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tadamsmar comments on Should people require a mandatory license for parenting? - Less Wrong
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With respect to parenting? A fair amount, I'd say.
If we are going to be talking about "sound science", first I'd like to see relevant non-subjective quantifiable metrics which are reasonably stable across environments (e.g. cultural) and individuals. Then I would expect a description of the major mechanisms underlying behavior which should be pretty universal and reliably identifiable. And finally I'd want an ability to make forecasts, say what will happen in cases both with specific interventions and without.
Given that I don't think psychology as a whole qualifies as "sound science", I don't really see how parenting advice can pull it off.
I agree about psychology as a whole. How about the practical part of behaviorism, operant conditoning?
It's quantifiable and reasonably good at forecasts.
Surely you realize that stability across individuals if not really to be expected overall in detail. People don't always react the same in detail because of genetic difference (as an example). Stabilty is likely not evidenced for the most extremely genetically different individuals, and it is not to be expected. Environment and culture can lead to variations as well. Stability is not to be expected in general, you just need to explain variation.
Operant conditioning is the foundation. In parenting, add to that the discovery that adult attention is a powerful positive reinforcer for most children. The methodological advances in parenting are largely built on that foundation.
It looks much more like engineering than like science to me. I don't know it enough to have an opinion on how well it works.
Of course and that's one of the reasons for me having doubts about the "sound science" label.
Post factum..? :-)
In any case, if it all worked as well as you claim, surely psychotherapy for kids would be very effective. I suspect this is not the case in reality.
Actually if it works as well as I claim, psychotherapy for kids might be less effective. It involves changing the kid's environment. Psychotherapy can't do that. You have to get the parents to be willing to change and give them training.
On the contrary, the fact that psychotherapy works at all is evidence that the operant conditioning methods I am pushing are not the whole story, and of course operant conditioning is not the whole story.
By your definition, medicine is not a sound science because stability overall in detail is not to be expected due to genetic variability.
It is not.
Notice how only recently the idea of "evidence-based medicine" appeared and how much pushback there was (and is) against that idea.