I think a lot of parents don't know how to effectively parent and make up for that with enthusiasm. Too much involvement, not enough parenting. I am guilty of this.
I also think it’s a new form of keeping up with the Jones. Which is why it happens in the privileged set. Stay at home parent? Nanny? Housekeeper? Dad present at all activities? Coaching the team? All things are social signals and increased parental activity is how parents compete with each other.
my wife is a stay-at-home mom except for working at a non-profit for 10-15 hours per week. The stay-at-home mom crowd is about the most vicious group i've ever seen when it comes to status and who is viewed as the best parent.
The fun part of social signals is that you can choose your own. You can hire a nanny and sneer at parents who can't hack high-powered careers, or you can be with your kids and sneer at the gunners who can't raise their own children. Or you can work long days and have no nanny and pass your kid from cousin to uncle to latchkey because you are a normal human being with no time to play status games of the privileged.
Ya I agree. I think the lifestyle signals are the new thing since the old signals (homes, cars, material things) could be faked through debt. The car you drive doesn’t send a signal anymore unless it’s a Bentley or lambo etc.
My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. My dad's always saying "There's no book on parenting."
My response if always "Screw you, yes there is. But you went to business school." You can pay someone to fix your injuries, or broken pipes, but you can't pay someone to raise your kids.
When my son was born, I went into it with the knowledge of three highly rated books on Amazon I had picked at random.
My wife went into it with years of experience dealing with difficult kids. She worked at a feeding clinic at a research institute, helping parents figure out how to get their kids to eat their vegetables.
I'm so grateful. My 2 year old helps fold laundry, says please and thank you, and knows to put away his toys before bath time.
I don't know what I'd do if I hadn't married this woman. I don't know where I would have gotten the skills I have now.
> My dad's always saying "There's no book on parenting."
This is both literally factually wrong and basically correct in its underlying message.
There are, of course, very many books on parenting and very many being published every day. What there isn't, though, is something correct, clear, authoritative, comprehensive, accessible, and easily filtered out by the layman from the noise of all the stuff published which meets none of those criteria.
Perhaps more on point, there's no general education on parenting.
It's authoritative though less than comprehensive, and more (though, unless I'm conflating it with something else, not entirely) focussed on physical health.
I think there's more implied in 'raising' children than keeping them alive and transporting them to their scheduled activities, which is what I'd expect from a nanny or au pair.
Quite the contrary, a nanny will not just keep them nourished and on schedule, but also provide emotional comfort and educational activities.
It is less frequent now in the west, but in many countries kids are raised by nannies or relatives. Kids get very attached to their nannies- see Mary Poppins. It is a fictional tale, but it shows you how it was also the case in the West.
If your expectations are limted to keeping the kids alive and transporting them, your are thinking about a butler and a chauffeur. I would strongly recommend complementing them with a nanny. A good butler can help you select a nanny if you are not sure on which qualities you should hire.
>Quite the contrary, a nanny will not just keep them nourished and on schedule, but also provide emotional comfort and educational activities.
When my son was younger, we had a part-time nanny (about 15 hours/week) who was simply wonderful. She was always "present", focused on enrichment, and truly loved our son. Even though she hasn't been our nanny for many years, we still keep in touch and occasionally get together.
I've also seen the other side, where a nanny or au-pair is literally just an adult ensuring the kids are alive at the end of the day. Definitely one case where you'd want a solid reference!
Be born with genes for incredible self discipline and emotional stamina, and your kids are likely to be born with those genes as well. In fact, all the books I read said that you have to apply the techniques with total consistency and regularity, or the method doesn't work. That's something I'm utterly incapable of doing.
> In fact, all the books I read said that you have to apply the techniques with total consistency and regularity, or the method doesn't work.
Note that's long been a line used when people are selling stuff they know doesn't work, because people don't do much of anything with total consistency and regularity, so when the inevitable failures occur, you've pre-biased the buyer of your woo to find an excuse to blame themselves, rather than the snake-oil you sold them.
Even if it's not knowing fraud, any parenting approach that doesn't accommodate and specifically address the reality that parents are fallible isn't going to work with real people very well, even if it might work for the mythical beasts it must be designed for.
I mean it's obvious that the vast majority of people, parents and their children, are spending too much time in front of a computer, TV or phone screen. I'm 20 now, growing up I barely had any contact with my father besides maybe an hour around the dinner table a day. That's when we actually sat around a dinner table. For the vast majority of my early childhood and teens we never did.
You can start by reading "Don't shoot the dog" and "Nonviolent communication"; and then perhaps "Games people play". None of that is specifically about parenting, but each teaches an important skill to a parent.
My preferred argument in favor is that depression can render government form-filled disability bureaucracy into an unnavigable hellscape and since it's one of the most common disabilities, a lot of human misery could be spared by making a living income automatically accessible.
> a lot of human misery could be spared by making a living income automatically accessible
You don't honestly think that those of us who have doubts about UBI are actually cackling and rubbing our hands together gleefully over all the human misery we're causing by denying living income to the miserable, do you? Of course that would be nice - and I do believe that humanity will eventually get to that point, but we're not there yet. We'll have flying, self-driving cars long before we have the level of automation we need to let everybody kick back and pursue whatever intellectual interests they find.
I think you're right. I also know technical people who obscure gaps in their own knowledge with jargon. So clarifying questions that might expose the gap are responded to with increasingly technical rambling. Bad habits all around, feeding off each other.
Increasingly technical rambling is good. What I hate is when techies start to imply that whoever they talk with is an idiot after they reach limit of their knowledge. That tactic is used surprisingly often.
In my experience, kids recognize the brightly-colored sanitized tools as "not real" programming. The moment they hit the overwhelming UI or unfriendly error messages of many environments, they feel under-prepared for "real" programming and take a hit to their confidence.
I tentatively agree with them. If I can take a stab at what "real" programming is, it's when you can't expect everything to just work out of the box. You can screw it up in unexpected ways. Sure, that's demoralizing. But you either win or you learn, and I wonder if winning too much, too early prevents cultivating the mental ruggedness it takes to really program.
I feel like the author doesn't understand the design part of OOD. Yes, you can inherit yourself into rigidity. OOP doesn't prevent you from making design choices that turn out to be bad, or are bad in the first place.
You can't reuse a class without reusing the whole world? That's the purpose of dependency injection and depending on interfaces instead of implementation. Decoupling.
Diamond problem? Okay, granted. But this still solvable in most languages with interfaces.
I'm not really drinking the OO Kool-Aid here. I lean functional when I get the chance, but this article reads like someone who's against rope because they hanged themselves.
If you have to tell too many people that they are "not doing it right", then perhaps its too hard to do it right. If you build a paradigm that only Sheldon Cooper can get right and complain when non-Sheldon's "can't use it right", there is a bigger problem. It was supposed to make software design easier and "more natural". If it takes lots of training to get right, that's not "natural".
In general, I find OOP fairly well suited for building utilitarian API's, but NOT for domain modelling. Domain modelling is where OOP failed bigly. When UI/GUI's got more complex, they outgrew OOP's ability also and became a mess. There seems to be a size/scope limit to OOP of subject matter.
Their job isn't just to be attractive. Their job is to help schmooze people who don't seem to be having fun. There are social skills involved, whether or not you value or believe in them.
Perhaps that's worth doing, no one wants to feel left out at a party. But then why do they need to be models, or focus on talking to the opposite gender?
But you're presupposing a problem. It's possible that women don't enter CS due to personal preference. Not because CS is hostile to women but because the subject matter isn't interesting to them.
I heard somewhere that there are just as many women in undergrad math as men, but the ratio dramatically decreases in graduate math because so many women leave... to teach.
Stanford has done wonders getting is to almost parity between male and female. Now, CS was already oversubscribed, so I’m not sure how much shaping is going on, but many departments don’t have a shortage of female applicants if they are competitive.
I do wish there was more research on how the gender gap arose in the first place, e.g. why that drop occurred in the mid/late 80s.
Yet somehow we don't see the same self-sorting phenomenon in other cultures. Russia, for instance. Maybe the one good thing communism accomplished was to create a culture in which everyone knows women can be technical. (Maybe that was part of the culture before -- I wouldn't know -- but the Soviets certainly encouraged it.)
To be clear, china has the same problem, perhaps even worse despite its reputation of gender diversity. Our big boss when I was working in china made it abundantly clear to us that we had to hire more women, and that there were supply issues from the universities, etc.... Maybe India does better?
Also, I find it weird that while I’ve met many Russian developers, I’ve never met a female Russian developer. That is just anecdata of course, take it with a grain of salt.
I do know two very good female Russian developers. I know a lot more male Russian developers, but few of them are as good as these two. I also know a couple of good female Russian QA engineers.
