Hacker News Reader

As a kid, when gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, one of the anti-advocates made the statement on the radio: "I am the gatekeeper for what is appropriate for my child, and the state telling my child that homosexuality is an appropriate lifestyle infringes on my role as a parent".

I asked my Dad what he thought of that statement, and he responded that gatekeeper was the completely wrong approach to parenting. The role is closer to a bodyguard or the secret service, you protect from harm and provide context when appropriate, but leave enough room to explore without your biases.

Self-sufficiency in ones own behaviors, responsibilities and statements should be your goal, just make sure they have a safe environment to explore and carve their own path.

> I asked my Dad what he thought of that statement, and he responded that gatekeeper was the completely wrong approach to parenting. The role is closer to a bodyguard or the secret service, you protect from harm and provide context when appropriate, but leave enough room to explore without your biases.

Agreed. In my opinion being a gatekeeper with hard and fast limits often only fuels the wrong outcome. Safety nets and moderation are a core approach in our household. They can do most things with some boundaries and aren't afraid to ask for something outside those boundaries which is often met with a conversation vs just a yes or no answer.

> The role is closer to a bodyguard or the secret service, you protect from harm and provide context when appropriate, but leave enough room to explore without your biases.

I and my wife chose to be "support" in a gaming style. So far so good.

I was only allowed 2 hours of Sega Genesis play, which was just enough to get to the final boss in Sonic and die. Never beat it.

In hindsight this prepared me for the 2 constants in the real world: Never having enough time, and constant disappointment.

Rookie mistake. You have to leave the Sega on come back the next day when you have your allotted time. God forbid someone vacuums and uses your plug.

This reminds me of when my brother and I beat Legend of Zelda and left the end segment on the tv for a few days to bask in the glory

"WHO THE EFF UNPAUSED MY GAME!"

heh, i had 1h limit and back in the days it took me 1-2 month to complete Half-Life and i played UFO for like 6 month. The first time my parents left me alone for 2 weeks i played pretty much all the time. I think i actually had like 5-6 meals and seeped less then 6h a day during that time.

I'm pretty sure that overall this 1h limit rule made me completely obsessed with computer games and the only thing that brought me back to the real life was WoW. Yeah it sounds funny, but i actually had "/played" 360 days of 2years period. And after the disband of my guild i had no interest in any other game. Yeah i play from time to time, but don't have the hunger to play every new thing out there.

I'm pretty sure that i would have burn out of this games addiction much faster in my childhood without the limitation and probably could start coding earlier. Probably would have eye problems by now because of a cheap crt monitor back then and would never meet lots of good friends in wow. So honestly i don't know was it good or bad, but i'm sure the time limit had a huge impact and not in a favor of my parents intentions.

Reminds me of playing GTA3 on my PS1 which did not have a memory card.

GTA3 was released for the PS2

Or Jurassic Park for SNES, which didn't allow you to save.

> Then I tell them "look at those smokers, how sick they are. And it really smells bad too" etc. When I ask them about smoking, they have very negative associations with it.

I do this as well but I also try to explain the upside so that they can understand why smokers exists at all.

"When they smoke they feel excited for a short time but after a while, if you do it often enough, you get hooked and then you don't get that excited feeling anymore but you feel sick if you don't do it". Something like that.

That's a pretty good description of my effective parenting strategy. I've always stated that my goal was to raise kids who could make good decisions as adults. To that end I've tried to err on the side of being more permissive while using potentially corrupting influences as teaching opportunities.

That said, I don't pretend that my approach would have worked in all situations. For example, you gave your son a choice about being aggressive with his XBox with a threat that he would have to stop completely. What if you had to follow through on your threat because your son escalated his aggression?

Sometimes, some kids need an adult to make a decision for them that their brains just aren't mature enough to make.

Very wise words, I'm not a parent, but I like the idea of giving them the choice and allowing them to come to their own conclusions.

"A man convinced against his will. Is of the same opinion still" ― Dale Carnegie

Not every kids is like your son. Some have more addictive tendencies and wont self regulate that easily and wont stick to agreements - even as they had an intention to follow up in advance.

Well sure but the ability to self regulate doesn't come out of nowhere. It's learned behaviour and xbox or a video game is a relatively harmless thing to train them on because the consequences for failure are minimal. That they're going to fuck up occasionally or even a lot isn't good reason to not keep trying to train them on it.

It does not come from nowhere. And for many kids it simply does not appear just because you threatened to remove xbox. And followed up on that threst.

The poor impulse control remains poor impulse control. They will grow up from that, but in the mean time if you expect self regulation they are not ready for yet, both you and them are in for very unhappy time when they both play too much and are regularly punished for that - despite not being capable to self regulate yet. One would almost say that it is unfair.

As someone with 6 alcoholic uncles ... yeah, I agree, that doesn't always work.

Of course (I say as someone with a lot of built in addictive tendencies).

But those kids need to be taught how to self-control those impulses more, not less than those who can already do it easily.

Good feedback and I agree. We have Roblox several chances. Each time it became out of control. We definitely do not hover-parent.

To be clear, my kids have an xbox1, ps4, xbox360, two gaming PCs, a Vive VR headset, their own macbooks, a switch, their own dedicated Chromecast TVs, and one even has a pixel 3a. Roblox is the only thing we have ever had to perma-ban. Fortnite got a one week hold once, but Roblox had to go forever.

They play fortnite, Minecraft, and lots of other stuff. Unfortunately, as soon as I find out my daughter joined a server where lego looking avatars were walking around with massive hard penises doing sex acts on each other, we were done with moderation and guardrails.

I typically use this approach also. One of the most successful developments was the gamification of tasks to earn play points (minutes of playtime). Vacuuming could earn 10 mins for example, with a maximum of 90 minutes, and only possible after doing homework etc. They ended up enjoying both the tasks and the reward.

Or you could make a game out of vacuuming, or you could explain why vacuuming is needed, or ...

The alternatives have merits too.