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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

> But what do you do if you’re poor? Or in a troubled home?

You stop going to school. There's a teenager next door who lives in a troubled home and from talking to him it sounds like he hasn't really attended school since the beginning of 2020 because there are no consequences for not showing up in zoom and his single mom is too tired to make sure he's attending his classes or to homeschool him...

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Systemic failures all the way down.

Just sounds like bad parenting to me

Have you experienced being an only parent while trying to support a household with no safety net?

Regardless of the above statement, this is such a silly argument.

You have to experience something to have an opinion on it now?

How can your opinion have any value without experience or education behind it?

No but you shouldn't ignore those that have experience and you should not assume you know what is best for others.

What it does is give you Credibility. Don’t be surprised that a doctor or lawyer is afforded more credibility by having done something at least once.

>You have to experience something to have an opinion on it now?

No, but if you haven't experienced something, your opinion on it should hold less weight.

In this case the single mom does have some safety nets (stamps for food, housing opportunities commission for rent), but there is way more than just basic survival she has to worry about. She's taking care of her mom who has failing health, she has health problems of her own, and she has a special needs daughter... it's just extremely hard to make sure all your kids are getting a quality education when you are burned out as a single parent.

Does how hard it is change that it is bad parenting? No it doesn’t. Just because someone has a hard life doesn’t excuse them from responsibility

When you're a single parent working minimum wage with no nearby support structure and you can't afford daycare or anything like that, there aren't many options.

People can make excuses all they want - it doesn’t change the fact that it is bad parenting

So what is your solution, just tell them to be good parents?

Child protective services for one - it is criminal in most states to neglect your child’s education

The only CPS involved in truancy enforcement is Chicago Public Schools.

Even if it did work that way, do you want to be the one to tell a child they’re going to be removed to a foster/group home because their parent wasn’t strict enough / tech savvy enough?

> Child protective services for one

CPS is not perfect, there are many horror stories of sexual abuse in foster homes and other serious issues.

I'd take it so far that I'll say that I've never actually met a human being for whom foster care wasn't a big source of abuse. Among the ones that were actually in foster care.

It transcends location, to me it seems like it is generally a poor choice to stick kids in the care of adults who don't really have a bond with them to start with. No matter where you live.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, and (related) please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. We're trying to avoid a hell of our own here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I apologize if my comment was taking this subthread into flamewar territory, that was not my intent. Please feel free to detach at my top most comment (id=26133980) above from the remainder of the thread.

I don't see your comment that way. I mean usually there's a movement flameward in each step, so it's always a matter of degree. But the comment that crossed the line, as I see it, is the one I replied to.

Huh? I’m not dismissing anything in the op comment - just giving an equally succinct description of the problem as the replied - in no world is dismissing your child’s education good parenting - maybe they have an excuse but it doesn’t make it good parenting

This is such a shallow argument/opinion. It sounds like something said by someone so painfully unaware and insulated from the life being commented on. So instead, I’d be curious to know what your background and upbringing was like. I don’t think the child being mentioned would consider CPS a good option like you argued for in another comment.

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