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Comment by nvln | Hacker News Reader

This! Parenting is not a "Here is the rule, here is the consequence" job. Raising responsible humans requires, well, giving them responsibility, the opportunity for soft failures to learn from and having those awkward long talks and figuring out how to set healthy boundaries.

The other part of the equation: The internet is an important aspect of the current generation's identity and culture. What seems like addiction to us could very well be our children's identity, lifestyle. The comparison to TVs is flawed because TV is not social. The unhealthy aspects have to be spoken about in the same vein as drinking and drugs, but any kind of limit-setting that doesn't acknowledge this might push children away from conversation.

There is an hilarious episode of Everybody Loves Raymond that goes into this with refreshing honesty.

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> giving them responsibility

I am not a parent, so maybe don't listen to me, but if I were (especially to boys), I would try to deeply instill a value of responsibility into them.

Boys are naturally going to have a higher tolerance for risk, and that can be a very good thing, but it needs to be directed and they need to learn to differentiate good risks from bad ones.

But more generally, building up an identity of being responsible and showing what is expected of them as a child, family member, citizen, human being, etc. will hopefully mean they will do what needs to get done when it needs to be done. Try to get them to ask themselves "what's the responsible thing to do here" and "why is that the responsible thing to do".

idk, maybe that's super obvious. Sorry for posting my naive opinion.

just a random thing: girls are more "responsible" because the societal bias is to teach women to be responsible from a young age.

from the perspective of a woman, I missed the possibility to make dumb mistakes because "responsibility" (and not even because my parents taught or encpuraged it, but from friends and family's pressure). Let your kids make dumb stuff and dumb mistakes, please.

Having worked very closely with numerous toddler and preschool children continuously from 2-6 and still observing many others doing this:

The base state of the child is absolutely evolutionary (at a population level): male children are less responsible/compliant and female children are more responsible/compliant from the outset.

This makes girls easy to (even accidentally) make responsible.

Teachers and parents generally easily spend 10x to 100x the effort trying to make boys responsible but do not succeed at nearly the same rates by the same ages. Girls learn faster.

>Girls learn faster.

you meant mature faster? probably until the mid 20s where gap closes, I guess.

It’s not clear to me the significance you’re trying to imply but I meant learn. There are positives and negatives to learning faster.

It's not a societal thing. Men are more risk tolerant. I believe there have been studies to show this transcends societies and cultures. That doesn't mean women aren't risk tolerant, or that they can't be taught to take calculated risks. Think of it as a distribution curve--men's curve is shifted a bit to the right. The median man is more risk tolerant than the median woman, but there are still lots of women who are more risk tolerant than the median man.

This means there are more male extreme athletes and entrepreneurs, but also more inmates and gambling addicts.

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