Attention deficit disorder. Like depression, it just looks like a sad excuse to most people. Even to those with some compassion, it’s puzzling at best.
Although I understand that there are a lot of ignorant people out there who offer useless or counterproductive child-rearing advice, I brissle at the idea that because one has not raised children, that one knows nothing about children and should keep one’s mouth shut.
First person example of why I feel this way.
About 10 years ago, I’m at the house of my (allegedly) good friends. It is 11:20pm. Their 2.5 year old son is throwing a temper tantrum. He hit me in the leg, hit his father, threw a toy at the piano and is generally carrying on.
I suggest that maybe he’s tired and they should put him to bed.
“Pfft! He’ll just cry!” (angry looks from his parents at my audacity)
“So?” I as innocently.
Mom goes ballistic. Tells me that she is the mother of a small child and therefore knows everything she needs to know about raising children (except, apparently, how to put a toddler to bed). I am a single male with no kids, therefore I know nothing about how to raise children. Therefore I am not EVER to tell them how to raise their child.
The night went south in a big hurry and I left.
That was Friday. Monday morning I’m in my cube waiting for a call from the DBA about my project. The dad calls. First words out of his mouth are how he just got to work, 3 hours late, because his son refused to go to bed the night before.
I let him have it. They didn’t want to hear me tell them how to raise their child, so I don’t want to hear how he’s too fucking stupid to put a 2 year old to bed. Slammed down the phone.
The next week, the kid has a bed time. It would be over a year before they made any real attempt to make the kid go to bed, though.
Foolishly, I remained their friend for another four years.
Having said that, I heartily agree with the basic premise that there are things that, if you have no experience with them, you should really just keep your mouth shut.
Boy, do I ever agree with you, Chimera. Can I recreate in my own head a parent’s instantaneous willingness to sacrifice their own life to protect their child’s? Well, no. However, that doesn’t mean I have no clue when it comes to dealing with kids. I’m a teacher. I have to run a classroom with anywhere from ten to 36 kids for ten months. I’d better be able to understand how to build a rapport with a child and enforce discipline.
My addition to the topic at hand is to say “giving birth”. No matter how graphic and colorful the description, I suspect that I will just not know unless I get to give birth.
Good example.
I’ve heard about Belarus from my parents and the newspapers, but I didn’t know how bad things were until I saw it with my own eyes. Every mention of mine of ways to fight the government gave the Belorussians plenty to laugh about.
“You want to sue the police?” :dubious: “Ahhhahaha!”
I also didn’t realize how filthy rich I was until I saw what poor really was. It took the experience of living in a Belorussian house to make me realize what real poor people go through. No air conditioning, rock hard mattresses and pillows, 56k modems, versions of windows lower than Millennium. processors lower than 200mhz… how can people tolerate this?
Driving.
No book will be able to make you good at it.
Parent of a disabled child. Nothing in life will prepare you for those lemons even if you make lemonade.
My cousin worked at a daycare for a couple of years, in the “Baby Room”. I think the place might’ve been understaffed, because, at age 18, she watched 4 babies, all on her own, for her entire shift, 40 hours/wk.
After her child was born, she told me motherhood was NOTHING like her daycare experience.
I agree that you can learn many wise and useful child-management skills through practice and exposure.
It’s not at ALL equivalent to parenthoood, though. Just isn’t.
In fact, I’d counter the OP and say I don’t think there’s anything significant you can really learn except through experience.
War. I have no first-hand experience of it, and precious little second-hand experience of it, but I like to think that if I did live through it I would do my very best to share my experiences with the next generation so they’d know what the shit is really like. But very few combat veterans seem to be willing to talk of it, and some try but break down into tears and are unable to continue. It seems to me that there’s something there that cannot be conveyed, 'cause I cannot imagine anything so horrifying that I would be literally unable to speak of it.
Being a victim of rape. Especially male rape.
Being on the opposite side of the “legitimate” government in a revolutionary struggle.
Being in an “interracial” marriage.
Thanks for sharing that story, Lobstermobster. Made me laugh.
I understand that a lot of management types go to management school, then they get hired to be management in a company with no experience of being an entry-level grunt. I would submit that working as an entry-level grunt should be mandatory for every management student who is someday going to manage workers. You can’t learn about being a wage slave from a book. Same with customer service type jobs - everyone in the world should have to work at a customer service job at some point in their life, preferably when they are young. You don’t know what it’s like behind that counter or on the other end of that phone unless you’ve been there.
dammit, featherlou, you beat me to it. The former president of one of my customers retired last year. A few years ago, he must have realized that he wasn’t going to live forever, after all, so he brought in his daughter, who was a housewife at that point, gave her a quick, two or three year crash training and then set her up as the new president.
Unfortunately, the training may be all to appropriate as the company may crash. Employees are quitting left and right, as she has no experience, and brought in someone else from outside of the industry as her VP.
In contrast, at another company in the industry, the former president turned over most of the day-to-day decisions years ago to his former righthand man, who was made president after a few years of this. That president just turned over the day-to-day decisions to a younger man now. The son of the original president (and majority stockholder) has been working in the company for almost 20 years, (he’s 46) but they felt he didn’t have enough experience yet, so he’ll have to wait for another 10 years.
Guess which company is doing well now?
The classic example of this is Property Ladder on British TV. The scrumptious presenter Sarah Beeny is a hugely successful multi-millionaire from investing in residential property, improving it, and selling it on for a huge margin. Yet when she comes along to advise the TV program’s subjects on their own development projects, they consistently ignore her advice.
“You don’t need to spend £5,000 on a bathtub,” she’ll say, and the idiots will go “but we like it”. You can see Sarah squirming as she tries not to slap them all on the foreheads and call them dimwits, as she says “yes, but you’re not developing this property for you, you’re developing it for the market” - but they go on totally to ignore her and end up screwing their profit margin. Her services as a consultant would cost thousands and thousands of pounds, and they’re getting it for free, and they still ignore her advice. Eejits.
For me, it’s my damn clients. So many of them know nothing but still insist on telling me how to alter the website I’ve made for them, to make it less good. I have worked in this industry for eleven fecking years. No, I’m not perfect, but I know a lot, lot more than you. What you’re telling me to do will make the site less good for its users. Do you want it less good? No? Then why are you telling me to do it then? I will do it for you, because you’re my client, but why on earth won’t you listen to me?
This extends to my brother (who has since admitted I was right), and a good friend, who waited until the site was finished before he told me that he wanted the design changed. I nearly thumped him.
There’s an adage that I’ve learned that states “everyone’s a designer”. I guess that’s what it is.
Apologies for the hijack: Priceguy, if you feel this way I urge you to get hold of the Spike Milligan War Diaries. There are six of them, but they’re very short, and they’re also hugely entertaining. The ones dealing directly with the war are:
Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall
Rommel? Gunner Who?
Monty: His Part in My Victory
and
Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall
The other two - Where have all the bullets gone? and Goodbye Soldier are about the aftermath.
Now, I have no way of judging, since I’ve never been in a war, but I’ve never read anything about war that seemed so authentic. They feel so honest, and are truly warts-and-all, including the revelation that for some of the soldiers, it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Long periods of boredom, during which the soldiers get up to all sorts of mischief, followed by interludes of sheer horror. It also covers the incident that gave him the post-traumatic stress which appeared to trigger his bipolar disorder. Highly recommended. [/hijack]
I think, for many combat vets, the problem isn’t that they’re unable to speak of it - it’s that when they do speak of it, they feel that no one quite hears what they’re saying.
There’s so much assumed background to any military experience that a lot of the basics that are uncommented upon for those who’ve experienced combat that when they do try to talk about it with those who’ve not had the experience - they feel like they’re trying to talk to a brick wall. Or worse. Someone who claims to understand what they’re talking about, and who clearly is missing some of the most important (for the teller) parts of the situation.
There’s an old parable that’s become first a metaphor, and now a cliche for this: Seeing the Elephant. The parable goes that six blind men are told to examine an object that will be presented to them, and then try to determine what the object was based on their experiences. After they each investigated a different part of the elephant, they compare their answers: A spear(tusk), a snake(trunk), a curtain(ear), a tree(leg), a wall(body) and a rope(tail). Because the blind men couldn’t take in the whole of what they experienced, they didn’t have a full picture.
Combat vets will often talk about this or that person having “seen the elephant.” I’ve even seen it here on the Dope. The feeling is that no one who wasn’t there would ever be able to understand everything that the combat vet experiences.
I think this is a good example of lack of experience. My wife and I went to Tulane ('95) and attended Saturate parties. I know chickens (but goats much better). However, I didn’t live in either Sharp or Monroe halls so I was never the one to ever catch that chicken or experience the intimacy thereafter so I have no idea what you could be feeling.
I have no idea what you are trying to communicate to me. It was the Kentucky girl with chicken experience that was able to capture it during its brief reign of terror on our floor (monroe)
Definitely how to deal with small kids - and you DON’T have to be a parent (anyone exposed to them - even older brothers and sisters have the experience). I’m not talking here about the details of things like breast versus bottle, or spanking versus other punishments etc, but just having the confidence that although it can be exhausting, it’s NOT difficult to look after small kids in the way that, say, computer programming is difficult. And, babies are NOT fragile - you can pick 'em up without fear of breaking them.
Oh my god I do NOT know how to deal with small children. When my sister had her baby I refused to hold it until she was big enough that I knew that if I dropped her I wouldn’t kill her. My dads the same way. We sat together and stared at my mom and my sister with the baby. Its even harder when they want to talk to you. I just cant separate who I’m talking to. I’m just like “god so this Madeleine McCann business…its some real shit huh?” or “hey man do you have any nitrous?”
Wow, lobstermobster, I also lived on the 8th floor of Monroe, before either you or Shagnasty were at Tulane. I don’t think anyone in my year would have been qualified to catch the chicken.