There is a website that tells children if they are on the ‘naughty or nice’ list that my brother-in-law showed the children over Christmas. Now a couple weeks after Christmas, when all children should be much less concerned about whether they are on the nice list, my six year old comes running in the kitchen demanding that we check her status on the website.
It was pretty clear from her manner that she hopes to systematically test whether different activities are “wrong-wrong” (from the point of view of high-status Santa) or just wrong because we think so. While I admire her desire to use experiments to identify the limits of good behavior, it is of course not a well-defined experiment and I’m not sure how to immediately discourage her...a solution just occurred to me to tell her that the webpage is “not working” after Christmas. (Along the lines of, ‘the best painkiller that I have’.)
If you show them apparently arbitrary short-term responses to specific actions, but a long-run trend that follows their behaviour, then you can explain that it takes a while for their actions to be reflected on Santa’s list; thereby preparing them for a lifetime of dealing with their credit rating.
There is a website that tells children if they are on the ‘naughty or nice’ list that my brother-in-law showed the children over Christmas. Now a couple weeks after Christmas, when all children should be much less concerned about whether they are on the nice list, my six year old comes running in the kitchen demanding that we check her status on the website.
It was pretty clear from her manner that she hopes to systematically test whether different activities are “wrong-wrong” (from the point of view of high-status Santa) or just wrong because we think so. While I admire her desire to use experiments to identify the limits of good behavior, it is of course not a well-defined experiment and I’m not sure how to immediately discourage her...a solution just occurred to me to tell her that the webpage is “not working” after Christmas. (Along the lines of, ‘the best painkiller that I have’.)
If you show them apparently arbitrary short-term responses to specific actions, but a long-run trend that follows their behaviour, then you can explain that it takes a while for their actions to be reflected on Santa’s list; thereby preparing them for a lifetime of dealing with their credit rating.