At least for the toddler years, dog training and child raising have more similarities than differences. Parents are just too proud to admit it.
Well, to an extent. But with toddlers you have a whole other dimension to leverage (for the good and the bad): modeling behavior. Kids are crazy copycats, it’s often ‘easy’ to convince children to do something if you do it yourself, but then, the opposite is also true 😬. Behavior you don’t want to be copied will still be copied.
Source: parent of two toddlers.
Toddler years? I plan on keeping up with dog style training well into teenagehood.
Let us know how that works out. We have 2 gods and a 7 y/o child.
They’ve all been untraining each other since about day 300.
We have 2 gods and a 7 y/o child.
Well, you see, gods are in charge of you, not the other way around. Source:Ancient Greece
One is a corgi and the other a Swedish Valhund. They are controlling our every move at this point.
Really though the 11 y/o corgi is in charge and the 1.5y/o Valhund is a maniac that just wants to play and run in circles with the 7 y/o kid. Utter chaos.
Recently watched my parents try to train a new dog. They absolutely don’t have the patience or consistency to do it. Even after sending it to be trained by someone else, they failed so miserably at following the trainer’s instructions they had to return the dog. Really put my childhood into perspective.
My mom learned how to train her dogs… long after my siblings and I had grown up. She now sees my aunt with her new puppy, doing the shit she might have done with us, and criticizing her for it.
I mean, I’m glad she learned, and can recognize shitty instruction. Would’ve been nice if she’d understood that reward works better than punishment back when I was a kid, though.
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that’s cursed
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that’s also an interesting perspective
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So, conditioning ? rewards ? pets ?
I keep saying that the best parrenting book that I’ve ever read was Don’t shoot the dog by Karen Pryor.
Sounds like an appropriate Christmas gift for Kristi Noem.
Dog training is a mystery to me. Should I be kept away from children?
Instructions no but man, they have no idea about emotional dysregulation.
My personal fave was the four hour meltdown because i wouldn’t let him eat a pool ball
Reminds me of one of my favourite memes…
How dare you deny him the pleasure of eating a pool ball?!
I know, i know, it’s my own prejudices about breathing and teeth
You must tell us what number it was. I can understand not letting somebody eat 14, but 3 always look juicy and delicious.
'Twas a 7, the tastiest of all
Yeah, the emotions are the key here. Children can’t regulate them, hell, many adults can’t. It makes any conversation you would want to have with them extremely difficult
Shit, when my kids were toddlers I couldn’t even get them to do something they literally just told me they wanted to do.
As a parent to a 5 and a 2 yo, once kids can communicate they can often be reasoned with. Most things that I ask them as a parent are things they dont want to do, like brush their teeth or don’t throw their toys or share with their sister. As a parent it’s my job to make them understand WHY those things are important and worth doing.
Brush your teeth so they dont decay and need to be cut out.
Dont throw toys because they will break and get thrown away or be taken away for everyones safety.
Share with your sister because if you cant cooperate with people they wont cooperate with you when you want them to.
Breaking down the reasons to language a kid can understand is generally successful and certainly much better than trying to force your kids to comply with expectations based on nothing more than “because I said so”, which was a common refrain said to me and my siblings growing up.
Out of curiosity, I always wondered… when do they start being conscious?
Like we all don’t remember our first years… but at some point, we know we are, we remember, and we see our hands, and go like, “wtf, i’m a person”, and so on
It’s impressively soon IMO. Our kid was showing his personality and likes and preferences around 4 months. We taught him hand signs/baby sign language and he really caught on to it at about 8 months. He made up his own signs and signals for things we didn’t give him words for and was communicating pretty intricate concepts clearly with us by the time he was 1.
I don’t know, what do you want to call consciousness? Personally I don’t think just because I have no memory of my first couple of years doesn’t mean I wasn’t conscious. I know I was concious a couple years ago and I can’t remember shit from then. I don’t think it’s as clear as a switch on/off and would say it’s more like a gradient of building complexity.
Baby sign is a really good way! Helps a lot with communication before it can talk. It’s also handy to know some signs as an adult I think, eg for communicating in loud bars and across barriers when you can’t just type atm.
I feel I’d call it consciousness when you start making permanent memories, ie memories that you don’t lose after a few weeks or months, but keep with you for at least many years. When you are aware of yourself being a person, as apart from … behaving on reflexes and unawareness? It’s hard to describe.
If you think of being self aware and realizing you’re an individual and exist it might even start before day 1. If it’s about the continuity of self, I’ve only been the person I am right now for a few years at this point. I think if you’re doing it right we are constantly growing, changing and evolving, and just because a previous version of ourselves wasn’t as developed as the current one, doesn’t mean it wasn’t sapient and full of the idiosyncrasies that make us unique and interesting.
That’s… tough to define. TBH Consciousness itself is poorly defined.
Even before they learn language they can communicate, and they respond to their parents voices even in utero. If anything I would say that they just slowly become more conscious over time.
Round about 18months- ish. You know, when ASD tends to show up as the person brain comes online
1.5 years? seems farfetched, I remember nothing till I’m 4, and even then, the ‘constant stream of memories’ only really started around 7, 8 for me.
I think there’s a bias when we’re looking back at our own experiences and memories because we see how simple they were compared to our older selves. I know before I had a kid I had a very dim view of their mental capabilities before age 4, and thought people were bragging and exaggerating what they could do at that age. However, now I’ve got my own who says things almost every day that surprise me, and I’m so impressed with what he can accomplish. I don’t think we give them enough credit, or enough chances to really show us what they are capable of.
I actually remember the bathroom of a house we moved out of when i was less than 2 years old. Was also apparently walking unassisted at 9 months as well. Everyone has different developmental rates, milestones are general goals. But it’s generally agreed its around 18 months the brain goes from “amorphous needs” to “person brain” , hence it being where neurodivergence tends to start showing up.
As it’s also the point where vaccinations are best (your immune system is able to process them, and you’re vulnerable enough to need protection) antivaxxers have drawn some very, very incorrect conclusions
I was on a train once and a couple of 20-somethings were complaining about a baby at the opposite end of the empty carriage crying. They said crying babies shouldn’t be allowed on the train.
I didn’t even have a kid then; didn’t need one to see they were dickheads.
They said crying babies shouldn’t be allowed on the train.
They were the crying adult babies who should leave.
Them: “Crying babies shouldn’t be allowed on the train.”
Me: “I know. They’re the second-worst thing in public transit, second only to the crying adults.” pointed stare
The pointed stare makes that comment
So… when my friend’s toddler absolutely refused to eat broccoli at Thanksgiving, guess what I did?
I loaded up my plate with broccoli, and started enjoying the hell out of it right in front of her. I wasn’t even faking… it was actually really good.
I offered her a piece of mine, and guess what? She liked broccoli from then on.
The whole authoritarian “do as I say, not as I do” is bullshit and always had been.
Kids (and everyone, really) model behaviour. Practice what you preach as a parent, and everything becomes easier. Be a hypocrite, and everything becomes harder. Imagine that. 😁
simple as that … so, do you have kids?
I do have kids. It’s not always as simple as that, but practicing what you preach as a parent and treating kids as individuals with minds and bodies of their own is very important.
The goal should be to teach, not just to make them obey like OP’s image suggests.
I actually do believe it is that simple. It’s probably not easy, because of the duration, but it is simple.
If you had infinite patience, then it would be easy as well, but we’re not robots. Humans, adults as well, get tired and run out of patience and don’t perform optimally. And when you’re exhausted and trying to put on a nice tone of voice, it might not sound all that pleasant. And kids can pick up on things like that.
To reiterate the difference between “simple” and “easy”, fighting a heavyweight boxing world champ would be simple, but it wouldn’t be easy.
It really depends on what. I can’t tell my 3 year old to “stop crying”, that would be worse than useless. I can tell him he needs to sit on his bed until he’s calm. I can tell him not to hit me, but I need consequences and consistency for months until it finally works and he restrains himself. We have a foundation of trust and a general understanding that there are dangers out in the world, so if we tell him to stop and get away from a hazard he listens because he trusts our judgement, but that only works for me and my partner.
So can you just tell a toddler to do something and they do it? Yes, some people, sometimes, for some things.
Maybe.
Everyone should have to babysit two toddlers for a week, at least one with undiagnosed mental health issues, with sugar and screen addictions because the divorced parents are too exhausted from working multiple jobs to deal with them, before they can say anything about parenting.
As someone who used to be one of those toddlers, thank you for your patience and I feel for you. I’m sorry.
It’s worse, even, (the “advice”) when you have a kid with ASD level 3. Raising this kid is like trying to rodeo ride a tornado. And people try and tell me to just “insert something simple that won’t in any way work that I have to then deconstruct why, in micro steps to this person, kindly, whilst internally spiralling at the depths of which people truly don’t understand or have any concept of how these levels of disability can affect your life, for all involved”.
Oh for sure. So annoying 🙄
I’ll bet! I have zero knowledge of parenting so I always ask questions I NEVER tell them anything. My knowledge of the area is literally zero so I know to STFU
Not a parent. I’d never say anything even remotely this asinine though.
I would never experience this if I were a parent.
