Learning on the job
When my daughter was just starting to walk and talk, I read How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen, one of the most popular books for communicating with toddlers.1 One of the first chapters is on how to encourage cooperation—how to help them get dressed or leave the house when they don’t want to—and I was quickly overwhelmed:
1. Be Playful:
Make it a game. “Can we get all the cars into the box before the timer beeps? Ready … set … go!”
Make inanimate objects talk. “I’m an empty sock. I need a foot in me!”
Use silly voices and accents. “I … am … your … robot … Must … buckle … seat … belt … now.”
Pretend! “We need to climb this slippery mountain into the car seat.”
Play the incompetent fool. “Oh dear, where does this sleeve go? Over your head? No? On the arm? This is so confusing! Thank you for helping me!”
2. Offer a Choice: “Do you want to hop to the tub like a bunny, or crawl to the tub like a crab?”
3. Put the Child in Charge: “Johnny, would you set the timer and let us know when it’s time to leave?”
4. Give Information: “Tissues go in the trash.”
5. Say It with a Word (or a Gesture): “Trash!”
6. Describe What You See: “I see most of the blocks put away in the toy box. There are only a few blocks left to go.”
7. Describe How You Feel: “I don’t like food thrown on the floor.”
8. Write a Note: “Put me on your head before riding. Love, your bike helmet.”
9. Take Action Without Insult: “I’m putting the paint away for now. I can’t let you splatter the other kids.”
Simple, right? That's nine different techniques—13 if you count the sub-bullets of #1—to have ready to choose from on a moment's notice, all while your child is probably shouting and you’re running late for school. I couldn’t imagine being able to do all that.
But when I re-read it a year later, I realized almost everything on the list had become second nature.2 That's not to say that they're always successful; just that I use them instinctively, and they often help. From what I've seen, most other parents have developed their own tricks that generally follow this advice, even if the specifics differ. (In fact, that’s an advantage—if my attempt at using a stuffed animal to help us put shoes on isn’t working, Meredith can come to the rescue with her own tactic of making the shoe talk with a funny voice instead.)
Another way to put it: parents develop expertise at communicating with young children. Expertise is largely a know-it-when-you-see-it thing, but here's a definition I find useful: 1) you have a lot of knowledge about how something works, and 2) you can act on that knowledge to achieve your goals much more effectively than a non-expert, which requires 3) a sophisticated mental model, usually trained through experience, that compresses your knowledge into something you can act on instinctively.3
An expert jazz pianist knows the fundamentals of jazz music (what each chord is comprised of, what progressions they usually follow, which melodies sound interesting on top of them), can play complex sounds on the piano, and chooses what sound they want to play as they're performing.
An expert basketball player knows the best way to attack different defensive schemes, can dribble and shoot really well, and makes decisions for when to dribble and shoot based on split-second cues from the defense.
An expert at corralling a toddler knows different ways to help them focus, can communicate those strategies clearly, and chooses which one to use in the moment based on the mood, time pressure, which stuffed animals are nearby, etc. (Don’t think you’re not an expert just because it doesn’t always work—even the best basketball players miss half their shots too.)
People typically study expertise in fields like music, sports, and dance—where you practice a lot, get coaching on weak areas, and measure yourself against benchmarks so you know when you're getting better. But most things we do aren't like that, so I'm really interested in how expertise manifests in these other areas. Parenting is an example: there's no real way to practice beforehand (the closest I got was swaddling a stuffed pelican) and no time to practice once you’re doing it; you can only learn "on the job."
And yet most parents get much better over time at engaging with children, especially their own children. How does that happen? According to a framework that I love, there are four conditions that help us learn well:
Repetition: practicing something over and over again gives you opportunities to improve.
A child has to get dressed, get out the door on time, eat dinner, take a bath, brush their teeth, put on pajamas, go to bed ... and do it all again the next day!
Timely feedback: seeing the outcomes right away helps you learn what works well and what doesn’t.
You know right away if they're cooperating, distracted, or having a tantrum.
Task variety: facing different challenges encourages you to experiment with new techniques and forces you to learn generalizable skills, not just specific situations.
You corral a child with different goals, in different locations, and while experiencing different moods.
Progressive difficulty: as you improve, you need to face harder challenges to keep learning.
Older children learn more ways to get what they want even when they shouldn’t, and new considerations like potty training enter the mix over time.
You might notice that many aspects of parenting are not like this, and those can be really stressful. Is your preferred method of discipline helping your child grow up to be an independent decision-maker, or will they resent you for the rest of their lives? Don’t expect timely feedback; you’ll have to wait a decade or two to find out, and also it’ll be confounded by everything else they’ve experienced in their life, sorry!
But even for the everyday communication, it hasn’t really felt like leveling up: there are no exercises to master, no teacher giving out stickers, and (thanks to the progressive difficulty) I’m still failing a lot of the time. Remembering how I felt a year ago—rereading something from the past, or seeing parents of younger children—has helped me realize what I’ve learned and gain confidence for future challenges. This probably applies to any other unstructured domains too.
An adaptation of the more famous How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, focused on the parts most applicable to 2-7 year-olds.
Including the nuance that it’s most important to understand "being playful," because that one works the most reliably.
That’s not to say that experts are always acting purely on instinct alone—an expert scientist or writer will spend lots of time thinking deeply—but they can still make connections or generate ideas much faster than a non-expert would even with the same textbook knowledge, allowing them to push the envelope further.