1
There is a failure mode in interacting with (little) kids that I see people, especially parents, often fall into. The adult is imposing some setting or demanding some behaviour from the kid, with the kid subsequently having and expressing a strong negative emotional reaction in order to avoid having to be there or having to do something. The kid needs to brush their teeth, needs to go on a boring car ride, needs to go to school, do activity x. The kids brain is wired to maximize novelty, take the easy, energy saving path and uses its behaviour (e.g. crying, being loud,…) to try get these needs met. It often is the only way it has to get this.
The adult or parent then gives in to the wishes of the child and lets them do what it wants, changes the situation, gives them the desired object. Letting them skip their teeth brushing, giving them a smartphone to distract them (this is especially popular, it seems to me). They do this either because it is easier and they want to have some peace for themselves. Or they think it actually is better for the kid - “the kid doesn’t like it, so it must not be the correct thing for them, can’t be good, right?” This one is a bit trickier, when it comes to things that are not as clear cut as going to school or brushing your teeth. Should you send you kid to Judo class, even if it might get hurt sometimes? It doesn’t want to go, you can tell, it rathers staying at home and playing games. But it’s probably a good decision to go anyway, the kids that stick to it get a lot out of it. And your kid hurting itself a bit from time to time is probably even a good thing.
“My child of 4 years can decide for itself” - well no, it can’t. Children are basically optimizing for short term reward, are recently spawned agents that have no notion of or conscious control over optimizing over longer time horizons. Humans in general are not automatically strategic, but while adults in theory have the possibility to override their impulses with rational reflection, kids lack this ability. They will blindly go for the first thing that satisfies their impulses. If they stumble upon a policy which works to get their ends met, they will keep using it. The Kid gets the smartphone after crying to their parent and in turn 1) learns that this behaviour will get them what they want and 2) fails to learn that there could be bigger rewards down the line if doing some harder things. If the parent would instead commit to not give in, the kid would learn that their strategy of crying doesn’t work and would search for other strategies. This is basic game theory. Better to start thinking about the right way of incentivizing kids to get them to the desired behaviour and end state.
2
Of course, this includes the parent having to make a judgement call of what is an desired end state. Hopefully, this won’t be about “my kid has to go to school x, get job y, position z”, but rather about the kid growing up to be an happy and capable adult, with a healthy mind and body. As a parent, one is responsible for optimizing over long time horizons for the kid, as long as it is unable to do this by itself.
A heuristic I once read that I like is asking oneself: “If the older version of my kid would be standing in the room with me right now, what would they want you to do?” Because in a sense, they are. I sometimes hear people express this when thinking back about their childhood or youth: “I wish my parents made me stick to X and not let me quit so easily”, “I wish my parents made me sit upright”, and so on. I have yet to hear “I wish my parents wouldn’t have let me use my phone so much” but I expect that someone with enough self-reflection would have this thought. I certainly feel that my parents letting me play video games so much worsened my ability to hold attention in one place and to delay gratification to take on bigger tasks, or at least worsened my predisposition. And it seems that in terms of tight dopamine feedback loops, the current generation of social media is like video games, but on steroids.
I’m not saying that making these decisions for the kid (or guiding them - ideally there is no need to impose this stuff) is easy. Identifying the best course of action with long time horizons in mind is not something that comes per default, but rather is something that also needs to be trained. And sticking to the decision made in face of the protesting and upset child is hard. We need to learn to accept that our kids can feel bad from time to time, that this is normal and even conducive to growth. We don’t want to prevent our kids from feeling bad, actively managing their environment so they never feel friction or discomfort. We want them to grow and to give them the tools to deal with their emotions and environment. You are not here to be the childs friend, you are here to be their parent.
I realize that this might give of some false impression if coming from a different point of view, so I want to make it explicit: for me it is obvious that all interaction with kids should be warm and supporting, not unnecessarily strict. If you have to take some sort of action, do it, but don’t get angry at your kid or see your kid as adversarial. Communicate with your kid, ideally letting them see and work out the point you have themselves. Come from a place of compassion.
3
All this might seem obvious. This is what raising kids is about, no? But as it is, I see people failing at this all the time. Giving in to their childrens short them wishes instead of optimizing for long term and getting incentives wrong by using punishments instead of positive reinforcement.
And zooming out a bit, this seems to hold true even for ourselves as adults. I certainly observe this in myself and in people around me - blindly going for the short term reward instead of playing longer games, probably because we are running on our default programming from ancient times. Which might have been adaptive back then, but is self-defeating in todays world. Most common failure mode I see is getting your brain hacked by the tight dopamine loops from todays social media and their cousins. This gives immediate pleasure and reward but is at best useless, if not downright harmful. The time lost on these platforms could be spent in any number of different ways that serve your goals better.
We need to be our own parents. To have some kind of meta observer installed in our mind which regularly takes the outside view and asks itself: “Am I optimizing for short term or long term here? How could I change it to the latter?” Then go and implement those changes to ones environment and behaviour, which is obviously trivial. (haha)
I am not yet sure how to install this meta observer reliably, how to make sure that you take a step back and look at your behaviour from a bigger vantage point. Some sort of reflection and writing things down. Probably what Rationality Skills (TM) are trying to accomplish. Also realizing that your mind is made of different parts that want different things and navigating this. It might just in itself be a difficult task, not getting your brain hacked into short term reward requires constant vigilance and effort.
Where are you optimizing over short term instead of long term?