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Comment by maximinus_thrax | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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