> The bitter irony is that if a young parent
>actually believes this, they've already screwed
>up. If you don't know good parenting skills
>*before* you have kids, you have precious little
>time to cram before you start making irrevocable
>mistakes. You get until roughly nine months old
>when mostly all they need is food, shelter,
>cleaning, and physical contact. Nine months, I
>might add, that do NOT experientially prepare you
>for the times to come. After that, everything
>you do, every mistaken response you make to their
>behavior through ignorance, shapes the social
>behavior and world views they'll keep the rest of
>their lives. By age 3, the most crucial parts of
>that are done. By age 5, the majority. By age
>10, the seeds for who they will become are
>planted almost irrevocably. If you screw up the
>terrible twos, it's uphill the rest of the way.

I'm not saying that none of this is true or that it's not important at all, but this just seems like classic overthinking to me. My parents didn't know any of this and turned out four pretty decent offspring. Humans for millions of years have been operating without any of this sort of detailed knowledge without a whole lot of problems. Seems to me that children in less developed cultures where none of this type of thinking goes on do just as well or better as children in developed cultures do.

Anyway, I do agree that just having a child doesn't make you an expert in them, nor does not having them preclude you from knowing anything about them. But I also often wonder how many people go into parenting thinking they're much better prepared for the task than some others, only to find out the book told them one thing and their kid behaves a completely different way, and get a little snippy with people who suggest the "book" method they've already tried and failed with? I remember reading a great series of diary articles over at Kuro5hin.com one time written by a novice beekeeper. He had read every book he could get his hands on about beekeeping, and then got into it, only to find out that a lot of the information the books gave him turned out to either not apply to his bees, or to be sporadically helpful. His conclusion was summed up with "bees can't read", so they don't know how they're "supposed" to react. And, well, neither can children.

-- Dave