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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

Physical beatings, not so much, but difference in attitude, definitely. To boldly caricature, in America it's all about how every child is a special snowflake whose antics must not just be tolerated but encouraged; while in "Europe" (France), children in adult spaces like restaurants must conform to adult rules or be punished.

Edit: Hmm, that came off snarkier than I intended. I didn't intend to imply that either approach is necessarily superior, just that surely there's a happy medium somewhere between the two extremes.

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It's getting like this in Europe as well. Little snowflakes. Now at least one adult has to take to and pick up kids from school until 11 or 12 years old where I am from. When I was 7 years old and started first grade we went to school which was 2km away and came home alone from the first day.

Currently we are all raising kids that will not be ready for the world in 10-20 years. I am sure of that. Kids from other parts of the world will have the advantage in pretty much all fields.

Oh yeah? Back in MY day we walked 10 miles to school! Uphill! Both ways!

Back then a "little snowflake" was what we called our classmates who froze to death walking home from school in a blizzard!

In actual parts of Europe, kids DID walk 10 (or close) km to school, often uphill, both ways, and not that far back ago. That's not some BS folklore.

Here's a fifties school to get an idea: http://aromalefkadas.gr/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/68.jpg

This is from around the fifties. The kids aren't doing yoga or something -- they really don't have shoes -- they usually had just an incredibly warn-out pair at most, which they wore as part of their "good outfit" (for going to important events, church, etc).

No school buses -- actually no highways between lots of rural villages until late 60s, and a single school (in the central/bigger village) catering also for 3-4 nearby villages in what could be a 10-20 km radius.

And yes, they also did that with snow.

Yes, you don't need to go more than 60 years back before even the socialist democracy utopia Norway was radically different from today. My grandfather grew up in the 40's and 50's, having eight siblings. At thirteen, his father died, so the three oldest boys (aged 11, 13 and 15) had to stop going to school and start working on fishing boats to provide for the family. He lost four of his cousins when they were trying to salvage scrap iron from a naval mine left after the war and it exploded.

The stories of our grandparents are stories that we would associate with a war-torn country in the third world if they happened today.

My father walked one and a half hour to school and back (big city in the netherlands). I walked for 20 mins until I went to high school where I used the bike. I think these days most kids bike to school my estimate is at least 80%. Don't know about other European countries but dropping your kids off is not the norm after the age of 8.

My parents and aunts/uncles did indeed do this to get to school in the 50's in Eastern Europe. The school was in a different town so they had no choice.

> at least one adult has to take to and pick up kids from school until 11 or 12 years old where I am from

Where is this? Do you mean by law, or is this just some social expectation? I find it hard to imagine how one would go about enforcing this, and it seems pretty silly for schools in cities and urban areas where kids are often living ~5-10 minutes walk from their school...

Are you talking about the UK?

> in America it's all about how every child is a special snowflake whose antics must not just be tolerated but encouraged

America has a sizable population who think that beating your children is okay. That's not limited to the home - 31 states have abolished corporal punishment in schools but it's still permitted in 19 other states. Corporal punishment is widespread in Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi schools. Corporal punishment is routine in some schools in Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

It's only in 2011 that parents had the right to prevent their children being hit at school.

(This is all public schools. Hitting children in private schools is legal in all but 2 states.)

Attempts to ban hitting children in US schools usually fail, although attempts to reintroduce hitting children in schools also fail.

In the places where hitting children is legal the rates of violence against children is possibly rising, partly because of efforts to reduce use of suspension and expulsion.

And this isn't just children: 18 and 19 year olds attending school are sometimes hit.

Ah yes. Someone small and very easy to shape and to scar, that looks up to you and loves you in the only way someone totally independent does = the only one you are allowed hit.

Not only is that totally effed up, but there is hardly anything that speaks in favour of it.

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