Comment by neverartful | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neverartful | Hacker News Reader

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And during that time that they're 12 or younger:

- Read to your young children regularly. Ideally, every day. This is something my father did with me when I was very young and I can't express how wonderful it was.

- Remember that you're setting the example for them -- make it a good example. 2 specific examples that I always observed: never use profanity (even saying 'crap' was very infrequent), and never let your kids see you drunk (tipsy maybe, but not drunk). Let them see that people can go through a normal life without resorting to excessive use of alcohol (and no drugs!).

- Always have them as your top priority. Your kids take priority over your other interests and also your job. Family is forever. Your job is your job until the next one.

- Be involved in their school. Show up to every single parent-teacher conference and every single school event. This shows the school and your child that you're serious about their education and their well-being. Do everything possible to equip them for success in education.

- Teach them the morals, ethics, and faith that you have. Never assume that someone else will (or even should). Let them see that you live by them.

- Be fair and respectful to everyone (give them the benefit of the doubt). If your child grows up seeing you being this way, they're more likely to do the same.

- Have a lot of laughs. Laughter is a great thing. Whether it's watching an old, silly TV show, reading a silly book, or just being silly yourself -- make your children laugh.

Interesting list but I'd considering being less prescriptive in the future. Hard for me to really buy in when the opinions shared are so explicitly hardline: "ideally, every day"; "never" (3x!); "always", "every single" (both 2x) "everything possible."

Part of the problem with today's parenting and why it's so demanding are these completely unreasonable expectations we are setting.

What did you expect instead? 3 nines %? 80% of the time?

A lot of the parenting blogs advise you to leave some room for being less than perfect and have a plan for how to deal with it (watching how you deal with it is often an important lesson to the kid, too).

Being able to say "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have taken away your favorite toy for a week, I was angry and made a mistake" is an important grace to give yourself.

> Remember that you're setting the example for them

I just started hitting the gym (very frequently and very painfully) when I realized that my teen/pre-teen kids did not see me just as "Daddy sits in front of his computer all day because he's smart and his job is important" but also "Daddy sits in front of his computer because he's unhealthy and not in shape."

> never use profanity (even saying 'crap' was very infrequent)

Why does this matter?

From my experience they learn from the older kids as soon as they start school. At least in my culture. My daughter came home saying "shit what the fuck" (in English, despite English not being the native tongue of the locality) one day. And now she will curse like a pirate when she hurts herself. But she already knows they are words that people attach special meaning to: she avoids them when "not needed", for example. Except when she wants a reaction, which she never gets from me at least.

We don't use many such strong words ourselves, but like with many things she learned on her own in the cultural melting pot that is public school.

Just my own observation, but all the kids I remember that cursed a lot weren't very good at English. Not sure if it is correlation or causation, but who needs to find the right word to express yourself, when "fuck" or "shit" almost certainly fit the bill?

Maybe people who curse poetically are even better at English than non-cursers, but that probably comes with age and isn't relevant to advice about children.

My anecdata is similar, but rather: the little kids I know who curse a lot and openly, have terrible manners overall. Talking nasty to grownups (and other kids), etc.

Our society tends to reward people that curse infrequently?

No it doesn't. It rewards people with the social skills to know when it's acceptable to use certain words that aren't acceptable in other contexts. But that's just a part of 'society rewards people with high levels of social skills'. If your experience has been that successful people (i.e., 'people who were rewarded by society') don't swear, then your experience has been very different from mine.

I’ve met enough rich people to know that certainly is not true.

I’d say the frequent use of foul language is highly correlated with other modes of anti-social behavior.

At the end of the day rude people are inconsiderate people, if you’re not thinking about how your behavior effects others…

It's more about having self respect. Why use the same language as drunken sailors and criminals?

> Why use the same language as drunken sailors and criminals?

Aside from hate speech, I honestly don't care what kind of language my kid uses. But I'd be pretty disappointed if they reduced groups of people into negative stereotypes like this.

Indeed. Some sailors are amongst the greatest people I've met. And their language was salty.

Language is communication. Context is important. You don't bust into a church or interview swearing loudly. You don't try to communicate every thought with a curse word.

But fuck it, they are handy sometimes.

If this is ironic this is a pretty funny joke, and if this isn't ironic this is even funnier.

Do you want your child growing up to be foul-mouthed?

Who cares? As long as someone can shut it off when needed (e.g. at work) this is something that does not matter at all.

Maybe his point isn't that cursing is bad, but that you should set an example for proper manners. Like, the language they should use when talking with schoolteachers, at work, etc.

That's my household: they'll hear plenty of salt when we play Jay-Z or Run The Jewels around the house, and it's no big deal if they cuss while telling us about their day, but we'd never tell them to "Pick up the fucking dishes."

One of the jobs of parenting is teaching social norms. Children don’t instinctively know them.

All things you can do for the rest of your and their lives. My daughter just passed her PhD General Exam today! We still read to each other :)

> - Read to your young children regularly. Ideally, every day. This is something my father did with me when I was very young and I can't express how wonderful it was.

...as long as it's a good book.

My mom thinks I love books because she did this with us. I haven't told her that whenever she did this I was just ignoring it and off in my own imagination, or watching other kids playing in the distance when we were outside - if anything she turned me off of reading for years because she chose books I found boring, and I didn't know anything else existed. It was much later I found sci-fi and came to it on my own.

Beautiful

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