or some variation), but then the words change from that to "hurt", and into a full sentence "I hurt myself", which is also redundant (myself and I imply the same thing, so why do we use both in that sentence in English?).

Anyhow just a thought as I'm feeding my son breakfast. "Would you like some breakfast" in English turns into 2 words in his second language.

[elgenie]

Your understanding of how formality levels in English function is perhaps not entirely complete: native speakers of English convey usually convey the sentiment with as little as "Breakfast?" or "Hungry?" when talking with family. In the child's second language, would the maitre'd at the restaurant of a fine hotel ask a two word question, or rather bury those in respectful filler?

"Ow" and friends, by the way, are interjections to express sudden pain, functioning analogously to an adult's swearing. They're not full sentences about the pain and its source.

[dismalaf]

> Your understanding of how formality levels in English function is perhaps not entirely complete: native speakers of English convey usually convey

It's kind of hilarious that you assume I'm not a native English speaker because I speak more languages... I'm a native English speaker who just happens to have grown up with 2 other languages and have a wife that speaks 4+ languages. On top of that I've taken a bunch of university level English courses.

Yes, I'm aware that people shorten sentences into statements when speaking to those they're familiar with. I do it as well.

Here's a thought experiment:

- If a toddler speaks in short statements it's "baby talk"

- If an immigrant speaks in short statements it's "broken English"

- If a native speaker speaks in short statements it's vernacular or slang

Or:

- If a toddler makes up words it's "baby talk"

- If an immigrant makes up words they're uneducated

- If a native speaker makes up words it's a dialect

[elgenie]

Most of those incorrectly use the linguistic terminology (in particular, "dialect", "baby talk", "slang") but, yes, congratulations on discovering that context plays a role in communication.

[dismalaf]

Ah so you want to be snarky to try assert intellectual superiority but actually have nothing to say. Gotcha.

[deadbabe]

I don’t get it, you can’t just ask “want breakfast?”

[dismalaf]

You can and you do but it sounds "babyish". That's my point. Whereas in some other languages it's idiomatic.

[dgfitz]

I think you’re overthinking it. I’ve been talking to my kids like they’re just normal people since they were born.

“Oh how old are they, 5? Nope, just turned 3. They speak so well!” shrug

The second language must be biasing you somehow, it’s not hard to talk to your kids.

[dismalaf]

It's not about how I talk to my kid; he's picking up 2 languages just fine (trying a third but I'll admit I'm slacking a little on that one).

It's about the perception of how children speak in English.

[thfuran]

"Would you like some breakfast" isn't quite so overly wordy that I'd say it sounds unnatural, but it absolutely is not the bare minimum for idiomatic English.

"Do you want breakfast?" is perfectly grammatical, and "Want breakfast?" would be a totally normal phrasing, even if some might argue that eliding the subject isn't technically correct.

[Izkata]

There's even the in-between "You want breakfast?" that relies on the tonal shift at the end of the sentence used for questions.

[bongodongobob]

No it doesn't. I don't ask my colleague "Would you care to go to the bar and drink a beer after work?" I say "Grab a beer later?" As does every other normal person I know. "Get lunch?" Etc.

[deadbabe]

Even “Lunch?” is enough with someone you know well.

[ikanreed]

And preschool teachers talk this way because they're desperately afraid of hurting parents' feelings

[andrepd]

I really think baby talk is a phenomenon that pre-dates helicopter parenting

[bombcar]

Baby Todd is a real phenomenon caused by kids not being able to say complex words. You want to say those complex words to them and they will repeat them back and they may make a baby version of it which is fine but it’s good to for you to keep using the complex words and the correct pronunciation so they learn.

Every one of my kids has a name that is hard for a baby to pronounce so they have a baby nickname, but we let them grow out of it.

[phatfish]

I blame Ms Rachel.

[uoaei]

Please don't inflame these otherwise reasonable comment sections with low effort culture war rhetoric.

[DiggyJohnson]

How does this have anything to do with the culture war? This is just a discussion of culture and how its changing unrelated to what you are referring to.

[uoaei]

Do you even understand the argument being made by the person I was replying to?

[bongodongobob]

It's true though. Talk to any teacher or childcare provider.

[uoaei]

I'm not denying the phenomenon exists. But to try to say that adults would be upset if teachers spoke to their children like they weren't developmentally challenged is completely ridiculous.

[watwut]

It is just a different sound for the same thing. There is nothing dumber about "I did an ouchie" then "I got hurt". Ouchie is more infantile, but not stupider.

[sorcerer-mar]

"I did [a noun]" is 'stupider', i.e. not grammatically correct English, i.e. a formulation that people will look down on you for using as you age. Sometimes you have to teach children things they'll eventually have to unlearn, but this is not one of those occasions.

[dragonwriter]

“I did [a noun]” is grammatically correct English object-verb-direct-object sentence structure.

Depending on the noun, it may not the most idiomatic way of expressing the sentiment it intends to communicate, but that is a different issue. (On the other hand, idiom is context dependent, and the objection here seems to be that it is idiomatic in at least one context, but that people prefer that children exclusively learn some other preferred idiom. But if you don't have this diversity, children don't get to learn and practice context switching as early, and that's an important skill, too.)

[sorcerer-mar]

Please provide examples

[losvedir]

Off the top of my head:

* I did a puzzle.

* I did a bad thing.

* I did a backflip.

Or, since this is just normal English, it's exactly the kind of thing that ChatGPT is good at, so here's a dozen more examples if you want: https://chatgpt.com/share/67e6d457-5ff4-8002-a5c7-15040f3d22... .

[carom]

>“I did [a noun]” is grammatically correct English object-verb-direct-object sentence structure.

I'm going to need some examples here because I'm filling in nouns to that structure and it does not sound correct. "I did [a] water." Huh?

[stonemetal12]

"I did a runner" British idiom means I ran away without paying. The only problem with "I did a water" is I don't know what "a water" is without context. If person A said "I did a shot" and person B said "I did a water", it would make perfect sense.

[RandallBrown]

I did a dance.

I did a presentation.

[quesera]

I did art. I did postgrad. I did work(n). I did dishes. I did Paris. I did the walls, but hired someone who did the roof.

Not idiomatic for all nouns, esp those for which there's a more applicable verb.

[thanatropism]

"1;

[zdragnar]

Well, it is grammatically wrong.

[palmotea]

> Children are most hurt by low expectations. Especially young children.

I feel children's programming is reflecting those low expectations.

Daniel Tiger's fine, but an episode tends to be so focused on some narrow little thing. The older Mr. Rogers show it's based on tended to be much more wide-ranging, and often had segments introducing parts of the real adult world to a kid.

And there's stuff like Blippi, where you have a man engaging in extremely literal and unimaginative play, being "educational" by teaching colors over and over.

[ikanreed]

Oh, yeah for sure. Children's television is seems more oriented toward addiction than genuine education more often than I'd like.

[thanatropism]

"Trash Truck" and Pocoyo.

[taeric]

"High demands are not high expectations." Holy crap that is a great phrase!

[worldsayshi]

I think treating partial goals as bonuses is a good thing. Any goal that can be seen as a fun bonus challenge becomes more psychologically rewarding than if it's treated as a requirement?

At least I find that works when motivating myself. I didn't expect that I would finish this big skirace this year. But having it as a bonus goal made it very rewarding when I actually did finish it.

[PartiallyTyped]

I wish we kind of celebrated failures and treated them as learning opportunities.

One of my main complains about my upbringing is that it didn't demand much of us, and it didn't provide opportunities to extend our wings and do and learn about cool stuff, while failures were treated as the end of the world.

[vwcx]

Looking back, what was your parents' relationship to anxiety (especially low-level anxiety)?

I have felt similar to your sentiment as I raise my 2.5 year old, and as I investigate more, true failure was always insulated by my parent's anxiety preventing a true experience of outcomes. "Don't climb on that ledge because it's wet and you could fall" rather than a climb and tumble off a 2 inch curb with likely no consequence. "Don't eat that meat if it's still pink", etc.

[alsetmusic]

I used to think I hated children. No, I hate bad parenting. Friends had kids and talked to them like adults (not when they were toddlers, obviously) and the kids turned out awesome. I think it’s easy to handicap children by limiting your expectations of them.

[zdragnar]

My cousin needed speech therapy because my aunt accidentally formed her own language with him in over-doing the baby talk.

Ironically, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone I've ever met.

[magneticstain]

This is the framework my wife and I use with our boys as well. Let them explore things, use regular words, even if you think they don't understand them (they do).

Like you said, set the bar high, but keep in mind they're still kids and failure should never be punished. We found that doing that for some time results in them setting the bar high for themselves _all on their own now_. Their confidence is beaming, and they're never afraid to try new things, or try again after failing.

[eitally]

The safest and best approach, as far as my limited parenting & school volunteering experience has demonstrated, is to go in with the assumption that the kids are just as smart as you and that they only suffer from lack of life experience.

Yes, the fact base kids have is limited due to limited experience & education, but they are able to learn and reason just as well as adolescents and adults, and should be treated like that. What they need is exposure to reasoning methods, clear explanations of logical fallacies, and necessary background information that will help them both articulate complex thoughts and set context for their reasoning.

I would argue that, in many cases, kids are "smarter" than adults because their lack of experience also correlates to increased creativity. Rather than pattern matching based on experience they'll frequently try out-of-the-box methods to solve problems -- this should never be discouraged.

[tetromino_]

This may be the correct attitude towards school-age kids, but is plainly wrong when dealing with toddlers. For one thing, very young children are usually unable to empathize. So they are unable to understand why it's bad to seize their cousin's toy, they are unable to understand why it's bad to leave a mess for someone else to clean up - they can be taught a set of rules of behavior, but they won't really get the principle underlying those rules until their brain grows more and develops the ability to imagine themselves in other people's shoes.

[tremon]

From around 8 years old (depending on the child), this is probably an accurate assumption. Many children younger than that do not have a fully-developed theory of mind to understand different perspectives on the same issue. This may not matter too much for natural science topics, but it does impact their ability to comprehend social or political issues.

[sebasvisser]

Could you add adults to those shouldn’t be punished for (most) failures?

Let’s be nice to each other and ourselves when try..and learn.

[ikanreed]

Sure, but also as an adult, you're expected to have learned some resilience to failure. You're expected to be able to be able to withstand some criticism and see negativity as a chance to improve.

I know it doesn't always work that way, but a lot of times our failures aren't just "on us", but affect others.

[jajko]

You are being too generous. Talk to most people over 50 (not even dragging current politics into this). Some have (still) some critical thinking, but a lot of them have their opinions set in stone, ego adequately high, and criticism is taken very defensively, you end up in 'other' camp, stonewalled.

It may not be the audience here so much, but average folks out there?

[flir]

Those kids today. Have you tried telling them they're wrong? The idea that you might have actually learned things, rather than spending fifty years staring at a blank wall utterly passes them by. Cancel you as soon as look at you, most of 'em.

[dripton]

I'm amused that the original ageist response ("old people suck") is left alone and the parody of the original ageist response ("young people suck") is downvoted. I would expect a bit better from HN readers, though any community that becomes popular enough devolves to average-at-best.

[flir]

Thanks. I'm torn on a response. On the one hand, HN was always bad at reading between the lines - even quite broad lines. On the other hand, maybe I'm just not as funny as I think I am, and that's what they're downvoting.

[j45]

Agreed - the article about the study gives very basic examples, for example.

Children seem to demonstrate when given support to explore their curiosities as a gateway to learning (Similar to Reggio Emelia approaches).