Pleased to meet you, I'm dad

[andrewducker]

It's only recently that I've realised that the reason that there are "dad jokes" with the structure "I'm hungry. - Pleased to meet you Hungry, I'm dad." is not because dads are determined to annoy their children but because children phrase everything as a statement about their, well, state.

I've had long conversations about how Sophia can turn her internal state ("I'm hungry.") into a request ("Dad, can I have something to eat please.") to very little effect. If she feels something then we are informed, and then it's up to us to solve the issue rather than her to formulate some kind of solution and bring *that* to us.

Clearly I'm far too demanding of a four year old, but I do at least understand now why dads resort, after a while, to annoying their children in return, in the vain hope that it might work where discussion has failed.

Comments

[gingicat]

I think you've put your finger on how Hint Culture overtakes Ask Culture.

[andrewducker]

It's all the fault of the children?

[gingicat]

It's developmentally appropriate to children, and some adults either never develop the Ask habit or grew up with people who had the Hint habit.

[andrewducker]

I've known people who were terribly "Guess", and they almost always come from homes where having your own needs and stating them out loud in a direct manner is punished.

[snippy]

Does "not having those needs met but instead being compelled to listen to a joke" count as punishment?

I mean, when I'm hungry I don't want a discourse on the amusement factors of how I stated it. And kids usually can't identify their feelings in their body until they're urgent (hence the difficulty of potty training).

My approach was to say "I'm really glad you told me that so we can get you something to eat!" And, of course, to model the behavior I wanted to see - at a different time from the hunger, blatantly say "I'm going to be hungry at noon like always. What shall I have to eat? Do I need to do anything to prepare that now?"

[simont]

I don't think that's even a child thing. Plenty of adults in my experience are just as prone to stick to reporting facts and abdicate responsibility for making a plan!

[andrewducker]

From a tech support point view I'd settle for just having more detail in the facts than "It doesn't work."

[simont]

That too! But at the 'feature request' end of the spectrum, I see a definite tendency for people to provide nothing but requirements, and leave specification (let alone implementation) to someone else.

(Indeed, often they just provide one requirement, and don't even stop to consider what other requirements it might need to coexist with, let alone whether a specification can possibly exist that satisfies them all at once, let alone what that specification might concretely be. Moreover, as often as not, they'll phrase even the one requirement they've noticed as vaguely as possible.)

That might very well just be because providing a single half-arsed requirement is the easy part, and everybody would like to avoid having to do the hard part. Though it also puts me in mind of siderea's comment some years ago that the waterfall-type division of responsibility into requirements / specification / design / implementation / testing has a built-in notion of high and low status, in that that model implicitly expects work to flow from higher-status people to lower-status people, because transfer of responsibility has the force of a command, in the sense that the recipient of the previous stage of work was not consulted about it and is nonetheless expected to just get on with it, rather than send it back with complaints. I do wonder if people who send feature requests in the form of requirements as vaguely specified as possible are semi-intentionally trying to attempt a piece of social manoeuvring in which they land-grab the high-status role before anyone else in the interaction can.

But this is getting a long way off your original topic of dad jokes. (Though that does give me the idea of cultivating a set of dad-joke style responses for feature requestors of that kind...)

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, yet another reason why Waterfall doesn't work. Although, theoretically, it's supposed to allow for some information to go back the way, the more layers there are, the harder that is.

The most effective I've ever been was when there were 4 of us around a table - an analyst, a DBA, a back-end person, and a GUI person (me), and we could manage the whole process end to end between ourselves.

[skington]

Ah, so:

“I’m hungry!”
“Huh. It works on my machine”

?

[darkoshi]

That reminds me that I used to say "I'm bored" a lot when I was young, hoping for my parents to give me something fun to do.

[andrewducker]

"Can we go play in the garden" (or some other specific request) is likely to work rather better!

[ng_moonmoth]

My folks got us out of that habit pretty quickly, using a very common tactic. The response was always along the line of "Well, I could use some help with [some household task]. How about you pitch in?" And the less time since the last time one announced boredom, and the more times boredom had been announced, the more onerous or time-consuming the tasks became.

It didn't take any of us too long to work out that finding ways to entertain ourselves, or taking an early offering, were much preferable to holding out for better.

[qilora]

you are not too demanding, you are simply helping the child to grow.

and being a girl, she might pick up the clues on this "effective communication" a bit quickly.

[ninetydegrees]

Some of my 6th grade students do this all the time too! 'I've forgotten my copybook', 'my pen rolled over there',...

[bens_dad]

My mother was taught (at an english private boarding school) to say "would you like some (specific food)" rather than "please could you pass me the (dish of food)".
Asking for things was not done; it suggested that the other person was not good enough at intuiting your needs, and ladies were not to be seen to have needs or desires.

I had always thought of this as a story about teaching ladies to be hyper-aware of other people's needs, but it does push a hinting culture.