TED - Jennifer Senior: For parents, happiness is a very high bar

TED JenniferSenior Parenting Hippocratic-Oath index

"I will try so hard not to hurt you." It was the Hippocratic Oath, and I didn't even know I was saying it. But it occurs to me now that the Hippocratic Oath is a much more realistic aim than happiness.

TED-2014-Senior-Parenting

• guides to raising a bilingual kid. 华裔家庭。
• why is it that raising our children is associated with so much anguish and so much confusion?
  Why is it that we are at sixes and sevens about the one thing human beings have been doing successfully for millennia, long before parenting message boards and peer-reviewed studies came along?
  Why is it that so many mothers and fathers experience parenthood as a kind of crisis? 新世界需要新史学。
• a very, very imaginative project that tracks people's happiness. 你的幸福是什么。
• I have been looking at what underlies these data for three years, and children are not the problem. Something about parenting right now at this moment is the problem. TED-2014-Herr-Bionics: human beings are not broken. Technology is broken, and technology is adequate.
• Parent, as a verb, only entered common usage in 1970. 不给力啊ungelivable，牛逼啊niubility。
• kids worked, on our farms primarily, but also in factories, mills, mines. Kids were considered economic assets. instead, and school became a child's new work. 工业革命，The second machine age
• Once kids stopped working, the economics of parenting changed. Kids became, in the words of one brilliant if totally ruthless sociologist, "economically worthless but emotionally priceless."
• "Homework is the new dinner." The middle class now pours all of its time and energy and resources into its kids.
• absent being able to anticipate the future, what we all do, as good parents, is try and prepare our kids for every possible kind of future, hoping that just one of our efforts will pay off. We teach our kids chess, thinking maybe they will need analytical skills. We sign them up for team sports, thinking maybe they will need collaborative skills, you know, for when they go to Harvard Business School. We try and teach them to be financially savvy and science-minded and eco-friendly and gluten-free, though now is probably a good time to tell you that I was not eco-friendly and gluten-free as a child. 全才，专才。培根：历史使人明智；诗词使人灵秀；数学使人周密；自然哲学使人深刻；伦理使人庄重；逻辑修辞学使人善辩。
• Either way, by the way, if you think it's hard for traditional families to sort out these new roles, just imagine what it's like now for non-traditional families: families with two dads, families with two moms, single-parent households. They are truly improvising as they go. 新兴家庭型构。
• "I will try so hard not to hurt you." It was the Hippocratic Oath, and I didn't even know I was saying it. But it occurs to me now that the Hippocratic Oath is a much more realistic aim than happiness.