
Toddlers regulate behavior to avoid making adults angry - amaks
http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/07/toddlers-regulate-behavior-to-avoid-making-adults-angry/
======
judk
Ad is standard, the headline grossly misrepresents the story. What The
research actually observed is that in the presence of an observing
angry/disapproving person, the kids were cowed, hestitant to play. Kids not
stated down by the angry person played more freely. That suggests that kids
are scared of angry people, not that kids tried to avoid making the person
angry. Ad is common for psych studies, they read far too much into one
behavior delta, and don't try multiole configurations to tease apart the many
possible interpretations.

------
ZenoArrow
"“Ultimately, we want kids who are well regulated, who can use multiple cues
from others to help decide what they should and shouldn’t do,” Repacholi
said."

Is that what we really want? Ultimately I´d hope that we raise kids that can
listen to themselves as much as others, so they have some hope of guarding
themselves from whatever neuroses the adults around them have picked up.

~~~
swartkrans
> Ultimately I´d hope that we raise kids that can listen to themselves as much
> as others

This is about toddlers, not angsty youths fighting for independence from
adults. Toddlers are entirely dependent on adults for their survival and
require 24/7 supervision so being capable of listening to adults can be
essential for their health and well being. Like staying away from pets,
dangerous things on the ground and around the house. Most people have few if
any memories of being a toddler. If you think a toddler should listen to
themselves or disregard adults you haven't been around many toddlers. They eat
dirt. They pull cat tails. They hit other kids in the head with toys. They
have to have child locks in cars. They aren't making good decisions yet.

> guarding themselves from whatever neuroses the adults around them have
> picked up.

Yes adults are all horrible and flawed in some way, terrors to children
everywhere. Always ruining their kids' lives. Forget about all those many
years they spend laughing, worrying, working and working to ensure the well
being of their child. All adults do is inflict emotional harm and poison the
child's natural state of innocence, wonder and internal happiness that would
last for eternity if only their parents weren't such terrible people.

~~~
sarkhan
Not every toddler needs 24/7 supervision. At age of 15-18 months they
understand consequences of basic behavior, and once they identify harming
things, they avoid them by themselves. My 2 year child does not touch cup with
hot tea for 6 months now, and warns us that it is hot. She recognizes spicy
and avoids it. And much more similar behavior. I strongly believe that
toddlers need not so much supervision and more free time/will. It will help
them to become more self-sufficient person in future.

Edit: I'm not saying parent should not spend time with toddler teaching
him/her. I'm saying toddler does not need 24/7 supervision. You don't want to
grow a person who can't live without supervision.

~~~
swartkrans
> Not every toddler needs 24/7 supervision

Yes, every toddler needs 24/7 supervision.

> and once they identify harming things

Some of those harming things are really bad, even life threatening.

> I strongly believe that toddlers need not so much supervision and more free
> time/will. It will help them to become more self-sufficient person in
> future.

I doubt any of this is true, and I worry for the safety of your child.

> and more free time/will.

When my daughter was a toddler, she didn't want to be alone, she wanted to be,
and she still always wants to be with someone. I have never heard of a toddler
that wants free time. More like parents want free time and don't get any.
Children at that young age need a lot of attention, caring and love, they
should not be alone, like ever only nowadays many parents are too busy staring
at their phones to notice.

~~~
sarkhan
I wonder what kind of supervision, you, me, my parents, your parents had in
our/their toddler days?

>I doubt any of this is true, and I worry for the safety of your child.

:)

> When my daughter was a toddler, she didn't want to be alone, she wanted to
> be, and she still always wants to be with someone. I have never heard of a
> toddler that wants free time. More like parents want free time and don't get
> any. Children at that young age need a lot of attention, caring and love,
> they should not be alone, like ever.

I have same experience with my older one. That does not make me happy not
because of I need free time. I can sleep less and have free time. It worries
me because of him being afraid of being by himself. BTW, me and my wife did
supervise him 24/7 till 3 years.

All in all, I understand being obsessive with supervision in parenting is
trend these days and anybody with other view will be considered as dangerous
parent. At the end of day, one can create safe environment for kid, hence
won't need to be worried every second. But I guess, this is part of evolution
in parenting and we have to ride it out.

~~~
rumcajz
I've used to play without parent supervision in front of out block of flats
since I was 2 years old. AFAICT it was not unusual back then (Eastern Europe,
cca 1975).

------
jacknews
Really? It seems just the opposite with mine :)

~~~
danieltillett
My own children are a very clever at this. My kids make me angry quite often
(it is so much fun to wind dad up), but they are pretty good at not crossing
the line that will make me totally furious (like poking objects into power
points).

~~~
Terr_
Reminds me of a fictional conversation involving a kid who has locked himself
in a bathroom:

> "Mm, but kids only dare defy those whom they really trust. The fact that I'm
> still mostly a stranger to him gives me an advantage, which I invite you to
> use."

~~~
Steuard
Is that from _Komarr_? (Bujold often has interesting things to say about
parenthood.)

~~~
Terr_
Yeee-ep.

------
afarrell
I'd love to see a study testing the hypothesis that exposure to lots of anger
in early childhood leads a person to poor impulse control or greater
susceptibility to addiction. Im not sure how you actually _would_ test this
hypothesis without actually measuring something else like the correlation with
certain state child welfare laws.

~~~
tedks
You would collect a cross-sample of infants from a wide variety of backgrounds
and arrange for cameras to be put in their homes. This isn't unethical given
certain constraints, and people have agreed to it before. Interactions with
the child in the frame are coded by blinded coders as to whether it's an
"angry" interaction or not. Every two to five years, you check in with the
children and test them on impulse control and addictive behavior. If you have
assloads of funding, follow them until they're 50 or 70 or however old you can
afford.

Of course, nobody has assloads of funding like this, because science has
basically reduced itself to clickbait.

~~~
grayclhn
No, even that wouldn't work. "Angry parenting" is going to be massively
correlated with many other factors that will affect how parents raise children
and with the children's impulse control in general. That's likely to be true
even after trying to get a wide variety of backgrounds, etc.

~~~
tedks
Generally you can control for this statistically; the study yields information
of the sort you need, but you're correct that it's not totally causal.

But there aren't experiments for most things we'd like to know anyway.
Experiments are a nice thing to have, but they're not necessary to gather
information and update your beliefs rationally.

~~~
grayclhn
I would say _sometimes_ you can control for this statistically. When the
selection problem is exactly along the dimension you want to measure, (i.e.,
measure the impulse-control of children of parents with poor impulse-control,
but only the part caused by angry yelling) statistical correction is less
plausible.

------
pmalynin
I find these type of studies so fascinating! By studying infants and toddlers
we can truly get a sense of how truly "social" we are as animals and how we
adapted to that fact by developing these subtle learning mechanism.

~~~
peteretep
I dunno. It's not surprising to me that any form of animal tries to restrict
anger in animals 4 or 5 times larger than it :-P

------
chatwinra
If you look at the study (which is hidden behind a paywall :/) only 150
infants were studied. That's quite a small number to make any definitive
claim, given there are probably hundreds of millions of toddlers on the
planet. The researchers probably mention it in the article, but the press
release doesn't.

~~~
jules
The number of toddlers on the planet is completely irrelevant for whether 150
is a large enough sample size.

~~~
chatwinra
I see where you're coming from, and they distinct, but I would not say
'completely irrelevant'. The number of toddlers on the planet relates to
possible variations (in environment and genetics) and therefore possible
discrepancies to the behaviour studied.

~~~
jules
Yes, what matters is indeed those variations, not the amount of toddlers. If
you randomly removed 99% of the toddler population the variations wouldn't be
significantly reduced. Hence the sample size you'd need in that situation
would still be roughly the same as now. Yes sure, if you removed 99.999999% of
the toddler population it would get so small that you'd have appreciably fewer
variations in the remaining population, so the population size is not
_completely_ irrelevant, but it's still _overwhelmingly_ irrelevant in
practice.

You do need a representative sample obviously, but that's a different issue.

