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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

You can't put your kid in a room full of crisps, sweets, alcohol, drugs, pornography, and expect it to come out ten, fifteen years later as a healthy individual that is not an addict to none of them

I know this is bandied about a lot, but is this actually proven? With the exception of drugs, all of those you mention have been within easy reach for me (actually, as a Dutchman, even softdrugs were just one step away if I'd wanted to). Yet I don't consider myself addicted to any of those.

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I'm not a native speaker of English, so I wonder: does kid not mean person not yet adolescent? I'm referring to 0-14 yrs olds when I say kid. If we agree on that, and you still say, it's not proven, we can try, well then I can't do much than hoping you either don't have children or no child's responsibility is on you otherwise.

Reading his post I believe he meant the above mentioned things were within reach of him as a child (I don't believe he meant now as an adult).

" I can't do much than hoping you either don't have children or no child's responsibility is on you otherwise."

That's a strong statement to make. Implying he's unable to raise children because he'd like to see evidence that the internet actually has a negative influence on children.

I interpreted his message as he did not only want evidence for the internet, but also the other stuff I mentioned, and their effects on kids. I'm sorry if that wasn't the case.

No, I did not mean I wanted evidence of their effect on kids. I want evidence that "putting your kid in a room full of $bad_stuff" always leads to addiction, since that strikes me as nothing more than scare stories.

Good parents can raise their children correctly even with $bad_stuff present around them, that was the point I was trying to make.

> Good parents can raise their children correctly even with $bad_stuff present around them, that was the point I was trying to make.

I concur. But the internet exposure of kids is mostly not governed by parents. They either are alone with the connected device in their rooms, away from them, or with a mobile device out of their home. The best the parents can do is to educate the kids, but the public lacks the knowledge to effectively do so. They should be given the formation to be able to educate their children, and furthermore schools should educate minors on the use of tech.

"putting your kid in a room full of $bad_stuff" will mostly lead to addiction if the parent is not there to teach the kid: this is harmful to you; not you think?

Mostly agreed, yes. But I would rephrase it as "introducing kids to $bad_stuff without guidance is a bad idea": I don't think that permanent supervision should be required. Once the novelty wears off, and the parent is confident that the kid can behave themselves even in the presence of $bad_stuff, even "putting your kid in a room full of $bad_stuff" can be fine.

And I don't mean that in the sense of "the kids are fine with their heroin syringes", but in the sense "I can leave the cookie jar on the counter and it will still be there when I leave the room".

I think there exist records of hospital mix-ups with babies, with pretty profound differences changing them depending on what environment they wound up in, but this may be mostly anecdotal. One case in Japan like this but it illustrated wealth difference as opposed to what we're looking for here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1048109...

Provocative but not evidence. I did look up some twin studies but I can't find one with a clear vice/virtue environment study. Gwern is good at ferreting out this kind of information if you ask him.

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