
Paul Graham’s thoughts, discoveries, and tricks on parenthood - k0stas
https://www.unclepaul.io/
======
WarOnPrivacy
I have a point to make that I feel intersects the conversations here.

It concerns something I didn't figure out until I was older, that children are
brought into existence w/o their consent.

Now I don't believe this is* (edit: fixed) an evil or unethical act; it's
simply an unavoidable facet of reality. However, it creates a debt to children
so massive, that it can't be fully repaid in a lifetime.

In short, the debt between children & parents only ever runs one way.

Because of this, I have a permanent & total obligation to my kids' well being,
while they in-turn owe me nothing for a lifetime of labor on their belhaf
(which as a single parent - changing diapers & earning income - has been
substantial).

It doesn't mean my grown kids should or shouldn't contribute to my welfare. It
means that my responsibility is to continually tip the scales toward the
outcomes they desire.

In our case we operate as one household & there are different obligations in
play there. But the Original Debt indicates that any shortfalls (in labor,
etc) be filled by me, unless & until more practical solutions are worked out.

My reward is that this really efficient mindset solves lots of problems in
advance.

~~~
hinkley
In my opinion, Sydney Poitier’s rebuke of his father in Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner should be Chapter 1 Verse 1 of any book on parenting.

What your parents sacrificed for you should be repaid in kind to your kids,
not back to your parents. If you don’t have kids, pay it to society.

~~~
brandnewlow
Thank you for this. Powerful stuff:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTgahyvBMk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTgahyvBMk4)

~~~
duk
Thank you for this. I will watch this scene whenever I act as if I "own" my
kids.

------
stripline
I found his essay on kids [0] a lot more insightful than this collection of
short tweets. In particular, he admits that having kids may actually make you
less ambitious _The fact is, once you have kids, you 're probably going to
care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum
game._

I've noticed this in myself. As usual though, he has a hack for this as well:
_I have some hacks for sailing close to this wind. For example, when I write
essays, I think about what I 'd want my kids to know. That drives me to get
things right. And when I was writing Bel, I told my kids that once I finished
it I'd take them to Africa. When you say that sort of thing to a little kid,
they treat it as a promise. Which meant I had to finish or I'd be taking away
their trip to Africa. Maybe if I'm really lucky such tricks could put me net
ahead. But the wind is there, no question._

[0] [http://paulgraham.com/kids.html](http://paulgraham.com/kids.html)

~~~
georgewsinger
I was impressed when PG admitted this. Empirically, people with kids almost
never achieve outlier levels of success (since attention is a zero sum game,
and kids force your risk appetite to be lower [1]). But this is an extremely
politically incorrect thing to admit, and people seem to be in denial about
it.

For the record I plan to have kids (because kids are awesome), but want to
push it off as far as humanly possible. It's basically a sign that you've
retired/don't have anything that important left to contribute other than
steady-state levels of productivity.

[1] I think having Fuck You Money is the best way to prevent kids from
lowering your risk appetite. But attention is still a zero sum game (even with
nannies helping to offload some of the work), so money won't save you
entirely.

~~~
icelancer
I have two kids and I've achieved a lot since having them, but Paul's root
argument is absolutely correct. I've staved off a lot of the deterioration by
investing tons of money into systems that make family life easier, rather than
fight things like house cleaning services and such from a point of
"efficiency."

I have far fewer material things, a very basic house, and not very nice cars,
but an equally important shift is your financial mindset on helping your
family's stability today as well as into the future.

Re-reading this, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Wish I could reword it, but
it's how I feel, I guess. Maybe it'll help someone out there. Having kids is
tough!

~~~
bitcoinmoney
Can you talk about all of the systems you employ to make your efficiency
higher?

~~~
icelancer
I am by no means rich by Hacker News standards, and I live a very modest life
in a modest home. The money I do have, I use on a personal assistant,
housecleaning services, a nanny, and other things that allow me to be as
productive as possible at work so when I'm at home, I can maximize family time
with the kids and my partner.

I very much believe in the ego depletion theory (though I know, it's not been
reproduced) - the more choices I have to make in a sub-arena, the more
fatigued I get, and the lower self-control I have. I've just admitted to
myself that I am poor at time management, so I've outsourced a lot of things
to my personal assistant (whom I would never hire in the past given my income
bracket). We have a housecleaner service despite the fact that I'm perfectly
capable of cleaning the house, but in doing so I just pile up more tasks that
I really don't want to do.

I've had these discussions with other people in my income bracket who say they
can't afford to get help around the house, but they drive Teslas, have super
nice clothes, buy expensive TVs / electronics, eat out a lot, go on posh
vacations... it's about what you prioritize your money towards. I spend a huge
amount of my money on my family and their needs, and I want for very little in
my personal life.

I see it this way: I'm an entrepreneur, getting to do my thing. That's enough
for me. I don't need nice stuff or to go to foreign lands; all the clothes I
wear are free from vendors or cheaply purchased at Old Navy / Goodwill / etc.
My family emotionally supports my self-employment, which is more than anyone
can ask for in this life. They deserve everything else.

------
brudgers
_Parenting trick: invent a gesture that means "I love you." 2 yos like it as a
game. 8 yos like it because they can use it in public._

I learned to say "I love you." It still gets an "I love you, too" nearly
twenty years later by default. If I don't fuck up, I expect it will work on my
deathbed. It probably helped that I often add "and am very very proud of you"
when I've thought it's a good thing to say. Most recently by text across two
thousand miles in the midst of a pandemic. Because I was. YMMV.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That's something to strive for - that those around me will want to say that on
my deathbed. I mean, there's not much else that is going to matter to me then.

------
amha
I've really, really enjoyed pg's tweets on parenting and his kids. It's
obvious he loves his kids and he loves being a dad.

Given how much of parenting advice/writing is written by and for moms (rather
than dads), and given how much of it is (separately) written by and for people
who are both extremely anxious and not very analytical, reading pg's
thoughtful and joyous takes on being a parent makes me want to be a parent,
too.

~~~
kqr
As a new father, it is crazy how little us fathers write for each other.
Almost everything I read on parenting is directed at mothers, and in some
ways, it is infuriating.

Either way, seeing someone write about parenting and reference fatherhood is
always a fresh breath of air.

(In a way, I guess I have tasted what it can be like as a woman in
engineering, with everything written for "him".)

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
I was a stay-at-home parent with a Y chromosome.

It was a deep and profound eye opener for me to (1) notice how most of the
writing about the stuff I did all day was written specifically for people
without Y chromosomes

 _but more importantly_

(2) it made it much more clear to me what it must be like to be a woman who
wants to be or is a part of a male-dominated field. Even though I was already
aware of the concept of gendered literature as it pertains to a field of
endeavor, wow, was it a totally different experience to have it apply directly
to me and to my feelings. I used to be a bit cavalier about this -
acknowledging that it was a real thing, but downplaying its significance.

No more. The kid is now 25, and we talk gender politics every other week :)

~~~
watwut
Out od curiosity what we're biggest things that you noticed or annoyed you? (I
am woman programmer who was stay-at-home few years and I am curious.)

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
It's been a while now :)

Almost any book on raising young children (say birth to 5) would be written
with the assumption that diapers, feeding, play arrangements, and what we
might call "very early childhood education" were the responsibility of a
mother. Many early children's books would feature mothers as the ones taking
care of young children too, and that grated on me a bit.

To be fair, there's a flip side to this which is almost as bad. By the time my
child ended up at a (co-op) nursery school, I of course got huge karma from
all the other stay-at-home mothers there for doing precisely what they did.
That wasn't comfortable either, but at least it was an ego massage.

A couple of decades later ... it all seems like water under the bridge now
compared to the deeper gender politics that we still face, and I am only glad
that it made me pay attention to what I had previously assumed was a trivial
thing.

------
distalx
programming for kids

#### kodable [https://www.kodable.com/](https://www.kodable.com/)

#### scratch [https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)

#### tynker [https://www.tynker.com/](https://www.tynker.com/)

#### blackly
[https://developers.google.com/blockly/](https://developers.google.com/blockly/)

####star logo [http://education.mit.edu/starlogo-
tng/](http://education.mit.edu/starlogo-tng/)

#### alice [http://www.alice.org/index.php](http://www.alice.org/index.php)

#### kodu form microsofts [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
gb/download/confirmation.aspx?i...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
gb/download/confirmation.aspx?id=10056)

#### android app inventor
[http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/](http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/)

#### kids ruby [http://kidsruby.com/](http://kidsruby.com/)

#### Lua programming language [https://www.lua.org/](https://www.lua.org/)

~~~
DanBC
Is KidsRuby still active? The downloads page isn't working (leads to an access
denied page) and the twitter account hasn't posted anything for 5 years.

Hardware programming for kids

Crumble
[https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/](https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/)

BBC Micro:Bit [https://microbit.org/](https://microbit.org/)

CodeBug [http://www.codebug.org.uk/](http://www.codebug.org.uk/)

~~~
fillskills
Hardware making for kids (using 3D printing/Laser engraving/mills/soldering):
[https://beamakerclub.com/](https://beamakerclub.com/)

I am an advisor

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> Writing Basic programs (I'm teaching my son Basic) reminds me that there was
> once a time when I used to be impressed when my programs were long. Look at
> all the work I've done, I used to think.

I am glad I am not alone I thinking that BASIC is still a great language to
teach young kids to program. I love how there is not a lot of boilerplate (for
example the parenthesis for the print call in python and indentation).

~~~
DanBC
It's possible to use BASIC on the ESP8266 / NodeMCU boards:
[http://www.esp8266basic.com/#](http://www.esp8266basic.com/#)

At the moment primary school age (5 to 10) children in the UK seem to learn
some flavour of Scratch. And then (in the UK) they also tinker with boards
like Crumble or CodeBug or BBC Micro:Bit (which use blockly or MS MakeCode or
something a bit like Scratch).

I don't know what the next step in progression is. I'm curious about what HN
readers would think good stepping stones would be? Direct to Python, or
something else then to python?

BBC Micro:Bit [https://microbit.org/](https://microbit.org/)

Crumble
[https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/](https://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/)

Codebug [http://www.codebug.org.uk/](http://www.codebug.org.uk/)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Python seems to be what's chosen next; couple of years ago I did the
UMich/Coursera course "Python for Everybody" as prep for parenting a high-
schooler as I'd never done any Python, good level for that.

I think if they're looking at the js behind the blocks in blockly that python
isn't a very big step.

------
kriro
Being an uncle of 10 month now I have made a list of the things to keep in
mind when I decide to have my own children. It's pretty short:

\- Spend as much time with your child as possible and let them roam free. Just
have a loose eye out and don't overprotect everything, children are really not
that fragile. This includes letting them eat dirt and play with pets without
worrying too much

\- Children observe/copy/improve (and wil let you know when they are not
interested in stuff). It's really fascinating to watch. Keep that in mind when
you want them to learn something

\- Let them play with other children without worrying that it'll be bad for
them. Also don't be scared to hand your toddler over to some other family
member to hold etc...noone will drop them. Humans intuitively understand how
to care for babies/children

\- Do research and base stuff on that (name bias and praising effort vs.
ability are the only two that seem interesting on a quick glance)

That's all I got so far. And there's a certain set of values I want to teach
but I believe the best way of doing that is by living it (be decent to people,
be critical of yourself/don't take yourself too seriously, always stay curious
about life, value freedom highly).

------
Linkd
I love to highlight text on my browser as I read. The fact that it auto-clicks
into the tweets as I'm highlight is infuriating.

~~~
micael_dias
I do too! I can't use Medium, it gets so annoying.

------
sytelus
Does anyone else feel this is extreme amount of pushing/hand-holding to kids
to have them learn programming?

My own experience is this: (1) kids meticulously observe what their parents do
in their "natural" state and get interested in that, however, (2) kids develop
sort of "not for me" or even outright repulsion for things parents what them
to excel at.

So the best way for kids to get interested in X is just to do that yourself
all the time and let them approach you with questions while never let them
feel that you are way too good at that. One technique is to do Conway style
"blunders" while teaching something to kids. This apparently makes them feel
that there is room for them to come in, contribute and think independently.

~~~
kkwteh
Could you explain what these Conway style "blunders" are? I hadn't heard of
them, and a web search didn't turn up anything.

~~~
robotresearcher
John Conway had a teaching technique where he would appear to make an error in
a talk, act slightly confused, then restart the problem now that a faulty
assumption (for example) was made explicit. Second time around greater insight
would be reached.

You have to be very good to pull off that kind of move.

------
aidenn0
I got down to the one where he says adults lecture kids on morality, but not
other adults.

Does he really not get regularly lectured on morality by other adults? I
certainly do, and I get a tiny fraction of such lectures compared to my
wife...

~~~
bcrosby95
I don't know about morality. But I have noticed that many adults tend to
expect kids to behave better than other adults.

The behavior of many adults isn't that far removed from the behavior of your
average toddler. As a society we seem to have come to accept this as fairly
normal though.

~~~
aidenn0
True. Expectations of sharing personal items is one of the biggest.

------
mabracadabra
It's not cool when someone gets preached like a prophet. VC stuff, OK, but
kids? Come on.

~~~
nogabebop23
This is pretty stupid. The cross-over between VC and parenting is ... non-
existent. Maybe PG is a great person and parent, but I don't know him.

VC playbook: build a portfolio of rapid growth companies, spread a bunch of
cash around; expect most to fail but one or a few are huge successes in a
short time frame; repeat.

Parent playbook: no real repeatable systems, slow organic growth, everyone
succeeds, likely no unicorns, one-and-done.

You cannot engineer and scale parenting.

~~~
kick
pg was famous for his essays before he was famous for being a venture
capitalist. I disagree with many of his late-stage essays, but his reflections
on parenting aren't the worst.

------
kleiba
Some of them are quite nice but being a parent myself I don't subscribe to all
of them. Which is expected, of course.

And then there are some tweets which are very situation/environment specific,
like for instance the one about walking to school alone:

 _10 yo asked when I 'd let him and his 7 yo brother walk to school by
themselves. I told him the task was not to get himself to school safely, but
to get his brother to school safely. I could practically hear his brain
struggle to assimilate this paradigm shift._

All of my class mates and I walked to school alone from first class on (6 yrs
of age) simply because we used to live in a smaller town where that was no
problem. I'd even think that a parent driving their elementary school kids to
school would have been looked at funny by the other parents.

Or this one:

 _Explained to nervous 7 yo that me being on the floor above is the same as me
being in the next room, just rotated 90 degrees. After trying various
objections, he had to agree._

While it might be true topologically, of course there are just practical
every-day considerations why the are not exactly the same.

So, yeah, I find a lot of the tweets entertaining, but not as deeply
insightful than some other commenters here.

~~~
mtreis86
Yeah, to someone who is wheelchair bound, that the room above them which is
only accessible by stairs, is not even close to the same as the room next
door.

~~~
LargeWu
While that's definitely true, I don' think that's the point here. The 7 yo had
anxiety about proximity, which is very common in children that age. They just
want to know that the adult is nearby and has not abandoned them.

------
latte
This has been discussed in the responses to the tweets, but still couldn't
find a definitive answer - why Basic?

I started with Basic too when I was a kid, but if I were to teach my child
programming now in 2020, I would choose Python as a first language. It has
many graphic tools, and it looks even more beginner-friendly than Basic.

~~~
sideshowb
Especially the python turtle module, imo the best of all beginner teaching
options I looked at

~~~
elric
Logo on the C64 was one of the foundational tools in my programming journey.
It was part of a computing class in primary school, I think when we were 9
years old. For many in the class, this was a first opportunity to mess around
with a computer (almost no one had any kind of computer at home back then).

Getting that little triangular turtle to draw the shape of my house, simply by
telling it how far to move and which way to turn, ended up being a life
altering moment.

I don't know if it's possible to enthrall children with it these days. The
graphics must seem absolutely bland and boring compared to many things
children these days get to tinker with.

~~~
ido
We got started with logo (on DOS PCs) at the same age in my school. It took me
a long time to even realize it had anything to do with programming, just
seemed like a wierd and cumbersome drawing program (compared to PC Paintbrush
for example).

A couple years later I started messing around with QBasic & that really pulled
me in even tho it took me a long while to learn even the basics.

Computer classes in school (until high school at least) seemed to have been
generally be taught by teachers slightly less computer-literate than more
advanced pupils in their class.

~~~
jecel
When I was testing a Logo implementation that had been released, I called my
much younger cousin to look at it since he had been so good at Logo back in
school that they had made him the "class monitor" the following year.

I quickly typed in code to draw a recursive tree and ran it. His reaction was
"What?!?! You mean Logo is a programming language like the Pascal I learned at
the university?"

Very sad.

~~~
ido
Honestly what can be expected when the teachers aren't programmers and learned
it just before the pupils themselves? Which I guess may be sorta forgivable in
the early 90s when there were few programmers (especially in the global
periphery) and even fewer that were both programmers & teachers.

------
TheGrassyKnoll

      https://parenting.stackexchange.com/

~~~
fapjacks
This, the Academia SE, and the Workplace SE are wonderful repositories full of
shining examples of how many pedantic, bureaucratic sociopaths walk among us.

------
dusted
Ahh, web 3.0 An empty screen except a green box with the text "LOAD MORE",
assuming the box might be a button, I press it. It elegantly turns into a
small green square, and then disappear completely, leaving me with a white
rectangle on top of a grey background.

------
tlb
As an early skeptic of Twitter as a medium of non-frivolous discourse, I
frequently cited Chesterfield's Letters to his Son as a thing that could never
be done with tweets instead of letters. Perhaps I was wrong.

~~~
kick
To be fair, tweets are twice as long as they used to be.

------
someperson
These are really great insights, thanks for taking the time to put this
together.

Which tool do Hacker News users recommend for reading everything ever written
by a Twitter user in _chronological order_?

~~~
lazydon
Reading everything from an account will usually give you quite low signal to
noise ratio. Even for someone like pg's timeline. I usually use min_retweets
and min_faves filter of Twitter advanced search to get to the best (crowd-
sourced) tweets by someone. For example -

[https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20min_faves%3A200&...](https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20min_faves%3A200&src=typed_query&f=live)

~~~
soonix
I _think_ GP asked more about _ascending_ chronological order (i.e. "oldest
first"). Of course, that's only conjecture, based on what _I_ thought when
reading the question.

OTOH, your info about "best" vs. "everything" is of interest, too.

------
hellofunk
> The biggest division in work may be between jobs that involve making new
> stuff (science, engineering) and those that don't (administration, sales),
> and you'll be a lot happier if you end up on the side you're suited for.

This is rather binary (and naive) distinction. There is a lot of room for
creative work in any field.

~~~
anonytrary
Furthermore, there is also a lot of non-creative work in science and
engineering. Ask any grad student or entry/mid level engineer.

~~~
hellofunk
Exactly. I find so many of PG's musings to be pretentious in their short
sightedness. As if these are great revelations that underscore a deep
observation, when in reality they are often shallow or contrived points.

~~~
anonytrary
I like most of PG's musings, but I agree that they often pertain to a very
thin slice of reality. If we conducted a taste test comparing randomly
selected ideas/excerpts from PG and senior engineers who comment on HN, I
doubt most people would be able to tell the difference.

Most people in science and engineering can think of equally (if not more)
clever and thought-provoking sentences, but PG's carry more weight because of
who he is. We still live in a world where thought-leading is dominated by who
has the most attention.

------
nojvek
Anyone have tips on how to make kids eat by themselves or generate hunger? My
2 year seems like she hates eating. Feeding her is a painful endeavor
everyday.

Watching cocomelon videos helps but this behavior makes me really wonder how
people have 2+ kids. Even one kid is a handful for us.

~~~
feydaykyn
First breath and regain some calm! As a parent we feel issues with sleeping,
eating, behavior, etc will always last, but in reality most won't last. You're
doing a permanent experiment on what's working and what's isn't, while the
subject constantly change: it's really hard!

Eating in front of TV is bad for nutrition in general and especially bad for
the kids, as multiple studies prove: almost no TV before 6 is a good rule of
thumb.

As others comments are hinting, kids know how to regulate themselves regarding
food intake, and no kid will let themselves starve, so you can offer a plate
with the main course and a _small_ dessert, your kid will eat the main course
when she is hungry. Also we found that allowing them to come and go out of
table was hard on our sense of properness but helped our kids to eat the
complete dish. After a few months, there were able to stay at table for the
duration. We also found out that industrial food for children is disgusting,
and that nothing beats homemade to open the appetite!

Feeling (and being) overwhelmed is normal, if possible go see a professional
to reassure you.

Sources: experience with my kids, reading a lot a studies, and a psychiatrist
wife

Keep up!

------
fouc
A lot of people in this thread keep wondering about the choice of Basic and
end up suggesting other programming languages.

Let me ask you though, what's the simplest plainest programming language for a
preteen that won't have any patience for dealing with syntax?

~~~
soonix
While I'm not a fan of "visual programming languages", I think Scratch
([https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)) and ScratchJr
([http://scratchjr.org/](http://scratchjr.org/)) are good. ScratchJr is made
for the younger ones, "no reading required" (but knowing the digits/numbers is
helpful)

------
mister_hn
3 thoughts:

1\. Didn't he had already a personal website?

2\. Why is he teaching Basic over Scratch?

3\. Will it scale to Kubernetes one day?

~~~
tlarkworthy
My teaching path for youngens:-

1\. electrical circuits (switch, button, battery), no reading necessary, and
purely physical. 2\. gcompris (computer skills + you can simulate circuits so
it connects to 1.) 3\. Scratch 4\. something textual (e.g. Basic but maybe
Python or JS)

------
cpach
Very nice and interesting site!

I like the texts and also the concept as a whole. Discovering old tweets is
very cumbersome on twitter.com. So this site really meets a need that Twitter
itself doesn’t.

------
darepublic
Do you need to teach 11 yr olds to test their programs after each change..
come on.

------
etiennemarcel
I never really understood the whole thing around Paul Graham. His insights on
startups and tech are somewhat interesting and legitimate, but at this point I
feel like some people are taking his every thought, even mondaine, as
gospel...

~~~
AlchemistCamp
It gets really repetitive and boring to see this sort of comment (and often
much nastier ad homenim attacks) every single time any of pg's writing is on
the front page.

If you think his observations are mundane, then why not just move on to
another link, hopefully one that you're interested in?

~~~
nogabebop23
It also gets tiring to have the knee-jerk defensive of PG or any other expert
leveraging ina different vertical to be "if you don't love america than get
the hell out".

HN _loves_ to question the bonafides of everyone/everything; if you're sick of
these comments, why do you take the time and effort to comment?

~~~
AlchemistCamp
I'm in this thread because I am interested in the submission and discussion on
either the tweets, the site showcasing them or both.

I replied in a perhaps futile attempt to discourage a comment which has
spawned an almost entirely mean-spirited sub-thread.

------
abledon
lots of pressure on that kids psyche

------
dmje
He might be a good entrepreneur but ffs, why the rabid, unthinking enthusiasm
in following everything this guy says? Why not make a website for someone else
who happens to be a good parent? This cultish b/s is exactly what leads to the
hell of Trumpistan. IMO.

~~~
toasterlovin
PG’s essays are why most people care about him. They’re only sometimes about
business. These tweets are a natural extension of his essays.

------
midoodj
nice work @k0stas

