I greatly respect the people I’ve interacted with on HN, but I would stop far short of assuming that intelligence and competence in something like hacking automagically transfers over to an orthogonal skill like parenting. This is partly because of my own anecdotal experience raising children while working in software development, and partly because of what I’ve observed which is that nearly every successful professional class assumes that they are good parents and clearly superior to people who are financially unsuccessful.
Often times, they are. Some people have poor life skills that translate directly into poor parenting skills. Some people have good life skills that seem to cross over directly into good parenting skills. But some poor people are great parents, and some successful people do not practice good parenting... Yet.
One of the attributes of being a good parent is to recognize when you could be even better. Thus, I guess my real message is that regardless of how we view our parenting skills, we ought to be open to the possibility that advice like this may apply to us even if we aren’t living in a trailer.
(Disclosure: I live in an extremely modest cottage that is Toronto’s equivalent to a trailer home).
Slightly facetious with the HN == good parenting comment. But in general, if you are the type of person that likes to learn, problem solves and strives to improve, you'll do fine at parenting. "Approach parenting like a startup" isn't such bad advice. In general.
Dwelling type, of course, is immaterial. I was illustrating a group of people who have extremely poor judgement, children being only one of them (i.e. you shouldn't be renting a giant TV if you can't pay rent or provide for your children).
I greatly respect the people I’ve interacted with on HN, but I would stop far short of assuming that intelligence and competence in something like hacking automagically transfers over to an orthogonal skill like parenting. This is partly because of my own anecdotal experience raising children while working in software development, and partly because of what I’ve observed which is that nearly every successful professional class assumes that they are good parents and clearly superior to people who are financially unsuccessful.
Often times, they are. Some people have poor life skills that translate directly into poor parenting skills. Some people have good life skills that seem to cross over directly into good parenting skills. But some poor people are great parents, and some successful people do not practice good parenting... Yet.
One of the attributes of being a good parent is to recognize when you could be even better. Thus, I guess my real message is that regardless of how we view our parenting skills, we ought to be open to the possibility that advice like this may apply to us even if we aren’t living in a trailer.
(Disclosure: I live in an extremely modest cottage that is Toronto’s equivalent to a trailer home).