Comment by urahara | Hacker News Reader

Comment by urahara | Hacker News Reader

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Parent-child relationships are more about mentoring and guidance than control. Pure force is almost never an adequate answer to any problems that a child experiences. How on earth can you force someone to study without fundamentally harming him, if he has a bunch of underlying problems that effectively prevent him from learning? No way, it's just a lazy approach and unwillingness to figure out the real problem. Also, there are many things, that you can teach only through personal example and overall context inside a family. Bad websites? If you are spending enough time with your child, teaching by example, family culture and discussion, explaining what is right and wrong, he is very unlikely to develop any interest towards "bad websites". Besides, the idea of blocking all possible sources of negative content is pretty laughable from a certain kid's age. As for the religion example, I have no idea why one should want to teach children any religion apart from maybe some historical and cultural perspective.

I'm interested to know: do you have any children, and if so, what age? Not that that is the end-all-be-all of knowing how to parent, but comments like "explaining what is right and wrong, he is very unlikely to develop any interest towards 'bad websites'" make me think that you don't have much experience trying to raise children. They test boundaries. They misunderstand morals of stories. They have primal urges. They disregard social customs that they see as irrelevant. I'm constantly explaining right and wrong to my children and they are probably slowly getting it, but it's a process.

Of course it's a process. Please excuse me for using your post as a spring board, but:

When you try to impose rules upon children that don't make any sense for them in the situation they're in, and that they may simply be mentally incapable of following at that point in their life (cf. the primal urges), it is not going to work just like that.

Children need to make up their own mind, and given the limited experience they're coming from, for many years that mind will of course look a little different from what a grown-up opinion would be.

That doesn't mean the grown-up opinion is necessarily right, by the way. It has not seen the world from the perspective of the child. The grown-up mind may very well reach another conclusion if it had seen that world.

Sure they do test everything and break nearly every rule you give them. You cited only one part of my sentence, I gave this in a row of other things, that are equally important. Nowhere did I say that this is the only or the primary way to teach them.

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