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Game theory behind parenting methods

The story ‘game theories secrete of parents’ introduced a great parenting solution of 5 different kinds of dilemmas that all parents experienced while raising their kids. First, the picking dilemma expressed a great way ‘tit or tat’ to let kids volunteer to clean up their toys instead of being forced to clean up toys. Secondly,  Kale Conundrum conveyed that putting only one food in front of a kid might make them refuse to take the food, but putting four kinds of food in front of them instead of 1 will make them at least take two of the four kinds. Third kind of parenting method was called ‘credible punishment’, which talked about thinking of punishing while the kids were disobeying the rules instead of coming up a new punishment every time, so whenever the credibility was build, kids would spontaneously correct their behavior while you were closing your eyes pretending to think the punishment. Forth kind was called ‘bedtime ultimatum’, which talked about making the bedtime routine shorter by using games such as paper, scissor, stone to decide which book. The last kind was abut sleeting training, which helps avoid the situation that the children would only response to mother’s comfort if the father never wake up in the mid night with the child.

This topic is pretty interesting because it talked about really practical solutions by using game theory, ultimatum exchange to deal with parenting.

The picking dilemma applied most to the prisoner dilemma of game theory. The parents could only provide one choice for their kid, just like the policeman can force the prisoner to confess, which might lead to great rejection. However, both parents in to story and policeman is providing alternative choices, which seems to benefit kid and prisoners but actually benefits parents and policeman the most respectively

I think the bedtime story is a simplified application of ultimatum of exchange that we learned from class in chapter 12. Since there are exchange between the kid who won the game and had a opportunity to choose which book to read and the rest of the kids. However, it is also a problem for the winning kid to decide which book to choose, since if the book is to hard to read, other kids might disagree and they all got nothing to read. It is also a problem for kids who lose the paper-scissors-stone game to choose whether to lose the opportunity to read a book by objection or to at least have something to read by compromising the winning kid.

Link;http://online.wsj.com/articles/game-theory-secrets-for-parents-1405005848

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