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Comment by hmwhy | Hacker News Reader

This is from someone on the receiving end and is probably slightly older than your kids—I think it's great that you are teaching your kids how to deal with conflicts and making them think, but I'm not sure that stressing them to the point of snapping is a good thing.

My dad did that to me and he still does it occasionally even when I'm "in the right"; I think he probably means well (he claims that he does when I confront him about it), but it's still an awful feeling that doesn't make me thankful of what he does or like him more. If you really do make your kids feel like that you are bullying them, maybe you should consider cutting it back a little.

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Yeah, there's a very big difference between friendly debate and bullying. Having been exposed to both from my parents I can assert that one gave me life skills and the other gave me trauma and problems with interpersonal relationships that I'm still recovering from.

Haha, my eldest child is 5. We kind of stress our kids since they're young enough to communicate. They don't enjoy it in the moment, but bear no grudge.

We try to be very careful with damage control. We honestly talk it out. My daughter is good with labeling her feelings. She would say things like "Mom loves to pick on me for no reason, but I know she's just kidding," or "I was really angry with you this morning, because you glued the wallpaper without me, but I'm not angry anymore."

And when they do get angry, we talk it out, what they're pissed about, say sorry, and how to fix it.

I think it's sort of like exercise. We take care to not go past the 'injury' point, but sometimes it happens and we try to avoid it next time.

I do not pick on my kids without reason and they are able to express they are angry about wallpaper too. There are plenty on naturally occurring points of difference and topics, there is no need for me to go out of way to stress them out to the point of breaking.

I teach them that if some kids do that to them, it is their right to defend themselves or retaliate (otherwise they would end up submissive victims of bullying, have seen that when I was child multiple times). I also teach then that if someone do it to others, it is their right to defend that other person too from bullying.

I'm assuming there's a little bit of a vernacular mismatch here. People hear that you're "picking on" the kids or stressing them intentionally and conflate it with actual pettiness or degradation, instead of training the children to process and understand criticism without getting defensive, which is probably more along the lines of what you mean. I'd suggest you use words that are less likely to cause false associations on this topic, as it is highly sensitive.

That said, I think that the child's tolerance usually develops organically via interaction with other children, and the biggest way to help with this is to give the child a lot of siblings.

We should be careful not to "overengineer" our children's childhood, especially not in ways that are ripe for misinterpretation in hindsight.

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