The Worst Parenting Advice in the World

The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 94 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

This week, someone linked me to a blog post by the Last Psychiatrist, who you’ll remember as the author of a book called Sadly, Porn that Scott Alexander reviewed last year, which begins with one of my favorite quotes from a book review:

Freshman English class says all books need a conflict. Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self, whatever. The conflict in Sadly, Porn is Author vs. Reader.

The author continues his abuse of the reader on his blog with the following advice:

say you yell every day at an/your eight year old girl for sloppy homework, admittedly a terrible thing to do but not uncommon, and eventually she thinks, "I'm terrible at everything" and gives up, so the standard interpretation of this is that she has lost self-confidence, she's been demoralized, and case by case you may be right, but there's another possibility which you should consider: she chooses to focus on "I'm terrible at everything" so that she can give up.  "If I agree to hate myself I only need a 60?  I'll be done in 10 minutes. "

It is precisely at this instant that a parent fails or succeeds, i.e. fails: do they teach the kid to prefer (find reinforcement in) the drudgery of boring, difficult work with little daily evidence of improvement, or do they teach the kid to prefer (find reinforcement in) about 20 minutes of sobbing hysterically and then off to Facebook and a sandwich?  Each human being is only able to learn to prefer one of those at a time.  Which one does the parent incentivize?

This is the worst parenting advice in the world, not because it acknowledges kids’ behavior is strategic, but because it uses that observation to encourage parents to find new and exciting ways to force their children to do their homework. 

Contra The Last Psychiatrist, you will never teach your kids to prefer boring drudgery. Nobody likes boring drudgery! If your kids view their task as boring drudgery, something has gone horribly wrong. Usually what’s going wrong is that you are asking your kids to work toward a goal they don’t care about. If a kid really wants to accomplish something and believes that hard work will make it happen, they will happily do the work required.

Here’s an example: in the 1990’s, one of the most popular video games series was a role playing game called Final Fantasy. One of the core gameplay mechanisms of the series was called “level grinding.” Level grinding involved walking around in circles for hours and fighting random enemies to gain experience and build levels. Typically you would kill the enemies by choosing the “fight” command three or four times per enemy (and nothing else). There was nothing challenging or engaging about it. It was boring busywork. Modern games have phased it out for that reason. And yet, everyone did it. You know, for fun! We couldn’t wait until school was over so we could run home and start level grinding.

The reason that level grinding was fun is that we were working toward a goal we cared about. We knew that if we ground enough levels, our characters would get stronger and we could easily smash the next boss we had to fight. It was immensely gratifying, not only because it got us further in the game, but because we got a sense of accomplishment out of it. 

So when people act like kids won’t work or do boring tasks to accomplish their goals, I laugh. Of course they will. They just won’t do it to accomplish your goals. If a kid really wants something and can see how their hard work will get it, they’ll do the hard work. And if you’re working hard toward accomplishing a goal you really care about, it doesn’t feel like boring drudgery. It feels good!

The Last Psychiatrist would have you teach your kids to do things they hate, which is a terrible lesson. If you teach your kids to do things they hate, they will end up hating the things they do. That is failing as a parent. If your eight-year-old daughter would rather cry for 20 minutes than do homework, the correct thing to do is throw the homework in the trash and tell the teacher that under no circumstances will your child be completing any assigned homework. Or better yet - send your kid to a Sudbury school where they don’t assign homework to eight-year-olds. Then ask your daughter what her goals are, show her how to accomplish those goals, and let her decide if it’s worth the effort. You’ll be amazed at the amount of effort she puts in if she’s actually working toward what she wants instead of what you want.