My most valuable piece of advice for parents is to keep your children informed about your plans for the day, especially things about to happen soon, and bear in mind that kids have their own plans and time schedules (and don't wear watches).

For instance, if you are about to go out, give them fair warning and a few reminders. Especially the all-important: if you need to save your game, you need to do it now.

Similarly, if kids are taking turns with toys, your kid might be patiently waiting their turn. To be suddenly yanked away before their turn will, quite rightly, feel like an injustice. I used to tell them all that if its someone's turn coming up that they should get to have it before we leave. Kids are usually fair in these circumstances.

These simple rules meant my kids never had leaving tantrums, and rarely had tantrums at all.

The problem I have with a lot of parenting advice is it's always written by someone with fewer than 30 kids.

Now I'm not saying you don't have a right to say anything until you have enough kids to fill a bus, far from it.

But the advice you get is always variations of the same. Try to be patient, try to be reasonable. If you need to make threats, have it escalate slowly. Follow through on consequences.

This works for most people, because if you have under 30 kids, you have a good chance of never getting a kid who is on the 1% level of difficulty (Rule of 1/3n).

In fact my first kid was normal in that sense. Ask him to do something, he does it eventually. Not too many issues. Patience and reason prevailed, I didn't even have to make a lot of threats before he just got it. At that point perhaps I should have written a book about parenting, because it was working great.

Second kid, no. It's not that the kid doesn't understand the trade: clean up first, then get read to. It's that the kid objects to the very idea that there's a deal. I'm being unreasonable in presenting this Faustian trade, no kid should be held prisoner until they unwillingly clean up after themselves! Consequences? Sure, try to hold to the things you said. No dinner, take away toys, stern voice, shouting.

Nothing helps. I can't be the only parent who has tried all the variations of "be reasonable". But that's also where the advice ends. I guess in programming we have the same problem: you've seemingly looked everywhere for the error, now you have no ideas left, but the problem is still there.

> Similarly, don't make commitments unnecessarily. Instead of "I'll go downstairs and get your bear" maybe "I'll go downstairs and look for your bear." While with adults we understand that when a person says they'll do something they mean they'll put in a reasonable effort and may fail if the task is surprisingly difficult or if factors outside their control intervene, [...]

I'm not sure adults understand it either. Many times, I've seen managers calling out a team member for not delivering by the time that they told they would. So, I started to add a caveat to almost everything I say about the future: “I plan to [...]”.

I'm always amazed at how much parenting advice comes down to "don't be an asshole to your children"

Like imagine if the article was about being a manager and had advice like: follow through on promises you make to your direct report. Everyone would respond, "no shit". Suddenly when it is about children this is sage advice.

The thing about parenting advice is it’s usually just tailored to whatever worked for some random person’s kids. What if you (as my wife and I have) adopted 4 kids over the course of 8 years, all with FASD who are all insane in different ways? We have had to learn 4 radically different approaches to parenting.

Our key has been understanding the needs (emotional, mental health, etc.) of each child and accommodating those needs. I think this translates to normal parents and their biological children, though maybe the needs aren’t so severe. Some specific ways this has played out for us:

- for our kid who needs to understand “why” she can’t do what she wants or else has a panic attack, we have had to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining our philosophy of parenting. Sometimes this means “opening her eyes” with some information that is probably a bit mature for the typical kid her age, but for her that’s outweighed by understanding our good intentions for her better.

- for the super needy one who stuffs her emotions and ends up having migraines and puking everywhere when she’s not doing well, this meant spending a lot of money on a mental health specialist to figure out her exact needs, experimenting with basically all aspects of her life and tuning things over time. We spend about half an hour with this one every evening just talking about her feelings, making her feel heard and nothing else.

- kid #3 has the most severe case of FASD but is probably the most emotionally healthy of the bunch. For him we just have to accommodate his education and development in a way that keeps him confident and develop some “key words” when we want him to adjust his behavior. E.g. when I need him to stop joking around, which is all the time (haha), I tell him to “lock it up,” and he knows what that means.

- #4 had 4 other homes before coming to us, so he has always had abandonment issues. He doesn’t remember any of it, but it’s part of him. As a result he tends to want to be more self-reliant and he doesn’t deal with big changes very well. When we still needed outside help he would have difficulty anytime we changed nannies. For him this meant we just really needed to reinforce his concept of family, remind him we won’t ever leave, etc. And then also let him do things for himself since that’s where his confidence comes from.

Those are just some examples. And as kids grow their needs change. In my experience parenting is not a set of steps or a magic formula. It is time invested in knowing your children’s needs (whatever those are) and helping them reach their full potential (whatever that is). It’s trial and error. It’s sacrifice.

Can anyone recommend parenting books that are either from other cultures or from a long time ago? When I read articles like this, I nod along and agree that it all seems rational. But then I get a creeping feeling that all this over-optimization is a trait of contemporary Western culture and not necessarily the “best” advice for raising healthy kids, whatever best is supposed to mean. (I’m not sure.)

I think it would be insightful to read parenting advice from different cultures and eras and think about it from first principles.

The three skills presented here are useful and deal strictly with shaping behaviour. I would add some random personal observations: 1) Being more predictable also involves being more available and predictable about trying to understand the seemingly wildly fluctuating emotions to which kids are prone. So I’d argue that predictably “seeking first to understand then be understood” is a way of building empathy and trust. 2) What works at one stage of life doesn’t necessarily work at another. Teens, for example, have much more complex lives and the levers you can pull are different. 3) Where possible predictably offering choice builds a sense of agency and self-efficacy. 4) The author acknowledges that socioeconomic disadvantage can cause this to go off the rails. To that I would just say there are 1001 ways it can fall apart. Child with mental health issues. Parent with health issues. Any life changes. Fortunately, kids are pretty resilient if they have one or more trusted adults in their lives who are empathic , caring and reasonably predictable.

Another thing that's worked well for my children is using positive reinforcement in as many stations as possible. The carrot, not the stick.

If you do X, you'll be rewarded with Y.

vs

If you don't do X, you'll be punished with Z.

Kids, even young ones, are pretty smart. In most situations simply being reasonable, consistent, and explaining your rationale goes a long way.

"You can't watch more TV because doctors have said X hours are the maximum healthy amount."

"If we start another game before cleaning the other one up, the house will be too messy and it's unfair for Mom and Dad to do all the cleaning for messes we didn't make"

Rereading this post 5 years later and with now a third child (2y) it's pretty close to what I would write today.

> mostly just my observations with my own two kids

I appreciate this line. Maybe right, maybe wrong, but I won't take parenting advice from anyone with zero or one children.

Reading the title I clicked this hoping to read an interesting code related blog post... I was disappointed