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Comment by tybris | Hacker News Reader

I think he learned a valuable lesson about how to use the Internet: lie about everything.

About law, actually. If a law is stupid and was only made to get some politicians re-elected by a histerical crowd, then... you pay the consequences.

COPPA is pretty reasonable, the idea is that the online personal data of young children should be treated with extra protections and permissions.

That may be the idea, but in practice young children are just officially banned from everything because dealing with the law is too expensive and/or risky.

It is not only a matter of law but also a matter of law enforcement.

yes, using the "intenet"

And those parents seem to be beyond repair. They should be experienced enough about life to not teach their son useless ivory-tower ethis like "dont lie". He will find out about the power of lying sooner or later himself, and every year he tries to abide by their logic, he will be hurt, lied to and deceived by others who have mastered it before him. Depending on how much damage they cause by such a nonsensical upbringing, he might end up hating them later. By telling him to be the only one not to lie, they are basically lying to him about how the "real world" works.

You don't have to lack ethics yourself to be unphased by others' lack of them. I don't know if you're just trolling or something but I think this needs to be addressed either way. Dishonesty has the distinct disadvantage of leaving you with the need to maintain a fabrication; honesty has the huge advantage of meaning you have nothing to hide. If you slip up your reputation is tarnished and even if you don't you have to actually maintain the lie. If you really believe the best way through life is to lie your way through it then I really pity you.

Sometimes lying is necessary though. In this case for instance, while the real solution would be to have Google's policy and the law changed, it's unlikely that's going to happen for a ten year-old kid. My parents have always told me to "pick your battles", and I think this is a clear example of a battle that's easier won by lying.

Morality aside: maintaining a fabrication is also not difficult for some people. You just need to make sure to think your lies through, and maintain two levels of backup explanations in case someone does poke their way through. Weaving details through primary and backup explanations can be difficult, but that's where practice comes in.

To be fair, nobody will ever raise a normal child who does not lie. It's an adaptive behavior brought about in most children by the age of three, but some studies indicate that it develops earlier in more intelligent children[1].

That's not to say that teaching kids that "lying is bad" isn't a noble goal, but you're going to have a really tough time convincing them when they can clearly see the benefits of it in their daily life (an extra cookie when Mom's out of the room, No detention because the dog ate their homework).

Perhaps a more realistic goal is to channel their learning into teaching the difference between lies.

But I think the whole argument is a bit of a "Red Herring" or is mostly irrelevant. The whole argument reeks of flame-war induced fallacies.

I figure that something happened like the following.

    - Google enforces mail policies.
    - kid cries.
    - parents broken hearted, outraged, determined to share outrage
    - article posted, misleading, overly emotional linkbait headline included
    - internet response: "who cares, just lie"
    - parent, embarrassed, defensive & still outraged, formulates weak knee-jerk rebuttal.
    - internet response: "flame on"

The parents are IMO wrong, they may or may not also think they're wrong, but are having trouble publicly backing down from the mostly-stupid position that they took, and continue to argue for the sake of arguing.

Or they actually believe it. Which is a bit stupid, but hey, stupid people exist too. I don't think they're dumb, just caught up in the emotions that stir whenever you witness your own child crying.

[1] http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/02/11/why-do-kids...

http://www.srcd.org/journals/cdev/0-0/Talwar.pdf

Agreed. There's a time and a place for everything and white lies make the world go round when used wisely.

However, I think you were voted down because it's difficult to find the line between a child making wise judgments within context and assuming they can lie in every scenario for their own benefit. That's a tricky one to walk, so it's better to play it safe until you're dead sure they can rationalize about the "real world." This is likely to be higher than age 10 for many kids.

The kid is ten...

You clearly don't have children.

That's a pretty clear example of an ad hominem argument. Whether he has kids or not has no bearing on the points of his argument.

If his argument had had points, I'd agree. It's just that it wasn't an argument - it was a screed that the parents should have known better and are entirely at fault, and I reject his standing, as he clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

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