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Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

I had a friend raised like this in a millennial context. Strict diet of restricted TV and computers, 1 hour a day for each. Cable TV was banned, network television only. Books were all him and his sibling were allowed to interact with. He was homeschooled for a bit.

In high school he discovered World of Warcraft, through chance. He started playing at school. Then sneaking over to friends houses to play. Then did everything in his power at home to play WoW. He became hopelessly addicted. For 2 years all he could do was play WoW. It had a huge effect on his grades and his friends. While I don't know all that happened, I think he was just unprepared to deal with modern digital consumption appetites that the rest of us grew up with.

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On a tangent, I knew a girl in high school who had their love life completely owned by their parents since she became a teenager. Her mother was a chaperone on her dates, her dad was closely monitoring her phone for 'sexting', no bedroom door, etc.. It's safe to assume she didn't have much success with boys. Come college time, she broke up a marriage, did some porn, is now a single mother who moved back with her parents. Not saying her parents are to blame, but I can say she grew up with a very unhealthy view of romantic relationships.

Another anecdote... People think my dad was nuts for letting me drink a beer here or there growing up.

It was always in moderation. Typically only one drink, maybe two spread out over lots of time if we were fishing. He talked openly about keeping drinking in check. He even addressed alcoholism in our family history, admitting to keeping a close eye on his consumption due to those predispositions; stressing that I'd have to watch it too. Since I was a young kid who felt privileged sippin' on a Highlife I listened closely taking a lot away from those conversations.

Fast forward to HS/college... never drank in HS because it was primarily only losers who would drink at the time... and in college I was always the party nurse or DD because I wouldn't drink to get drunk - I just didn't see the point. Dad had took all of the novelty out of it for me.

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Kids who come from overly strict or controlling parents often have behavior and moderation issues once leaving the nest. Your #1 goal as a parent is to engage them and teach them how to navigate life in careful and healthy ways vs. trying to outright control their behavior. Hard truth is you're not always going to be there - my dad died when I was 14. Being an authoritarian doesn't give your kid a healthy mental framework to help them through life's complexities, you're only teaching them to be afraid of punishment and consequences.

To readers of the comment above, keep in mind that this approach likely works best with such a wise and calm man, and perhaps it helps having a son of much the same disposition.

In aggregate, it's shown that children who drink in general have more drinking problems as adults.

Some great notes here! Moderating is hard, but it's crucial in development. Too much or too little of anything has absurd longterm impacts.

Moderation mixed with education has tremendous positive impacts. Going with the alcohol example, you grow up knowing what it tastes like and what it does, rather than growing up completely unaware of it other than your college friends say it's cool to get hammered.

You have to be teaching your kids about life, it seems like so many forget this trying to create the ultimate curated experience for them.

14. Shit that made me cry. I hope you always manage to steer clear of alcoholism if your old man thought you might inherit a disposition. And your dad sounds very courageous and wise to talk straight to you.

"The forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest."

Sadly this approach doesn't always work, but this is the only way to at least to give an idea on how it tastes and feels. Works great for spirits for up to 12-14 years, though, kids don't like the bitterness at all.

> because it was primarily only losers who would drink at the time

What was the dynamic like at your high school where the losers would party with alcohol and the cool kids stayed sober?

It's also possible that the woman you know is, for predominantly genetic or personality reasons, highly sexed and sociosexually unrestricted, and her parents' efforts at best delayed some matters. There's a line of thinking, articulated in Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and elsewhere, that a large component of personality is innate and parents spend way too much time trying to micro-shape their kids.

There is an interesting writer and tweeter named Aella: https://knowingless.com/ who has described at length how she was born into a fundamentalist Christian family, found herself doing work she hated in a factory at 19, and escaped it via nude camming and then sex work (both of which she likes a lot, relative to alternatives). She's tweeted about how her mom appears to LOVE the trad Christian life, and how Aella and some of her siblings hate it. Who is "right?" Maybe no one: people's personal propensities and desires vary in many ways that appear to be genetic in origin, even if their expressions may change across cultures, and this may also include in matters of sex.

There are lots of pseudo-Freudian theories about how the way one is raised affects one's adolescent and adult sex life but I'm not sure any of those theories are true.

Kinda surprise her parents still let her in. So I guess they are not that bad after all.

I'm not sure any of us have figured it out. I grew up with the internet and video games. I was hopelessly addicted to Counterstrike for 15 years. I don't think kids should have complete (unsupervised) control over their own entertainment, but it's clear that strict limits aren't sufficient.

I think people have been looking at it from the wrong perspective and you hit the nail on the head. He was unprepared, yes, but... How exactly are we preparing our kids for the internet and video games? This is something we aren't talking or thinking about. Putting limits isn't enough. It's like forcing abstinence on kids without trying to teach them safe sex or about healthy relationships or character values.

I think there should be some limits, but there also needs to be an effort to cultivate interests/skills/experiences outside of gaming as well as a stronger focus on personal values/responsibility and philosophy in general.

I would recommend reading “Indistractible” by Nir Eyql if you are looking for more tools for this

+1 for this. "Nir Eyal" btw. From excerpts, it's a very good guide with plenty of common sense psychology and practical advice.

Read a few pages and this looks useful, thanks.

i really hope we reach a point where more parents play video games with their children, especially as a teammate rather than a hoverer. it seems like in most homes vidya is usually tolerated as a necessary carrot or a babysitter rather than something that is shared. kids learn from the people around them, this is why sportsmanship gets such heavy emphasis in junior sports leagues. we recognize that it is not enough for them to learn how to hit the ball, they need to learn how to be gracious competitors as well. imo this is equally true of games. if kids aren't given an example of what good habits & moderation look like, then why are we shocked if they emulate the grinders and the nolifers?

I am a little like that. When growing up we had very little allowed TV time (admittedly this was common in the 80s, due to limited selection) and I get distracted by TVs very easily. Compared to friends who grew up with TVs running constantly in the house and who have no problem having a conversation with a TV in the background, I can't help to watch the TV. I therefore hate most modern pubs, which have TVs running everywhere and try to always sit so not to have a TV in my fov (which is often difficult).

You've described me.

I've gotten better at eye-fixation control, and also careful selection of seats. If I can get a seat facing away from the TV I do much better, and I even catch those around me gazing at the TVs from time to time.

It is exhausting trying to exert that amount of self control, though. The quick bright movements naturally catch my eye and I often can't help myself. I'd like to chalk this up to innate hunter instincts, but... ;)

My experience is that these kind of people (grew up in houses with tv on the background 24/7) have difficulty doing meaningful in depth work. They can "block it out", but only for doing simple tasks, like chatting to someone. When it comes to sitting doing and doing some nuanced analysis, and thinking thru edge cases, they can't do it.

I knew about a dozen college kids in the millennial context who grew up with no restrictions on video game use, and it was fine for them because their parents handled every aspect of their life. Fine for them until college, when they were now responsible for themselves and couldn't tear themselves away from the screen because video games were all they knew. They lost their scholarships and flunked out.

As for myself, I felt shameful if I spent more than an hour playing a game because long video game binges is something I never became accustomed to in the first place. The habits kids learn as kids will follow them at least into young adulthood.

Video game use was also a privilege that my parents used to teach responsibility and priorities. If I wanted to be allowed to play games, I had to get all As in school, complete all chores, and participate in athletics. They didn't police my gaming time, so I learned to regulate it myself to meet those conditions.

I think what you describe is closer to my own experience than to unregulated screentime. You say they didn't police your screen time, but it sounds like they did forbid you from playing games if you weren't keeping up with your other obligations. In my case, my permitted screen time was moderately increased if I got good grades and severely decreased if I got bad grades. I think a scheme like this, or the one you describe, is a good way to do it.

No regulation of screen time at all, no conditions about behavior/grades, is dangerous territory. It teaches harmful habits which some kids will have a very hard time shaking. Have a bad time in school? Come home and numb the pain by spending 12 hours playing games late into the night. Go to school the next day without enough sleep, the cycle repeats but the whole thing doesn't collapse because you're still forced to go to school. That is, until you hit college and now have the option of skipping class to continue playing video games. Then they flunk out after a year or two of wasted tuition money. Many of the friends I made in freshman year at college flunked out due to this vicious cycle of video game binging. All of them were long-time gamers by that point, expressing great incredulity when I told them I came from a household were I was limited to an hour a day. They said I had been abused, while they were flunking out due to their own lack of self control.

Or they could make school more fun and also start later.

But nooo, force the kids to suffer and then act surprised when they rebel.

Oh for sure, making school start later in the day would be a huge benefit to teenagers particularly. But this is the way it was in college, most of us scheduled most of our classes for the afternoon and the gaming addicts still skipped class anyway. Both are problems, but I don't think addressing one will address the other.

As for school being fun.. if you're doing well and the course material is interesting, then school is generally fun I think. School becomes particularly unfun when you're struggling with difficult/uninteresting material combined with the stress that comes from knowing that good performance is important to your future. That struggle+stress can be very hard on some people and lead them to self-medicate by binging alcohol or video games. Booze and game binging make people feel better in the immediate sense but harms them in the long run. I don't think you can address this problem by making school more fun, except insofar as you can shift students into subjects they care about and can do well in. But stress avoidance has its limits, even if school is an absolute pleasure, everybody will encounter stress eventually in life and knowing alternatives to escapism is important.

I remember a book talking about Robert Morris, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer), who didn't allow his kids to watch television (something about the low quality of TV programs made for children was the main reason).

He found out that his kids, including son, Robert T Morris, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris - later Internet email worm author, were having trouble socializing with other kids at school since the other kids would talk about the TV shows that they had watched (like Sesame Street) but Morris's kids were clueless.

So his kids were allowed to watch PBS so they didn't become social outcasts.

On my recent workshop regarding kids' psychology, there was said that social media and online world in general is the only drug that you have to learn kids to get used to gradually.

There's no point in restricting them screen time completely, because phones and computers are just everywhere, you cannot shield kids forever and sooner or later they will find a way how to get connected, so better they are prepared and know what's going on and what to be aware of.

> Then did everything in his power at home to play WoW. He became hopelessly addicted.

I was like this and spent a shit load of that time on a computer. Everyone around me said it was a waste of time until I realized I wanted to work in software. Then I realized they were all full of shit and it was actually a very profitable use of time

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