Half a century ago, nursing books warned against being too cuddly and warm with children. Harry Harlow is an extremely famous psychologist who experimented with monkeys to show the opposite - that children seek affection and warmth, and it helps them grow. He gave monkeys a choice between two 'mothers' - a wire mother that dispensed milk and a cloth mother that had no food - and the monkeys overwhelmingly chose the cloth mother. Furthermore, monkeys that could choose only the wire mother later had psychological problems. This was groundbreaking work at the time. So you would expect that Harlow would apply the same lessons to his personal life, right? Not quite:

Harry Harlow did not discover what children need by watching his own. In fact, Harlow was a hard-drinking, possibly alcoholic, workaholic who ignored his two sons so completely that it led his first wife to divorce him. After his boys were grown, he reacquainted himself with them, but his younger son said that although they got along, "we were never father and son." In fact, Harlow's insights about child rearing were not based on studying children at all but came out of his research with monkeys.

Are the people who preach loudest about X the most likely to have shortcomings in their ability to do X? Maybe there are two reasons for preaching loudly about something: 1) You believe you're better at it than everyone else and want to stress its importance to raise your status. 2) People who lack skills in area X try to cover it up by overachieving in other areas, but remain unwilling or unable to improve their skills in area X.

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