I used to participate in the online gifted community and was somewhat respected as a knowledgeable person with good ideas. As such, people would email me and talk to me about their parenting challenges. So I got to talk to a fair number of parents who were at wit's end. In many cases, I was able to help them untangle their mess.

A common theme is that bright toddlers can wind up with screwy ideas because of being bright toddlers. They are just smart enough to leap to ridiculous conclusions based on partial information and incomplete mental models.

For a time, my oldest was deathly afraid of ladybugs. We lived on the third floor and there was a tall tree just outside his window. He ended up with yellow and black ladybugs in his bedroom.

He was terrified. I laughed about it, but shut the door and let him sleep in my room. I couldn't understand why he was so afraid of these harmless insects, but I respected the fact that he was.

Years later, he was able to tell me what he couldn't articulate at the time of the incident: because they were yellow and black and he knew bees were yellow and black, he was convinced they were bees. He couldn't explain how he knew the color while having no idea they looked nothing like bees.

When he was about seven, he similarly reacted with terror to rolly pollies. They are completely harmless.

So I collected a few up and put them in a dish with lettuce. I figured he was mistaking their antennae for mandibles, and he was. He thought they would bit him.

I told him they eat plants and showed him the chewed lettuce. I explained the antennae were how they smelled. They were not for biting. I held them in my hand and showed my son "See, they are smelling me."

He got over his fear of these harmless bugs. His fear was based on incorrect conclusions due to partial info and the ability to make inferences.

After providing the right mental models to some parents, they were able to help their children also let go of phobias based on similar circumstances.

But most parents don't have access to those mental models. Instead, they are given models that make the problem worse.

Humans are not going to stop having a childhood phase. We aren't going to start springing fully formed from incubators or something like that. There will always be a long period of growth in which they are taking in a lot of knowledge.

Furthermore, parents in the US are going thrown to the wolves. There are studies and articles out there showing that American parents are incredibly stressed out in ways and to degrees you don't see in most developed countries.

If we want parents to do a better job with their kids, we need to design a supportive system that helps them raise their children. One of the consequences of our current model is that the societal message to parents is that authority is inherently abusive and cannot be trusted. This tends to poison their relationship to their children. If society were more of a "good steward" for the people, parents would have an easier time being good stewards to their kids.

If you don't put those pieces in place, adding aggressive measures to take kids from parents just deepens the problem.

Positing that parents are merely intentionally abusive for no real reason and there isn't a biological basis and then seeking to add more punishment to the system is broken on the face of it. A lot of abusive parents are trying to control a child and simply don't know how to get good results. A punishment model isn't very effective.

I was a homemaker and full-time mom for years. I am frequently pissed all over by career women who think what I did has no value. I have been told he people on Hacker News that college education is wasted on a mom and homemaker.

But the reality is that raising healthy people is a serious challenge and requires a lot of knowledge and skill, especially if there are any special needs, including a high IQ. Very smart children are endlessly curious and "curiosity killed the cat." Patents of gifted kids are often tearing their hair out.

And we aren't providing them the support they need. Then we wonder why so many people are dysfunctional.