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Comment by hashmp | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree with this, but I can understand why they are able to do it.

Kids don't judge. As a kid, you can meet another kid and get straight in there asking the important questions in life and have no fear about being judged or even to care if you are judged.

Do you play Pokemon go? Bingo. Got an xbox? No? Ps4? Etc etc. Never ending list of stuff to keep asking until you hit the mark with no fear.

As an adult you have to be careful what to say for fear of offending them, or to give the wrong impression. Kids have none of these fears.

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Kids do judge, that's the point of bullying. They don't care about whether they might act inappropriately in a adult sense, but they still care about what others think of them.

The real difference, I'd say, is that kids are very easily bored. They get majorly annoyed if they don't have anything to do for more than three minutes, so they leave no time for awkwardness: they'll either pester everyone around them for attention until they either get a playmate or just get tired and start playing alone.

Plus, pretty much all kids know how to play pretend, so it doesn't take much for them to be playmates. Or at least it didn't take much in the far distant past of 2001.

I agree, but when I say kids I was thinking more of young kids. Say up until 7 or 8. You don't tend to see much bullying at that age, maybe teasing a bit but they don't seem to be nasty in the way older kids can be when they bully other kids ( like an on going campaign to isolate and intimidate a person).

This is my experience anyhow.

I really don't think this is it.

I think more than anything it's the amount children share in common. Adults are lame. The world is big. There's a lot to do and a lot of time to do it in. If you're a kid and you meet another kid odds are you live in the same town or at least region, go through the same school system, are roughly socioeconomically similar, and (thus) have a lot of things you can do together.

At work I really don't know much about my co-workers. I would go grab a beer and watch the game with someone if I knew they were interested, and from there we could hang out more -- but I don't. We spend all day near each other, at the EOD I just want to go home.

So my theory is that as adults most of us have fulltime jobs where we're always near people we don't spend much time with, and have no time to enter social circles afterwards.

$0.02

I would agree with and extend your remarks with the positive example of adult ex-military people always have something to talk about in common, why with the newborn I haven't had this little sleep since Basic, hey you ever been stationed at Ft Leonardwood, well I was at Redstone in the 90s and ... etc etc. Another positive example is sports team fans, how about that pass in the 3rd quarter of the Packer game, eh? I don't even do sportsball but I got the terminology correct and I'm sure there was some questionable pass in the 3rd quarter of the most recent Packers game, how could there not be?

I can also extend with some classic negative examples, once you graduate school and live in the real world, I have nothing in common with my neighbors. What can I say to a 65 year old CFO, or a 50 year old warehouse owner/manager? The HVAC contractor across the street? "Wow those air conditioners sure blow a lot of air don't they?" Our kids might have a lot in common at the school as you state, but as parents I have very little in common with my neighbors.

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