As someone who is creative and regularly does things that make me want to beat my head against a wall, the idea that you get to be the kind of person who does that through agony and pain and starvation is just...bad.

I mean, just look at what behavior Can Opener Dad is reinforcing.

1. He is doing a puzzle but is hungry so he asks his nine-year-old to make him a meal.

2. She does not say no. She asks “how.”

He interprets this to mean that she actually wants him to make him a meal.

3. If he really wanted to teach her to value the possibility of independent thinking, he would praise and reinforce behavior that put the onus for meal-making on the person who wanted it, especially if the wanting person was an adult!

He does not.

4. Instead, he tells her to get a can of beans and put it in a pot, and then it turns out she doesn’t know how to use a can-opener.

5. He tells us, total internet strangers, that his daughter is bad at spatial reasoning. Likelihood that he says this to her as well? High.

Great way to start off your life learning task is to tell the person doing it that they are unlikely to succeed.

6. Spoiler alert: she does not succeed. And he does not offer any assistance. He asks her to identify the parts of the can opener and figure out how they’re gonna work.

7. There’s absolutely NOTHING wrong with teaching a kid how a can opener works by encouraging them to be curious about function! And to look at it and admire it! And to offer clues when they try to use it the wrong way, clues like “what if you turned it around?”

8. He does NONE of that.

Instead, he declares that NOBODY is eating until this fucking can of beans gets opened. Six hours elapse. She’s hungry. Her brain isn’t working. The can is not looking good.

9. Reminder: this all started because he wanted his nine-year-old daughter to make him a fucking meal because he was doing a puzzle.

10. Anyway, eventually she figures it out and he decides that he is a Good Father, and a lot of people praise this because oh wow he just taught his daughter that if you suffer you can figure things out!

11. But as a simple brain matter, the reward she got for this (basic survival) does not compensate for the six hours of pain and belittlement.

12. You don’t build up a kid’s confidence by making them take six hours to figure out a one-minute task. If you wanted to do the “learn how to use a can opener without me showing you directly” thing, you could have done it in five.

13. You let them try. You ask questions that help them see the aligning of the functionality. You get them the success SOON and if they don’t get to success soon enough you lower the bar because you fucked up.

14. This is like saying “I made my kid run a marathon!” okay look, I’m not saying kids can’t run marathons, but did you start with a half-mile jog and work your way up?

Making someone run a marathon without giving them the tools and the training, both physical and mental, to do it—and most importantly, teaching them that they can say, no, this isn’t for me, I want to stop—is just abuse.

Anyway, I think a few fundamental lessons from dog training are relevant to teaching things in general, not just to kids, but also to adults.

1. Dog training should end while dog training is still fun for the dog. Otherwise dog learns that dog training is bad.

2. Dog gets frustrated if dog does not succeed. If dog is not succeeding at one task, take a step back and let dog do something dog knows how to do.

And while humans understand words, this last one still holds true:

3. Dogs understand behavior a lot more than dogs understand words. If behavior says “bad dog,” dog learns he is a bad dog, no matter what words you use. If behavior says “good dog,” dog learns he is a good dog.

We have a really, really shit work culture in the United States because we do not believe 1. Or 2. Or 3. We valorize working painfully long hours with little reward, which is an intensely bad thing to do to our brains.

And I think the reason Can Opener Dad makes people happy is because people see him as teaching his daughter the True Valor of pointless, lengthy, costly struggle, while overlooking all her needs, which is the true American Way.

Whoops, mea culpa. I had read the first tweet as him saying he was hungry, but that was a misreading. Sorry. Rest of the thread still applies, though. https://twitter.com/lindaholmes/status/1345738508691005440?s=20