The drunkard's walk is an oft used concept in math descrbing the behavior of random paths in various situations.  One of my favorites is the "drunk in the gutter".  It describes the drunkard walking down a city sidewalk.  His path is randomized so he might lurch toward the wall on his left or towards the gutter on his right.  In the morning you always find him in the gutter.  His randomness can't take him through the wall -- he bounces off it as many times as his random walk is fated to.  But eventually his random lurches will add up to put him in the gutter, he'll stumble there and remain until the morning.

 

Anticipating fatherhood I was concerned about inadvertently training my daughter to be a brat.  Her only method of communication of displeasure is to cry and the more plaintive her cry the more attention she'll command.  Therefore she'll stumble onto bigger and louder behaviors and we'll reinforce her all the way there until we've a brat on our hands.

 

In some sense I still believe this is true, and you have to counter this with reason and explicit trianing for politeness when she is old enough to understand.

 

But I'm learning that we aren't so important in that equation.  When my daughter sees something she wants, for example she loves gadgets and often wants my cell phone, and she can't have it she will briefly scream in rage.  This seems more an authentic and automatic representation of how she feels than it does a mode of communication taught to her by our response.  She really wants the cell phone.  Mercifully these moments are brief and she gets over it.  For now. 

 

I am unafraid of creating a brat.  We will or we won't and if we do we will have to train her out of it.  It's just the nature of things.

Many cool things are happening in the next few months.