Parents as programmers

Sunday August 19 2007

by Fitzgerald Trevis Scott

I do programming. No not C++ or Java, at least not regularly, primarily VBA and some VB.Net. Most people I mention this too immediately know three things without me saying more than the first sentence.

1. They know I know everything about computers, from the day they were invented to how to build a talking one.
2. They know that anything I could possible attempt to do with a computer is easy for me to do and should always take a couple minutes.
3. And they know that they can't do anything that I do.

I'm sure that if you don't program you already knew the above once I mentioned programming. Aside from these "truths" it amazes me how much programming people do especially parents and they don't realise it. Programming a child involves conditioning and debugging The Most Powerful Computer in existence. True, children absorb amazing amounts of information on their own but between the time that they learn to speak and when they learn to read, which should enable them to access terabytes upon  terabytes of information on their own, parents are literally programming these astounding devices every waking moment they are with them.

Eat with your spoon, close your mouth when you talk, ask excuse me before you get up, put your plate in the sink and/or wash it. This is how you put on your clothes and tie your shoes, this is how you brush your teeth, this is why you brush your teeth. You should be quiet now, you can sing and play now. This is how you treat other people, this is how you share.

This is pretty much the same thing that I have to do with a computer when I have to program something. Of course I don't have to make sure the  program is being taken care of 24/7 and I don't have to change any diapers but then the program can't learn on its own.

Parents have to go through a lot more of the same steps I take with a program. They have an idea of what they would like their children to learn. They instruct their children with basic guidelines and then every time an exception appears they have to create new instructions to account for that particular case. Basically they have to debug the behavioural algorithms that they set up for their children and they have to do it over and over and over. If they aren't clear, they don't have a long term goal, they don't know what they're doing or don't want to and aren't committed they will fail with as much certainty as I would if any of these conditions applied to me while I was writing a program.

Unfortunately there is no oversight for parenting, no testing to see if the resulting behavioural algorithms are faulty or anything else for that matter. For better or worst the products of our successes and failures as parents are let loose on society.