Jennifer Senior Ted Talk Analysis

Holding the title of aunt since the mere age of thirteen and being a daughter I have really observed parenting in various situations. From an outside perspective I think parents sometimes get too caught up in wanting to shape their children to become the best person they can be that they often forget that their children are just that “children” and that in reality their behavior is natural. Jennifer senior mentions in her Ted Talk “…I do think that in our desperate quest to create happy kids, we may be assuming the wrong moral burden. It strikes me as a better goal, and, dare I say, a more virtuous one, to focus on making productive kids and moral kids, and to simply hope that happiness will come to them by virtue of the good that they do and their accomplishments and the love that they feel from us.” Which I think sums up parenting which wanting to discipline your children so they can go out to the world prepared but we tend to magnify their mistakes instead of optimizing

For a while we celebrated him every time he went potty but after sometime had passed we stopped, he started having accidents again and getting punished for them. In one of the readings titled parenting behaviorism is mentioned that it is the “theory of learning that simply states that children will repeat behaviors that they perceive to bring a desired reward while ceasing behaviors that they perceive bring punishments.” While for the most part this seem to apply to my nephew since once we stopped celebrating his ability to potty it seemed like he started to have accidents again. Here’s the thing about punishing him for having accidents is that we would put so much pressure on him and we often forgot that his behavior was normal. I think we made him feel like a bad kid when in reality it happens and I don’t think we should’ve punished him for