Yeah, I did say that children were designed to work like that. Your dichotomy is false, though; adults influence each others’ opinions all the time. I’m significantly less bothered “This show is great” (it will have greater influence than on an adult, but that may be a feature) than by “You love this show” (a lie).
telling them what they like/dislike does actually change their liking/disliking
Okay. What measure did you use? (Hmm, I wonder if self-image consistency has a large effect in young children.)
My big problem is that children do work differently from adults, but there doesn’t appear to be a model for treating them like unusual people. It’s like if they were lots of blind people around, and most seeing people treated them like noisy decoration, used their sight to boss them around, refused to talk to them about visual phenomena, told them lies about what they saw to shut them up, treated sightedness as absolute authority, and found laughable the idea they could have valuable opinions, but the only sighted people who didn’t just ignored the blindness instead of occasionally telling them “There’s fresh paint on this bench”.
My big problem is that children do work differently from adults, but there doesn’t appear to be a model for treating them like unusual people.
You might be interested in the Continuum Concept, then. The book describes the childcare practices of the Yequana and other indigenous cultures that treat children as if they’re differently-abled people rather than an underclass.
On first reading the continuum stuff, it’s easy to get caught up in the parts that have to do with physical contact, feeding, etc. of babies, as that’s where a lot of the discussion is. But the actual idea of “continuum” (at least as I see it), is that basically these cultures treated children as if they were “real people” from birth… as if they’re full members of the community, with the same needs for contact, participation, respect, trust, belonging, etc. as full-grown adults—and vice versa. (That is, adults aren’t deprived of play, empathy, touch, etc. either.)
Even as much as Eliezer speaks and writes about the subject, it’s still a bit of culture shock to see how fundamentally wrong our own culture is about the treatment of children, in ways that never occurred to me, even as a child.
For example, the whole permissive vs. strict dichotomy is irrelevant to a continuum culture: both permissiveness and strictness are too child-centric from the continuum viewpoint, because they both operate on an underlying assumption that children have to be treated differently from “normal” people, and that they’ll break or some other bad thing will happen if you don’t do something special to “fix” them (e.g. spoil them, punish them, spend time with them, whatever).
Yeah, I did say that children were designed to work like that. Your dichotomy is false, though; adults influence each others’ opinions all the time. I’m significantly less bothered “This show is great” (it will have greater influence than on an adult, but that may be a feature) than by “You love this show” (a lie).
Okay. What measure did you use? (Hmm, I wonder if self-image consistency has a large effect in young children.)
My big problem is that children do work differently from adults, but there doesn’t appear to be a model for treating them like unusual people. It’s like if they were lots of blind people around, and most seeing people treated them like noisy decoration, used their sight to boss them around, refused to talk to them about visual phenomena, told them lies about what they saw to shut them up, treated sightedness as absolute authority, and found laughable the idea they could have valuable opinions, but the only sighted people who didn’t just ignored the blindness instead of occasionally telling them “There’s fresh paint on this bench”.
You might be interested in the Continuum Concept, then. The book describes the childcare practices of the Yequana and other indigenous cultures that treat children as if they’re differently-abled people rather than an underclass.
On first reading the continuum stuff, it’s easy to get caught up in the parts that have to do with physical contact, feeding, etc. of babies, as that’s where a lot of the discussion is. But the actual idea of “continuum” (at least as I see it), is that basically these cultures treated children as if they were “real people” from birth… as if they’re full members of the community, with the same needs for contact, participation, respect, trust, belonging, etc. as full-grown adults—and vice versa. (That is, adults aren’t deprived of play, empathy, touch, etc. either.)
Even as much as Eliezer speaks and writes about the subject, it’s still a bit of culture shock to see how fundamentally wrong our own culture is about the treatment of children, in ways that never occurred to me, even as a child.
For example, the whole permissive vs. strict dichotomy is irrelevant to a continuum culture: both permissiveness and strictness are too child-centric from the continuum viewpoint, because they both operate on an underlying assumption that children have to be treated differently from “normal” people, and that they’ll break or some other bad thing will happen if you don’t do something special to “fix” them (e.g. spoil them, punish them, spend time with them, whatever).
Increase and decrease of frequency of behavior (i.e. does the child ask for the preferred object more or less often) seems like a plausible candidate.
No. If you have a self-image that says you like cooking you may cook a lot more without enjoying it more.
I thought the question was how to measure the effect of the intervention.