Hacker News Reader

"There would usually be routes"

ah; I believe you are mentally imagining a kids' room floor full of Lego, and adult inexplicable inability to avoid them :)

For me at least, that's not the threat vector.

It's when you go to your office or living room, a seemingly safe place at a safe time and your mind is not running "Obstacle avoidance program", and unexpectedly there's a single sharp piece of lego hidden in the patterns of the carpet or underneath your office work chair, or even when it's in the middle of the bathroom floor in the pitch dark at 3am when you're running to the toilet --> let me tell you, THAT one REALLY hurts, and usually results in secondary or even tertiary damage :P

The only thing worse than stepping on legos are protruding rusty nails --just thinking about it makes me recoil.

Hah, core memory triggered.

As a kid I jumped off of a swing onto a rusty nail. Yes, I was barefoot. I seem to remember it went in pretty smooth, and barely felt it, but then I had to pull it out.

I actually think Lego has been more uncomfortable.

Ugh, why did I have to read that? >.< I had a similar experience walking through mud and finding an old rustic tin can with its lid sticking out. Sliced up a wide shallow flap of skin, I think I still have the scar…

Haha i remember doing halloween and we had to hit a pinata thing which was essentially a barrel with candy in it, when it was down i walked over it just to get a rusty nail in my foot, i swear the lego still hurts more than that.

I'd add UK mains plugs[1] to that category. I've seen multiple people compare them to caltrops, and for good reason.

[1] Photo for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moulded_and_rewireable_BS...

I've stepped on rusty nails twice in my life. The nails maybe went into my foot each time by about half a centimeter. They didn't really hurt. The very small area felt mildly sore.

I've heard that getting stabbed feels like being punched. I imagine it's similar mechanism, just on a smaller scale.

The other one is when there's some urgent problem in the lego-strewn area - when you need to remove the block from the hand of the kid who's whacking the window or the toddler, there's no time or attention to spare for walking carefully.

I stepped on Bluey's friend Indy [0] yesterday. She was laying on the floor under a blanket with holes in it. I stepped directly on that stupid cartoon character's sharp long nose and thought I was going to die.

[0] https://blueypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Indy

Yowch! I stepped on a fox minifig (not sure it’s technically Lego) with pointy ears and it drew quite a lot of blood. The thing was basically a caltrop. >.<

Lego all over the floor is easy to avoid.

It's when a single piece, of similar color to the floor, is left out. If you don't see that lego is present, it's much harder to avoid.

Yes, this is an excellent point i had overlooked. The colour ranges now are far wider so this could come up quite easily now. The stealth Lego piece risk!

I see you didn't have a red, black, and yellow carpet in your house growing up. Not sure what decade that was from, but was still around when I was growing up in the 80s.

Yes these are the unexpected one that hurt you. When you are taking a step back, or when your kid is crying in the middle of the night and you walk to his room all lights off and step into one that was left somewhere in the house (not necessarily in his room).

It's about salience and paying attention - most people don't do it most of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_sy...

To most people, walking around is a type 1 task - they aren't really thinking about it, it just happens automatically. Having to pay attention to avoid things is a negative experience.

I'm with you, I actively pay attention when I'm walking around, but I suspect we're significant outliers in the general population.

One can’t help but wonder why people would make mistakes when they could simply choose not to.

Because paying attention to not make mistakes costs time and time is valuable.

We only really pay attention for the big decisions.

> (besides something like insisting kids clear it up, which is no fun!)

Instructing kids to clean up their mess isn't just wholesome fun, but it also teaches a valuable life skill! Might not be much "fun" for them to start, but kids actually benefit from having responsibilities. And, if you make it a precondition for something they want to do, they'll be motivated!

> but kids actually benefit from having responsibilities.

Do they? I’m not sure what I learned from my parents insisting that I “clean” my room.

Maybe it teaches a recognition of pointless overhead and a healthy distrust of people who would fit in too well in Compliance departments?

Mission accomplished.

Presumably you learnt that people will be unhappy if they're in a position of power over you and you don't do what they say.

Most people, eventually, learn the value of cleaning their domicile (there are exceptions, of course).

I think parents live in hope that their kids can learn that value earlier than they themselves have, or at least help share their lessons learned with their kids - this is true of many things in parent/child relationship -> we want/hope better for our kids.

And let's not minimize the "I'm tired, I had to clean your room every night for the past 3 days/weeks/months/years/decades, you need to put some effort too!" aspect of course :->

It works various degrees of well or poorly with various kids, parents, and circumstances - like virtually anything else in parenting.

I make my 3 year old participate in cleaning up her toys. I always volunteer to help her, and we do it together. We do it consistently enough so that it's a habit, and she rarely complains. She visited her cousins recently and said, "those boys are very messy. They should clean up their toys!"

And you desire this to continue? Isn’t she just mindlessly parroting what you say?

You sound like you enjoy your freedom to live in squalor. Did you know that clutter leads to stress and anxiety? I teach my kid to fight for worthy causes, you're describing self-defeating pettiness.

She's mindlessly parroting what I say, anyway.

Might as well be something that's appreciated even as an adult :-)

Then what happens if you ask her why she is saying the stuff she says?

I just asked my daughter why it's important to clean up her toys. She said it's a good thing to do. I asked her why it's a good thing to do. She said it's a good idea to clean up before nap time so that there isn't stuff all over the floor for people to trip on and get owies.

Okay cool, imo the desire to avoid hurting her feet is a good justification. What does she say if you ask her, “Are there good reasons for not cleaning up the toys?”

You should try interacting with kids, that is how they learn :)

No, she has a mind with her own thoughts and emotions. Most children aren't zombies.

And you know this how?

It was always easier to find the toy you wanted in a clean and tidy room.

Same thing applies as adults and non-toy items too.

I don't expect spic&span. The alternative is my kid can never find anything, because everything is in a pile on the floor. That's how you get ants (or worse).

Yes, I know it's time to clean up the playroom when they stop playing with toys and start doing constant mischief instead.

Toys become a lot more attractive once there's space to play and the pieces that belong together are not mixed up with a bunch of random junk.

Learning to clean. If you never did it as a child you would find that horribly annoying as an adult.

> And, if you make it a precondition for something they want to do, they'll be motivated!

For me, this was rather the beginning of my insanely deep hate for authorities and the power that they (ab)use.

There are thousands of ways how to sell it to the kid, obviously the driest factual ones won't get much sympathy.

But yes kids are hard, I would love to see comparison of 19th century 10-kid family and now... I feel like we are doing something wrong to have raising kids well so hard, but maybe its just that circumstances and expectations have changed completely

> But yes kids are hard, I would love to see comparison of 19th century 10-kid family and now... I feel like we are doing something wrong to have raising kids well so hard, but maybe its just that circumstances and expectations have changed completely

Families with 10 kids basically abandon most of them, after the first 1-2 and probably except for the last 1-2. Bigger kids take care of smaller ones, they become surrogate teenage parents.

Humans are quite smart and so kids manage to survive, but it doesn't mean being a kid in such a family is a good life comparatively to being a kid today, in your regular family with 1-2-3 kids.

I had a girlfriend who was 1 out of 14 (2 large families moving together) she was basically a mother at 10-12 years old doing chores washing clothes etc. they had 0 grown up time since both was working, needless to say alot of fuckery went on there..

Do you ever stub your toes? I’ve been known to do that on furniture that I positioned and haven’t moved in over a year, with the lights on.

Nobody intentionally steps on LEGOs, so why does it happen? Because it’s unintentional. Either they didn’t see it or they did and simply misused their foot placement. Not very puzzling.

Haven’t you even done something accidentally that you didn’t mean to do? Maybe bumped your head on something?

Its not the obvious dangers that lurk in every room where the kids reside, its those hidden fuckers, the one that is on the end of the stair you first see when you actually stepped on it and fall over screaming, those are the murder lego's.

It is easily preventable get a huge box for all legos, legos are only played with on a carpet thats easy to pick up and put back in the box, at that point most of it is around that area.

Or keep your floor free of sharp things and relax, even stumbling around in the middle of the night. It’s not hard - the kids legos things being an exception.