You have undoubtedly seen this kind of seductive post in various parenting groups or on Xiaohongshu:
“Tested and proven! My four-year-old little terror used to fight sleep to the bitter end every night. Since I started this picture book plus white noise routine, he’s out the second his head hits the pillow! Highly recommend to all you tired moms out there!”
Below it, a long line of people leaving comments like “Link please” and “Claiming this luck.”
A fortnight later, look at the half of the parents who followed suit and bought the items. Some children indeed went to bed earlier. Others remained stuck at square one, still tossing and turning until midnight. And some became so overstimulated by the bedtime stories that they ended up even more wired.
But guess what? The parents who saw no results, or whose kids got more wired, will absolutely not broadcast it in the group. They will simply toss the picture books into a corner in silence, spending the dead of night wondering if their child has bad genes, or if they themselves are just massive failures.
In this internet parenting echo chamber, the only sound you will ever hear is the banging drums of the winners.
You treat this noise as “high-quality parenting input,” using it as the core framework for setting rules for your child or enrolling them in early education.
But cognitive science has a name for this: Survivorship Bias.
There is a classic thought experiment that every parent agonizing over “not knowing what to do” should consider.
Suppose there is a family restaurant on a certain street. Over the past few years, it has gone through seven owners, all of whom went bankrupt. Now, the eighth owner moves in, confidently declaring: “My concept is different. I can make this work.”
Do you think they will succeed?
Most people’s intuition would say: Maybe—what if their concept actually is good?
But probabilistic thinking tells you with absolute ruthlessness: The street has already proven through seven consecutive failures that the problem is highly unlikely to be the owner or the concept; it is the location.
This is the distinction neuroscientists make between the “inside view” and the “outside view.” In parenting, the inside view is: “What brilliant method did I use to cure her dawdling?” The outside view is: “What erratic, unpredictable fluctuations naturally occur in the neural development of a three- or four-year-old?”
If your child suddenly becomes well-behaved, focused, and starts sleeping on time this week…
You will undoubtedly rack your brain trying to remember: “What did I do right last weekend? Was it because I took her to an art exhibition? Or because I switched her to a new flavor of vitamins?”
You will always be biased toward attributing good outcomes to your own brilliant decision-making.
Former World Series of Poker champion and universally recognized top decision-making expert Annie Duke once said something incredibly blunt and chilling:
“What determines a person’s final outcome always comes down to just two things: luck, and the quality of their decisions. And luck is something you cannot control.”
What does this mean?
It means that the next time you see a viral “Tested and proven! How I cured my four-year-old son’s separation anxiety” post in a moms’ group…
Before you get emotionally swept up and try to copy her exact routine…
First, erect an impenetrable firewall in your mind and ask yourself one critical question:
“Did her child stop crying because she used that overly complex goodbye routine? Or did she simply stumble into dumb luck, and the kindergarten just happened to hand out new toys that day?”
Because the truly fatal traps in parenting are often the most counterintuitive:
An entirely illogical, bad decision can actually yield a good outcome. For instance, you lose your temper today and scream at your four-year-old, “If you don’t put those toys away right now, I’m throwing them all in the trash!” She gets terrified and immediately obeys. The outcome is “good”; the efficiency is exceptionally high. But you cannot conclude that “yelling and intimidation is a good decision for setting rules.”
Conversely, a highly rigorous, excellent decision can yield a disastrously bad outcome. For instance, you consult developmental psychology, apply the most gentle and firm empathetic approach, crouch down patiently, and spend twenty minutes communicating with her about why she cannot wear sandals on a rainy day. The result: she still breaks down in tears, rolls on the floor, leaves you drenched in sweat, and ultimately forces you to compromise out of sheer exhaustion. The outcome is “bad,” but this in no way means your decision to choose “gentle and firm communication” was wrong.
Being able to completely decouple the “good or bad of the immediate outcome” from the “quality of your decision-making as a parent”…
That is your first step toward rationality on this journey of parenthood. This is called “desensitizing yourself to immediate outcomes.”
This trap is exceptionally destructive when we are raising toddlers.
Because it so easily breeds either a false sense of control or entirely unnecessary, crushing guilt.
Just because your child happens to not get sick today does not mean your decision to let her eat three ice creams yesterday was right. And just because she wet the bed tonight does not mean letting her drink half a glass of milk before bed was an unforgivable dereliction of duty.
Every parent’s claim of “This is exactly how I disciplined her back then, which is why she is so well-behaved today” is, in fact, highly suspect.
That is fundamentally not some unassailable compendium of wisdom; it is merely an incredibly flimsy, heavily filtered, isolated data point that happened to be blessed by the gods of probability.
It holds absolutely no value worth copying.
Next time you are at home, feeling gratified and wanting to take credit for your child’s sudden “improvement,” or feeling deeply remorseful over a “bungled disaster”…
Try to detach yourself from that ecstasy or frustration.
Silently flip that coin of rationality in your mind:
“Was this good execution on my part, or simply good luck?”
Grasp this concept. It allows you to give yourself a break, and to give a break to that less-than-one-meter-tall tiny human you have been scrutinizing so relentlessly.
—— Decision-making can be practiced.
