I grew up in a house where abundant praise was given for completion of the most mundane of tasks. Failures were justified and assigned an appropriate cause that absolved me of any wrongdoing.
Exactly the opposite of my experience. My father never praised us. Ever. My mother rarely did. We were routinely punished for anything less than perfection: homework, grades, even washing the dishes (Do them again! Not clean enough!)
And yet they must have been doing something else so subtly that none of us ever noticed. Everything about the way they treated us led each of us to believe that we could accomplish anything, as long as we worked hard enough and didn't expect anything given to us. We were special but not entitled.
I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential.
There both gone now and I think about them every day. Even more so after posts like this one. Thank you, OP.
"I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential."
That's a pity. You should not do that. Please don't do that to your children or they will become miserable and angry too, and their children too, and so on. This is an awful way to live a life.
A man is born for happiness like a bird for flight.
Sacrificing large part of your life to misery for the questionable future success is a very bad deal. Not suggesting anyone take it.
I could not disagree more strongly. I believe that for every one case in which what you experienced is true, there are nine cases in which a childhood that consists of a general lack of praise and constant punishment for lack of perfection results in adults with low self-esteem, low confidence, a lack of discipline, and a general hatred of their parents' culture and of doing the things that they were pushed to do.
I think what the article's author posted and your experience are two extremes of parenting. It just so happened that the article shows the "failure case" of excessive and unmerited praise; there are undoubtedly many well-adjusted adults who were constantly praised for mundane tasks and told they would achieve great things as a child, just like there are adults who turned out to be well-adjusted despite the other extreme of parenting.
Like others have stated here, I believe that the right balance is a childhood in which parents praise effort and not talent and where the enforcement of discipline is firm but not rigid.
I remember hearing recently (I think it was from the book Outliers) that children whose parents tell them their achievements are due to natural ability fair far worse in life than children whose parents tell them their achievements are the result of hard work.
> I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential.
I feel absolutely the same. I've spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct how my mother raised me. Things I consider average and normal human potential seem outrageous to a lot of people i meet.
For my brother when people were always telling him how great he was, she was the one pulling him back on earth.
One thing I noticed is that once you start believing that you're awesome, you stop becoming awesome.
Low fertility rates, high cost of child-rearing, families starting later... it's probably quite normal for parents to give their only child the Royal treatment.
> I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential.
This is the best line I've read in a comment here in some time. I had this same epiphany once I went to college. My father and I had never really gotten along. I had tremendous respect for him (and a mild bit of fear), but I never really "liked" him. He preached personal responsibility and hard work. Over and over.
When I was in karate as a 10 year old, we would work in the basement for hours every night. Perfecting every move, learning all the forms. He would sit there and critique. I hated it. I won a lot of trophies in competitions as a child, but I never cared. There was no praise for winning. I hated the constant practice, the drilling, the ceaseless work. As I got older I realized the message he instilled. If you want to excel at something, this is what it takes. This is the amount of effort required to be competitive. And you do things because you want to be good at them, not because someone will praise you for it.
Every day of my life I'm glad he taught me that lesson. I get so tired of self-entitled whiners like the author of this article. It's not fair of course, the author never had a parent that taught them what hard work and success really looks like. The real shame is that he's probably more the rule than the exception these days.
My parents never forced me to do my hw. I never did chores. Almost no praise and no punishment. All in all they were pretty hands-off. I'm from a low income family and lived in a crappy neighborhood in NYC, went to some crappy schools. And yet, I managed to get a Bachelors in Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science. I have a very strong work ethic. What worked? Who knows.
The author of the piece still doesn't get it. He blames other people for his belief that nothing is his fault, oblivious to the irony of that logic. His twitter bio starts with the words "Trying to figure myself out". He looks inside himself and sees nothing; His reaction to that void is to just keep looking.
He wants more than anything in the world to be a game journalist, or a story writer, or an animator, or a game designer, or whatever, which is fine if you're a freshman, but seriously fucked up if you're several years out of college. He hasn't realised that you don't need anyone's permission to write games reviews or make short films or put together a little indie game, you just fucking do it. He is sufficiently preoccupied with the question of identity that he fails to understand that "doing x" precedes "being x".
He uses the world "passion" more than anyone who understands the meaning of that word. Put bluntly, he's a pathological narcissist. I feel desperately sorry for the guy, but not as much as I feel sorry for the people who live with him.
I used to think, like the author, that the "everyone gets a trophy" epidemic in America was a major problem. Lately, I've come to realize that this is but half of the problem. The other half is America's growing culture of Celebrity Worship. You see it all over: in the way America's youth treats Facebook and Twitter, in the exponential growth of "reality" shows and "talent" competitions, in the rise of celebrities who are "famous for being famous".
With the way that America treats celebrity, not just as something to be desired but something to be expected, it's hard to blame parents for having that "everyone gets a trophy" mentality. The reality is that someone needs to sweep the floors. Someone needs to build the buildings, dig the ditches, and work the assembly line. The fact that America seems to have forgotten how to do those jobs and still maintain a sense of accomplishment, a sense of self-worth, is directly reflected by the employment crisis the country currently finds itself in. When everyone is trying to be a celebrity, you end up with a country full of celebrities and drop-outs, of highly-paid, highly-skilled workers, and McDonalds' cashiers.
I used to struggle with the same thing. Always being told that I was special. Graduating at the top 2% of my high school, slated for MIT, "you'll go far kid."
But here I am, feeling normal and useless. I lead a moderate sized club at RPI, but I don't even feel accomplished for it. I haven't seen any of the job offers that I felt were promised to me when I enrolled at the school, I haven't gotten any major internships.
As a kid I used to hit the video games pretty hard, but at some point I started to realize how fake the achievements felt. I literally can't stomach playing video games anymore. It feels like taking some sort of numbing drug. I have good memories, and I don't even regret most of the weekends I devoted entirely to video games (and the costs associated).
But I feel ill equipped for criticism. Not only am I ill equipped to hear criticism, but my peers are ill equipped to give criticism. Did my speech go well? What could I improve? Even when I can tell that my peers did not like what they saw, it's hard to figure out why, I don't think that some of them even know how to criticize someone within their own mind.
I worked a job last summer teaching kids. I still visit from time to time, and the trend of positive reinforcement and lack of criticism seems to be gaining momentum in our youth. My boss would not let me criticize my own students. And this worries me. What happens when everybody hits the real world, ill equipped for the failure that most adults will tell you happens regularly?
And what can we do to address the issue without swinging the pendulum in the exact opposite direction, to the fabled 'tiger' parenting that seems to carry it's own hefty share of negative consequences?
> But here I am, feeling normal and useless. I lead a moderate sized club at RPI, but I don't even feel accomplished for it. I haven't seen any of the job offers that I felt were promised to me when I enrolled at the school, I haven't gotten any major internships.
I struggled with this as well. A big turning point for me was dropping entirely the notion of being entitled to anything. In reality, no one owes me anything just because I think I'm smart or because I think I work hard.
> As a kid I used to hit the video games pretty hard, but at some point I started to realize how fake the achievements felt. I literally can't stomach playing video games anymore. It feels like taking some sort of numbing drug. I have good memories, and I don't even regret most of the weekends I devoted entirely to video games (and the costs associated).
Me too! It sucks sometimes because I want to enjoy playing a game but don't. I've found that I can't play games, like Skyrim, that are just time-based grinds. Instead, I play games for the nostalgia, the story, for creativity elements, or for the competition/skill factor. Sometimes even then I feel uneasy playing games because I feel like I should be doing something more productive.. that's a tough feeling to get over.
> I worked a job last summer teaching kids. I still visit from time to time, and the trend of positive reinforcement and lack of criticism seems to be gaining momentum in our youth. My boss would not let me criticize my own students.
I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. You can certainly criticize and be positive (or at least not negative) about it.
Hey, I'm an RPI student too. I think fundamentally your feelings of "fake achievement" come down to the fact that job offers, internships, fame, etc don't spawn from going to MIT or any other university: it's what you create that matters. College isn't a guarantee of anything: it's just a great opportunity to learn a ton of stuff if you put your mind to it.
Sidenote: I saw this post in your profile, "How can I learn to code in a practical environment?" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326920). I'm someone that comes from the practical side of things, in terms of software engineering. Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to discuss.
I think this is another case of "Failures were justified and assigned an appropriate cause". In reality, the author didn't have the discipline to balance work and entertainment. This sounds like tantamount lazyness to me; who doesn't want to be having "fun" all the time instead of work or school?
I have difficulty putting it into words but this sounds like one big excuse blaming society/parents/school for his failures rather than himself, which is where they lie.
It's hard to expect him (looking at the child growing up, and the kid in college less than the adult) to know how to balance work and entertainment when he was never taught these things.
Discipline isn't something that you are born with, and if nobody is there to teach it to you then you have to teach it to yourself. It sounds to me like the author is beginning to learn his lessons, but that doesn't change the failures of his childhood parents/mentors who clearly did not adequately prepare him for college.
One of the reasons that I like college as an institution though is that it is a 'safe' place for you to learn the gaps in your childhood education. It's more or less a safe haven for you to finally be on your own but with still lessened consequences.
When you always have a group of people supporting you (like your parents), it's difficult to realize that you lack discipline, and it's difficult to realize the full consequences of your laziness.
In more juvenile terms, I'd put it as "Oh, I'm sorry, let me call the WAAAAAAAAHmbulance".
So far I have met very, very few people who didn't have some sort of mental breakdown during their 20s. Attributing it to "youthful idealism", or what have you, sounds rather disingenuous. Also, there are definite problems with the reverse idea of "you're not special, you're just a cog in a machine" -- namely that once you think that way about yourself, you also start thinking that way about other people and then you're thinking of people as things.
Besides, you are special. You're just not more special than the guy next to you.
I believe this culture arose in 90's as a reaction to the 70's where in the US, the education system mainstreamed almost everyone and praise was nonexistent.
Today's 40-50 y/o so-called rocket scientist sat through exactly the same coursework, at the same pace, as the lowest passable student. Some schools even placed everyone in the same large room regardless of age.
To make things worse, grading was heavily weighted on rote assignments being completed; boredom could turn a 99th percentile tester into a C student and nothing was done.
Somehow though college admission was surprisingly objective. You could get into a respected public engineering school with any GPA if your SAT score was high enough.
The opposite is true now, where GPA is who you are "intellectually," and "honors" courses that allow you to get a 5.0 on a 4.0 scale almost ensure that the valedictorian will have more than a 4.0/4.0 GPA. Compliant, hard workers can grow up thinking they're also PhD material.
There is some validation in real life for the old system however. "Success" in real life is mostly just showing up consistently and having social skills to keep your customers (or bosses) happy.
Like ideas, raw intellectual horsepower doesn't go far without execution.
We lived in the US for a couple years when I was in grade school. My parents always laughed and mocked the stickers that my teacher would put on our assignments: "Great Job!", "You're the best!", "#1". (almost 20 years later, it is still a recurring joke in my family).
An English professor of mine in college loved to dissect differences between the French and English language, and how they highlighted the differences in how anglo-saxon cultures and French culture approach education.
French schools mark out of 20 (0 being worst, 20 being best); but no one ever gets 20. In middle and high school, getting 17 or 18 is already stupendous; in college, top students rarely ever go above 15, and some professors skew their grading to rarely give out marks above 10 in order to toughen up students. On the other hand, getting an A or a 100% in a US college class is not all that hard.
In French, we also often use the verb "to perfect" ("se parfaire") to mean "improve"; for instance, "I'm taking classes to perfect my English". I don't believe I've ever encountered that construction in English (if it is grammatically correct, then it is infinitely rarer)
My professor's main point being that in French culture, perfection is something we strive towards, but never achieve; whereas in anglo-saxon culture, it is something fully within reach.
I was never a straight A student; in middle and high school, my grades would rarely go above 14/20; in college, they were more around 12/20. I did finish my undergrad in a British institution, where my marks immediately skyrocketed and I graduated with the highest honors (ha). In grad school (US), I got a B or two, but they always were from some tough foreign professors.
By contrast, I dated an American girl for a while who had always been a straight A student in middle/high school (graduated valedictorian) and college (graduated on the dean's roll etc. etc.). Her blaring success stopped right as she graduated college though; she quickly fell in deep depression at that point due to the stark contrast with what she experienced and the professional world.
Addendum: Differences between the French (and European to some extent) and American culture have fascinated me for the past few years, as I grew up in a pluricultural environment in the later years, but very French in my early years (and as I slowly become a functioning adult, understanding what shaped my youth and education is interesting to me). To anyone interested in that question, I recommend the book "Bringing Up Bébé" by Pamela Druckerman, which is about a British/American couple discovering French parenting and contrasting it with their own. It is pop-cultury and light on actual research, but does contain interesting insights. Any recommendations on that same topic are very welcome :)
That's because "education" as we know it is bullshit.
Instead of finding a talent and teaching you to do something useful it teaches you to do nothing useful for ten years.
More so, it benchmarks your ability to do nothing useful and (in some systems) tries to decide whether to let you to finally learn to do something useful or not.
I suggest sidestep this and go straight into programming (writing, drawing, whatevering).
Call this Minimal Viable Education.
The problem is that most people today don't understand what an education is supposed to accomplish.
The vast majority of Americans believe that an education should ultimately end with a marketable skill, and as a result students are dissuaded from paths of study that do not end with a directly marketable skill (art school, liberal arts, music school). In a minimally viable education the pressure to not study these things goes away however there is no incentive to produce a student with marketable job skills. I think this is okay because school should have never been about job training.
An education should prepare you for job training and job training should teach you a marketable skill. This is not a new concept; guilds, apprenticeships, and trade schools have existed for centuries. What is necessary is to de-stigmatize these paths in the modern age and divorce the concept of education from that of job training.
One of a key tenants of the parenting style my wife and I use (positive discipline) is that you encourage and do not praise. The difference is subtle, but it focuses on the action and not the person. For example, when one of our kids do well in school, we don't say "you're so smart!". Rather, we say "you worked hard for that, good job! keep it up!". When a child fails, we say "I understand you feel bad. What do you think you could have done better?"
The problem with many Americans, and wealthy people more generally, is that they're spoiled rotten to the extent that they are brainwashed into believing that how much monopoly money they take home and how much respect a bunch of other spoiled rotten people give them indicate success or failure in life.
Meanwhile people are starving and dying in wars all over the world. There's no such thing as success or failure in a wealthy country. It's all meaningless. There are just a bunch of people who are well taken care of and given an addictive, stressful game to play so they don't rock the boat.
there's no such thing as " failure in a wealthy country." sorry what planet are you on - there are plenty of people who fall though the gaps in the USA and the UK.
Unless you think the homeless guy I see sleeping behind the pret a manger in holbourn is some kind of success story
> Except in video games. In video games greatness is inevitable.
The underlying assumption here is incorrect, that is, that greatness involves saving the world in some epic way. I, however, see greatness in one who sacrifices himself for another, no matter how small the task. From the stay-at-home mom who spends most of her time caring for a small child to Captain Kirk's father who sacrificed himself for the whole ship (newest ST movie), there is greatness to be found in all of them, and one is not necessarily greater than the other, for they both involve elevating the other's interests above your own.
A good, fee-paying, school for girls in the UK runs "failure week" to let girls know that risk is good; failure will happen; and that you need to be able to work through it.
Praise effort and work, not just good outcomes, is something that has been mentioned on HN a few times before. What I think would be good (although I welcome correction from anyone with better knowledge of education) is letting bright students help teach slower students. This isn't just for the less able students. Teaching other people strengthens your own skills. You don't have bright bored students causing trouble. You have a teacher more able to help students that need it. Maybe it already happens? I dunno. I went to a school that had pretty heavy streaming.
This is how America ruins it's best children. I know the story so well, I only had to read the title, though I did skim the article to be sure.
Children need to be given goals and challenged, not constantly told they are good enough. Children need to be shown a path to improvement, not reassurance on their accomplishments.
There's a reason Americans fascinated by movies about hard loving teachers who are proud but never satisfied with their students, like in the Karate Kid or Dead Poets' Society (dating myself there.) Unfortunately we can't bring ourselves to actually challenge our children and sacrifice their short term glee for long term fulfillment.
While in jr. high and high school I helped my father with his business. I saw all the same 'U R SPESHUL' crap dumped on kids and laughed it off. In the working world you have to 'pass' or you may not have cash for dinner. Failures are very common in the real world. You may not make the big sale you were expecting. The company you work for may go out of business. All kinds of things go wrong, raising your children to be resilient is more important then shooting for success. This also means you have to allow your kids to suffer the consequences of their failures too. You don't want them to get hurt, but if you save them from themselves every time, you've taught them that mommy/daddy will bail them out whenever they need it.
They provide the illusion of power or change in your life, but nothing really change outside of your game. Nothing improve other than your stats.
So instead of just playing game, I also make them. With making video games, I learn all sort of thing applicable to programming and real life. The game I am working on will enlighten players with a simulation of infantry combat. (suppressive fire, maneuvering, covers, spacing, etc)
Surprisingly, not everybody seeks change and accomplishment with every moment. An escape can be nice. Also, "Nothing improve other than your stats" ... maybe you are thinking only of WoW-type games that reward time spent playing more than anything else.
Cant agree more! I have always hated video games but this game called Braid caught my attention. Being highly addicted to this puzzler, i finished it in a week and i remember what i felt. I felt like a genius, like i did which no one could, but my brother, he finished before me. Video games can make you feel like someone but as soon as you get beaten in your game, the dirty old feeling will be back.
>I want to become the adult I believed I could be. I want video games to become something that helps me change instead of giving me a place to hide
This is a growing and misguided sentiment. Being absorbed in and obsessed with video games is the problem, not the content of the games! If you want to grow up you need to collide with the real world. No game is going to become the driver of adulthood. The answer here is to subtract games from your life and go live in the world. Unfortunately there is an "art game" movement indulging in delusions that the right kind of game can rise above the level of crass entertainment and "nourish" the player. This is garbage. You can imbibe the most clever and interest art in the world, but only living in the real world can teach you about the real world. Even education is dangerously "gamified". The difference there is that the world is rigged with many favors for educated people, so you don't have much choice.
I posted this as a reply to the article itself, but I feel I should post it here as well, in case it just gets buried there.
To me, the OP's post is clearly a cry for help, guidance, a "wtf do I do next?"
Been there.. You know what you need to do? Treat life itself like a video game. Win. Stop what you're doing right now. Think really hard about what winning would be for YOU. Write that down on a piece of paper. Done? Good.. now figure out how to get there.
I, too, had a great affection, possibly obsession, with video games at a similar point in my life. I had these grand ideas for video games that I'd like to play, but didn't exist yet. So, I started figuring out what it would take to make them. Now, roughly 6 years later, I'm not in game development, but I am building complex web applications and doing a lot of very interesting things. And, you know what? I'm happy.
You have the drive. Make happiness happen. Don't wait for it to come to you.
OK, I love the tide of unbridled machismo -- here's a little secret: No one is special, but one of the precious gifts we get from our parents or guardians is unconditional love. And given the harsh reality of our situation: that we live in a world which is indifferent to our survival, that it will only briefly remember any of our accomplishments, that we are more likely to go on forever struggling with our own mediocrity, we are deserving of that love and it is invaluable. It is something that (as far as we know), our species creates that is unique. And if it chokes us a little bit and if it stunts our growth, then that is acceptable bargain for the brief memories of peace and happiness that it will create for us, which we can carry with us on our long journey to the grave.
[+] [-] edw519|13 years ago|reply
Exactly the opposite of my experience. My father never praised us. Ever. My mother rarely did. We were routinely punished for anything less than perfection: homework, grades, even washing the dishes (Do them again! Not clean enough!)
And yet they must have been doing something else so subtly that none of us ever noticed. Everything about the way they treated us led each of us to believe that we could accomplish anything, as long as we worked hard enough and didn't expect anything given to us. We were special but not entitled.
I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential.
There both gone now and I think about them every day. Even more so after posts like this one. Thank you, OP.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|13 years ago|reply
That's a pity. You should not do that. Please don't do that to your children or they will become miserable and angry too, and their children too, and so on. This is an awful way to live a life.
A man is born for happiness like a bird for flight. Sacrificing large part of your life to misery for the questionable future success is a very bad deal. Not suggesting anyone take it.
[+] [-] brianchu|13 years ago|reply
I think what the article's author posted and your experience are two extremes of parenting. It just so happened that the article shows the "failure case" of excessive and unmerited praise; there are undoubtedly many well-adjusted adults who were constantly praised for mundane tasks and told they would achieve great things as a child, just like there are adults who turned out to be well-adjusted despite the other extreme of parenting.
Like others have stated here, I believe that the right balance is a childhood in which parents praise effort and not talent and where the enforcement of discipline is firm but not rigid.
[+] [-] marknutter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjzzleep|13 years ago|reply
I feel absolutely the same. I've spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct how my mother raised me. Things I consider average and normal human potential seem outrageous to a lot of people i meet.
For my brother when people were always telling him how great he was, she was the one pulling him back on earth.
One thing I noticed is that once you start believing that you're awesome, you stop becoming awesome.
[+] [-] bitcartel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tichy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fatjokes|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dos1|13 years ago|reply
This is the best line I've read in a comment here in some time. I had this same epiphany once I went to college. My father and I had never really gotten along. I had tremendous respect for him (and a mild bit of fear), but I never really "liked" him. He preached personal responsibility and hard work. Over and over.
When I was in karate as a 10 year old, we would work in the basement for hours every night. Perfecting every move, learning all the forms. He would sit there and critique. I hated it. I won a lot of trophies in competitions as a child, but I never cared. There was no praise for winning. I hated the constant practice, the drilling, the ceaseless work. As I got older I realized the message he instilled. If you want to excel at something, this is what it takes. This is the amount of effort required to be competitive. And you do things because you want to be good at them, not because someone will praise you for it.
Every day of my life I'm glad he taught me that lesson. I get so tired of self-entitled whiners like the author of this article. It's not fair of course, the author never had a parent that taught them what hard work and success really looks like. The real shame is that he's probably more the rule than the exception these days.
[+] [-] latinohere|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdietrich|13 years ago|reply
He wants more than anything in the world to be a game journalist, or a story writer, or an animator, or a game designer, or whatever, which is fine if you're a freshman, but seriously fucked up if you're several years out of college. He hasn't realised that you don't need anyone's permission to write games reviews or make short films or put together a little indie game, you just fucking do it. He is sufficiently preoccupied with the question of identity that he fails to understand that "doing x" precedes "being x".
He uses the world "passion" more than anyone who understands the meaning of that word. Put bluntly, he's a pathological narcissist. I feel desperately sorry for the guy, but not as much as I feel sorry for the people who live with him.
[+] [-] jballanc|13 years ago|reply
With the way that America treats celebrity, not just as something to be desired but something to be expected, it's hard to blame parents for having that "everyone gets a trophy" mentality. The reality is that someone needs to sweep the floors. Someone needs to build the buildings, dig the ditches, and work the assembly line. The fact that America seems to have forgotten how to do those jobs and still maintain a sense of accomplishment, a sense of self-worth, is directly reflected by the employment crisis the country currently finds itself in. When everyone is trying to be a celebrity, you end up with a country full of celebrities and drop-outs, of highly-paid, highly-skilled workers, and McDonalds' cashiers.
[+] [-] javert|13 years ago|reply
Basically, I always considered the whole "celebrity worship" thing to be for more "lower class" people, and I think there's some truth there.
[+] [-] Evbn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaperclipTaken|13 years ago|reply
But here I am, feeling normal and useless. I lead a moderate sized club at RPI, but I don't even feel accomplished for it. I haven't seen any of the job offers that I felt were promised to me when I enrolled at the school, I haven't gotten any major internships.
As a kid I used to hit the video games pretty hard, but at some point I started to realize how fake the achievements felt. I literally can't stomach playing video games anymore. It feels like taking some sort of numbing drug. I have good memories, and I don't even regret most of the weekends I devoted entirely to video games (and the costs associated).
But I feel ill equipped for criticism. Not only am I ill equipped to hear criticism, but my peers are ill equipped to give criticism. Did my speech go well? What could I improve? Even when I can tell that my peers did not like what they saw, it's hard to figure out why, I don't think that some of them even know how to criticize someone within their own mind.
I worked a job last summer teaching kids. I still visit from time to time, and the trend of positive reinforcement and lack of criticism seems to be gaining momentum in our youth. My boss would not let me criticize my own students. And this worries me. What happens when everybody hits the real world, ill equipped for the failure that most adults will tell you happens regularly?
And what can we do to address the issue without swinging the pendulum in the exact opposite direction, to the fabled 'tiger' parenting that seems to carry it's own hefty share of negative consequences?
[+] [-] MordinSolus|13 years ago|reply
I struggled with this as well. A big turning point for me was dropping entirely the notion of being entitled to anything. In reality, no one owes me anything just because I think I'm smart or because I think I work hard.
On the feeling unaccomplished part, maybe try reading a book like http://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfill.... It's sort of a "the goal is the journey" book with some practical advice thrown in.
> As a kid I used to hit the video games pretty hard, but at some point I started to realize how fake the achievements felt. I literally can't stomach playing video games anymore. It feels like taking some sort of numbing drug. I have good memories, and I don't even regret most of the weekends I devoted entirely to video games (and the costs associated).
Me too! It sucks sometimes because I want to enjoy playing a game but don't. I've found that I can't play games, like Skyrim, that are just time-based grinds. Instead, I play games for the nostalgia, the story, for creativity elements, or for the competition/skill factor. Sometimes even then I feel uneasy playing games because I feel like I should be doing something more productive.. that's a tough feeling to get over.
> I worked a job last summer teaching kids. I still visit from time to time, and the trend of positive reinforcement and lack of criticism seems to be gaining momentum in our youth. My boss would not let me criticize my own students.
I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. You can certainly criticize and be positive (or at least not negative) about it.
[+] [-] gramsey|13 years ago|reply
Sidenote: I saw this post in your profile, "How can I learn to code in a practical environment?" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326920). I'm someone that comes from the practical side of things, in terms of software engineering. Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to discuss.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Evbn|13 years ago|reply
And mild depression is common in college aged people.
[+] [-] zimbatm|13 years ago|reply
http://www.parentingscience.com/praise-and-intelligence.html
https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/sys...
[+] [-] evdawg|13 years ago|reply
I have difficulty putting it into words but this sounds like one big excuse blaming society/parents/school for his failures rather than himself, which is where they lie.
[+] [-] PaperclipTaken|13 years ago|reply
Discipline isn't something that you are born with, and if nobody is there to teach it to you then you have to teach it to yourself. It sounds to me like the author is beginning to learn his lessons, but that doesn't change the failures of his childhood parents/mentors who clearly did not adequately prepare him for college.
One of the reasons that I like college as an institution though is that it is a 'safe' place for you to learn the gaps in your childhood education. It's more or less a safe haven for you to finally be on your own but with still lessened consequences.
When you always have a group of people supporting you (like your parents), it's difficult to realize that you lack discipline, and it's difficult to realize the full consequences of your laziness.
[+] [-] anonymous|13 years ago|reply
So far I have met very, very few people who didn't have some sort of mental breakdown during their 20s. Attributing it to "youthful idealism", or what have you, sounds rather disingenuous. Also, there are definite problems with the reverse idea of "you're not special, you're just a cog in a machine" -- namely that once you think that way about yourself, you also start thinking that way about other people and then you're thinking of people as things.
Besides, you are special. You're just not more special than the guy next to you.
[+] [-] OldSchool|13 years ago|reply
Today's 40-50 y/o so-called rocket scientist sat through exactly the same coursework, at the same pace, as the lowest passable student. Some schools even placed everyone in the same large room regardless of age.
To make things worse, grading was heavily weighted on rote assignments being completed; boredom could turn a 99th percentile tester into a C student and nothing was done.
Somehow though college admission was surprisingly objective. You could get into a respected public engineering school with any GPA if your SAT score was high enough.
The opposite is true now, where GPA is who you are "intellectually," and "honors" courses that allow you to get a 5.0 on a 4.0 scale almost ensure that the valedictorian will have more than a 4.0/4.0 GPA. Compliant, hard workers can grow up thinking they're also PhD material.
There is some validation in real life for the old system however. "Success" in real life is mostly just showing up consistently and having social skills to keep your customers (or bosses) happy.
Like ideas, raw intellectual horsepower doesn't go far without execution.
[+] [-] GuiA|13 years ago|reply
An English professor of mine in college loved to dissect differences between the French and English language, and how they highlighted the differences in how anglo-saxon cultures and French culture approach education.
French schools mark out of 20 (0 being worst, 20 being best); but no one ever gets 20. In middle and high school, getting 17 or 18 is already stupendous; in college, top students rarely ever go above 15, and some professors skew their grading to rarely give out marks above 10 in order to toughen up students. On the other hand, getting an A or a 100% in a US college class is not all that hard. In French, we also often use the verb "to perfect" ("se parfaire") to mean "improve"; for instance, "I'm taking classes to perfect my English". I don't believe I've ever encountered that construction in English (if it is grammatically correct, then it is infinitely rarer)
My professor's main point being that in French culture, perfection is something we strive towards, but never achieve; whereas in anglo-saxon culture, it is something fully within reach.
I was never a straight A student; in middle and high school, my grades would rarely go above 14/20; in college, they were more around 12/20. I did finish my undergrad in a British institution, where my marks immediately skyrocketed and I graduated with the highest honors (ha). In grad school (US), I got a B or two, but they always were from some tough foreign professors.
By contrast, I dated an American girl for a while who had always been a straight A student in middle/high school (graduated valedictorian) and college (graduated on the dean's roll etc. etc.). Her blaring success stopped right as she graduated college though; she quickly fell in deep depression at that point due to the stark contrast with what she experienced and the professional world.
Addendum: Differences between the French (and European to some extent) and American culture have fascinated me for the past few years, as I grew up in a pluricultural environment in the later years, but very French in my early years (and as I slowly become a functioning adult, understanding what shaped my youth and education is interesting to me). To anyone interested in that question, I recommend the book "Bringing Up Bébé" by Pamela Druckerman, which is about a British/American couple discovering French parenting and contrasting it with their own. It is pop-cultury and light on actual research, but does contain interesting insights. Any recommendations on that same topic are very welcome :)
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|13 years ago|reply
Instead of finding a talent and teaching you to do something useful it teaches you to do nothing useful for ten years.
More so, it benchmarks your ability to do nothing useful and (in some systems) tries to decide whether to let you to finally learn to do something useful or not.
I suggest sidestep this and go straight into programming (writing, drawing, whatevering). Call this Minimal Viable Education.
[+] [-] EvilLook|13 years ago|reply
The vast majority of Americans believe that an education should ultimately end with a marketable skill, and as a result students are dissuaded from paths of study that do not end with a directly marketable skill (art school, liberal arts, music school). In a minimally viable education the pressure to not study these things goes away however there is no incentive to produce a student with marketable job skills. I think this is okay because school should have never been about job training.
An education should prepare you for job training and job training should teach you a marketable skill. This is not a new concept; guilds, apprenticeships, and trade schools have existed for centuries. What is necessary is to de-stigmatize these paths in the modern age and divorce the concept of education from that of job training.
[+] [-] Delmania|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danenania|13 years ago|reply
Meanwhile people are starving and dying in wars all over the world. There's no such thing as success or failure in a wealthy country. It's all meaningless. There are just a bunch of people who are well taken care of and given an addictive, stressful game to play so they don't rock the boat.
[+] [-] walshemj|13 years ago|reply
Unless you think the homeless guy I see sleeping behind the pret a manger in holbourn is some kind of success story
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tesmar2|13 years ago|reply
The underlying assumption here is incorrect, that is, that greatness involves saving the world in some epic way. I, however, see greatness in one who sacrifices himself for another, no matter how small the task. From the stay-at-home mom who spends most of her time caring for a small child to Captain Kirk's father who sacrificed himself for the whole ship (newest ST movie), there is greatness to be found in all of them, and one is not necessarily greater than the other, for they both involve elevating the other's interests above your own.
[+] [-] danso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16879336)
Praise effort and work, not just good outcomes, is something that has been mentioned on HN a few times before. What I think would be good (although I welcome correction from anyone with better knowledge of education) is letting bright students help teach slower students. This isn't just for the less able students. Teaching other people strengthens your own skills. You don't have bright bored students causing trouble. You have a teacher more able to help students that need it. Maybe it already happens? I dunno. I went to a school that had pretty heavy streaming.
[+] [-] aneth4|13 years ago|reply
Children need to be given goals and challenged, not constantly told they are good enough. Children need to be shown a path to improvement, not reassurance on their accomplishments.
There's a reason Americans fascinated by movies about hard loving teachers who are proud but never satisfied with their students, like in the Karate Kid or Dead Poets' Society (dating myself there.) Unfortunately we can't bring ourselves to actually challenge our children and sacrifice their short term glee for long term fulfillment.
[+] [-] pixl97|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiba|13 years ago|reply
They provide the illusion of power or change in your life, but nothing really change outside of your game. Nothing improve other than your stats.
So instead of just playing game, I also make them. With making video games, I learn all sort of thing applicable to programming and real life. The game I am working on will enlighten players with a simulation of infantry combat. (suppressive fire, maneuvering, covers, spacing, etc)
[+] [-] oinksoft|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EvilLook|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shubhamjain|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celiac|13 years ago|reply
This is a growing and misguided sentiment. Being absorbed in and obsessed with video games is the problem, not the content of the games! If you want to grow up you need to collide with the real world. No game is going to become the driver of adulthood. The answer here is to subtract games from your life and go live in the world. Unfortunately there is an "art game" movement indulging in delusions that the right kind of game can rise above the level of crass entertainment and "nourish" the player. This is garbage. You can imbibe the most clever and interest art in the world, but only living in the real world can teach you about the real world. Even education is dangerously "gamified". The difference there is that the world is rigged with many favors for educated people, so you don't have much choice.
[+] [-] chill1|13 years ago|reply
To me, the OP's post is clearly a cry for help, guidance, a "wtf do I do next?"
Been there.. You know what you need to do? Treat life itself like a video game. Win. Stop what you're doing right now. Think really hard about what winning would be for YOU. Write that down on a piece of paper. Done? Good.. now figure out how to get there.
I, too, had a great affection, possibly obsession, with video games at a similar point in my life. I had these grand ideas for video games that I'd like to play, but didn't exist yet. So, I started figuring out what it would take to make them. Now, roughly 6 years later, I'm not in game development, but I am building complex web applications and doing a lot of very interesting things. And, you know what? I'm happy.
You have the drive. Make happiness happen. Don't wait for it to come to you.
[+] [-] xdev|13 years ago|reply