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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Moving is far from an easy solution, but there are some places that take the opposite approach. We lived in Utah for years and they actually have laws on the books to guarantee parental rights (I think they call them free range parenting or something like that?). In the more city dense areas you'll still have people who do that kind of stuff, but it's much, much less socially acceptable to interfere than in many coastal areas, and if somebody does call the police, there's a strong chance the police will tell them you're in the right and they are in the wrong. There are tons of tech opportunities for work there too so definitely worth a look if it's important to you.

We live in Idaho now and it's similar up here though I don't know about the laws. In our neighborhood kids will run around playing outside together unsupervised all day and nobody bats an eye. It's expected!

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Free range parenting laws are also being passed to codify the right to spank and physically disciplined children.

That's why you find them being passed in conservative and ultra-religious states: Utah, Texas, Oklahoma

And to force schools to disclose information that their children don't feel safe revealing to them (like LGBTQ status), knowing that it could cause their religious parents to completely destroy their lives through things that are banned in most of the civilized world but not in the US (conversion therapy, etc)

It's a tough balance.

> It's a tough balance.

Sarcasm? We have both privacy and free roam rights for children in germany.

Talk about sane legislature!

Agreed. As an American raising a child in Europe, it's also strange that what I believe to be perfectly reasonable positions like "My child should have the right to play outside unbothered by police or busy-bodies", are not only opposed, but opposed because of other unrelated culture-war reasons. The reasoning seems to be that because (e.g.) some states allow parents to hit their children or otherwise do things that (I agree) are reprehensible, therefore parents should not have the right to allow their children outside. Baffling.

And yet home schooling is completely illegal in Germany, something that would be a complete deal breaker for me. But perhaps that speaks more to how bad public school is in the US, maybe it's freaking amazing in Germany?

I'm with you on this. Maybe it speaks a bit to opinions on public schools in the US, but even free access to the best public school in the world doesn't (imo) give someone the right to force it on others.

This is the most bizarre thing that I will never understand about the US. Everything is about protecting the children from imagined harm, even if the "protection" is causing much more harm, but beating kids is totally fine. CPS may take away your kids if you let them play outside, but not if you beat them.

Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.

It's my understanding that spanking isn't the optimal way to discipline children and still shouldn't be done, but conflating it with beating a child is ridiculous and offensive.

Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.

Yes, striking your child to teach them a lesson is definitely completely unrelated to striking your child out of anger/frustration. Definitely no connections there at all.

I guess folks have different definitions of the words?

To me, a "spank" is usually a mild to moderate slap on the rear, a part of the body particularly well cushioned that can handle it just fine without physical trauma, not to mention psychological trauma.

When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.

If you've ever been a parent, regardless of whether you think spanking is OK, you know that there is a huge difference between these two activities. I personally avoid physical discipline myself, but I can understand a parent who decides to give their kid a spank on the rump after the child did something where they didn't understand how seriously negative the implications were.

For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny? I can see why someone would think that the short – but sharp – pain of a quick spank is more effective at protecting the child's short and long term health.

When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool, and usually with visible bruising and possible laceration and bleeding.

"Spanking" can definitely include implements, though that's less common nowadays as people have started to view the act in a less positive light overall.

And the "without psychological trauma" is one aspect where it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue.

> it isn't really that clear if there is a level of spanking that avoids that whole issue

Exactly, which is why I myself choose to play it safe.

But it's kinda like the, "No evidence that parachutes save lives" thing, where because you don't have a double-blind randomized controlled study, we have to end up relying on our intuition.

And – unlike with parachutes – everyone has a different intuition as to whether spanking is actually going to result in trauma. Lots of, "I'll never hit my child" going up against, "I was spanked as a child and I'm just fine" so its all back to personal judgment.

My oldest son once accidentally ran out in traffic, and he was practically traumatised just by the way I shouted "stop!" at him. He never did it again.

I think by using violence, the main thing you teach kids is that using violence is an option. I prefer to discourage violence. I'm not saying I never grabbed or held them a bit too roughly, but I think they learn a lot more from me talking to them and explaining why it's wrong, than from pain.

> When I think of a child who has been "beaten", I imagine repeated bludgeoning across the body, often with a tool

I see people talk about belts far too often. I would consider that immediate grounds for losing custody over your child.

The trouble is, you are describing different points on a scale with no clear boundary. As anyone into BDSM can tell you, an open handed slap on a bare buttocks is quite capable of inflicting severe pain - and therefore, psychological trauma. Imagine being made to wait for the spank, in a vulnerable and humiliating position. Imagine if it were accompanied by mind games. In short, imagine what a sadist hell bent on inflicting trauma on a child could do if you permitted them to strike their victim, provided they left no permanent marks.

It is true that a malicious parent is capable of mentally damaging their child without recourse to violence, but it does not follow from that that we should shrug and permit it. Violence is an overwhelming force multiplier in an abuser's toolkit, and also strictly unnecessary for good parenting.

> For example, if 5 year old runs out into traffic on a busy road and you pull them back, which form of discipline is more likely to negatively incentivize the impulse to dash into the street to get a penny?

I'm glad that you brought up this example because it's the one context in which I think spanking can be acceptable (needing to shock a child from something they were about to do that could have endangered themselves or others). I'm not a parent and not sure I wouldn't try to find some other approach but I can see the strength of the argument here (where I can't see it for other uses of corporal punishment of children).

Spanking and beating your employees are two entirely different things.

Lots of people believe that not using physical discipline is ultimately harmful to kids. Their brains aren’t fully developed until age 25, so it can’t be assumed that children can learn proper behaviors entirely through reasoning.

The empirical evidence is mixed. The best behaved kids in the world are in east Asia, where physical discipline is still quite common. Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed. America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.

> America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.

More likely by people who played outside as children. I'm pretty sure that's more universal than spanking.

Which is giving me an idea: are there societal problems among youths that correlate with either a lack of spanking or a lack of playing outside? Most of Europe has banned spanking but encourages playing outside, whereas in the US, spanking is legal but playing outside strongly discouraged. Which kids are doing better? Less violent? Less psychological problems?

The empirical evidence of efficacy of corporal punishment is also mixed, so between the two, I think I'd recommend the strategy that minimizes violence.

> Physical discipline was widespread in the west during the very timeframe that contemporary civilizations developed.

I'd be real careful pushing that justification; it can be used to support all manner of unnecessary (and was-never-necessary) evil.

We've been through this before. The empirical evidence is not mixed: there is weak evidence that it is effective at securing compliance in the short term, and strong evidence that it leads to bad long term outcomes. The high-performing Asian families you alluded to in the last thread about this issue are some of the least likely in America to physically abuse their kids. That's because hitting kids is, among other things, stupid.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34471156

What are the “bad long term outcomes?” Civilization as we know it is the product of societies that practiced corporal punishment. Most of those civilizations have declined since they abandoned it. Look at the British. They were famous for the strict discipline in their schools. Now they’re a shadow of their former selves. I’m not as ready as you to abandon received wisdom and a track record for some academic studies.

I meant Asians in Asia. Also, as I mentioned in the thread you linked, I’m unpersuaded by your study of Asian Americans, especially because of the highly idiomatic phrasing of the polling questions. I’m also not even sure how you’d design a study to measure this to account for confounding factors. For example, how do you separate parents who use physical punishment because they have poor impulse control (which is quite heritable) from those that use physical punishment when it’s appropriate? And what’s the definition of success? E.g. what if teachers hitting low impulse control students doesn’t do much for the student, but reduces disruption so the rest of the students in class do better? That wouldn’t seem to count in the studies on this I’ve seen.

In the previous thread, you attempted to construct the argument that high-status Asian families somehow endorsed corporal punishment; in fact, they are among the least likely cohorts to do so. That there is a huge diversity of different Asians doesn't do anything to rehabilitate your argument.

Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.

You pointed to a survey that asked people to agree or disagree with the assertion that sometimes, children need a "good hard spanking." As I said in that thread, that evidence is unpersuasive, because it relies on a confusing English idiom. As used in America, the term "good hard spanking" just means "spanking." But if you're one of the 71% of Asian American adults born in another country, that qualifier "hard" implies something more extreme than an ordinary spanking.

We know for a fact that corporal punishment is widely used in Asia. Surveys show that 60-70% of parents in India, China, and Japan spank their kids or approve of spanking: e.g. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-06/03/content_175.... It's possible that all those Asian immigrants come to American and adopt western attitudes against corporal punishment, but I'm going to need more than a poorly worded survey to believe that.

> Nobody should hit kids. This is a bad contrarian hill to die on.

You're the contrarian here! The same survey you relied on in the other thread shows that the vast majority of asian American parents (73%) spank their kids.

> America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who were spanked as children.

I mean, I guess it could have been worse- you could have said "America as you know it today, with all its prosperity, was created by people who burned witches" or "...who practiced chattel slavery."

Those same people also practiced bundling [1] as a courtship ritual, and used mercury as a treatment for melancholy [2]. Out of all the practices you could have cited, why on Earth would you pick beating kids as a factor in America's success, instead of something more benign?

You're smart enough to know the difference between correlation and causation. Do you have evidence that physical discipline was the reason America became the country it is today?

If you don't have such evidence, how do you know that we wouldn't have been even more prosperous without corporal punishment as a child-rearing method?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(tradition)

2. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/10/22/mercury-was-...

It’s not an incidental correlation—something that happened to exist at the same time as contemporary societies were being built. Cultures all over the world came to the conclusion that physical discipline produced better behaved kids. Europeans only changed their view in the last generation or so, and in Asia, it’s still the dominant view.

By contrast, cultures that stopped using physical discipline are almost universally in decline. On the European continent, for example, post-Christians who don’t use physical discipline are being outcompeted by Muslims who do.

How's that lakebed dust doing?

Any tech jobs outside of SLC?

Thank goodness we’ve had record breaking snow this year, so the lake lives to see another day!

I suppose it depends on how narrowly you define "SLC." Lehi and Utah County is brimming with tech jobs, but if you consider that part of SLC then no, not really many tech jobs outside. Further north into Davis County and Ogden, and even Logan there are some, but it's not like like SLC/Lehi.

Lakebed is indeed sadness.

Be careful. 1983 is coming.

(Maybe... but it looks somewhat similar. And 1983 wasn't unique. It also happened sometime in the 1950s, though I forget the exact year.)

For those not in the know: In 1982, the lake was also sadness. There was talk of it drying up completely. Then the winter of 1982-83 was something like 200% of normal. Salt Lake wound up having to turn State Street into a river to handle all the extra water. From there to 1985 or -86, the lake rose dramatically, threatening to close railroads, and interstate 80.

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