Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

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A house I lived in for a while had one room where all the interior panes were plexiglass. It wasn't that clear (they'd been significantly scuffed up) and there were some cracks at the edges that had been half heartedly sealed.

When asking a neighbor about it, that room was a child's room who in their younger years had tantrums and would throw things at the window. After the glass windows were replaced a couple times (once in the winter which was pricy for a "need to fix this today"), the parents replaced the windows with a rather durable plexiglass. They didn't break again, but they got scuffed up until the child outgrew the tantrums and the house was later sold.

Having something that is potentially more energy efficient (lower thermal transmission) and more durable are existing problems that this could provide a solution or a direction for future solutions.

(older articles) https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/10/01/transparent-wood-... and https://web.archive.org/web/20201006210438/https://www.fpl.f...

Love stories like this that unintentionally show how hard parenting is. I guarantee a big share of non parents are thinking “I would simply stop the bad behavior or would have never let it start to begin with”

I’m a parent of two mostly grown boys, one of which was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, so he definitely had behaviors at a young age that were challenging.

But even I’m having a hard time rationalizing that replacing windows with plexiglass was the first solution that worked. It seems like there are a number of other things that would’ve helped without having to go to that extreme.

But I do get it — every child is different, and every parent has different methods for approaching challenges.

Just saying that this feels extreme, even from the perspective of another parent.

As a non-parent, I might replace the window with acrylic simply to deny the child the satisfaction of destroying plate glass

Most parents would tell you that having a child learn how to deny satisfaction is a huge detriment. If they learn it from a parent it’s almost impossible to constructively address.

Can you restate that for me, because the way I read it, you are saying that if you teach a child how to deny satisfaction it is a negative.

I think there is evidence to show that children who can't delay/deny satisfaction end up making significantly poorer life choices and have worse lives.

Anecdotally, every teenager I knew who couldn't accept delayed/denied satisfaction were absolute shits.

> Can you restate that for me

Definitely. I appreciate when someone asks for clarity.

The part I was talking about was “denying the child the satisfaction” as in the parent intentionally frustrating the child to teach them a lesson. I tried to take a shortcut by using the same wording as the person I replied to but I can see how that made it unclear.

The point I meant to make is that if a parent uses that technique to teach lessons in that way it’s likely that the child learns to use that technique themselves and turn it on the parent.

Further: If a child learns this type of technique from a parent it can be very hard to stop them from using it.

I didn't read the story as the plexiglass working for anything other than eliminating recurring bills of replacing windows. Clearly, the tantrums did not stop as the plexi was all scratched up. So to me, your hard time rationalizing is probably because it's not something that needs doing. Sometimes, you have to stop the bleeding before you can fix the actual issue.

It makes a lot of sense to me. If a kid keeps breaking something, stop giving it to him.

Kids (and adults) often have an impulse to make problems worse once they know they are in trouble. If they don’t have the opportunity to do that then there is a shorter path to calm down and talk.

Like if you know your kid cheated on a test, don’t ask them if they cheated and give them a chance to lie. Just start by saying you know they cheated and why.

Put me in the "ever let it start to begin with" camp, because I'm never having kids. That shit looks hard as all hell.

Having a kid that smashes windows when told to go to its room sounds like the kind of soul draining thing that causes relationships to end. Huge props to those parents for navigating through that.

On the other hand, non-parents read stories like this and assume it's common behavior, or that all children are like this.

A child who throws tantrums and breaks windows would be a parenting challenge indeed and it's not as simple as blaming the parents, but to be clear a situation like this (child breaks windows on a routine basis) would be rather rare.

Solution: don't replace the window and let the goddamn child pay for his sins during the whole winter. That'll teach him. Hint: I'm a non parent.

20% rise in dead children for parents who take this advice seriously.

Just give them another blanket or two! They’ll be fine.

/s

I call it natural selection.

And a big share of parents are thinking “this is a really smart solution!”

“Bad behaviors” are almost always rooted in chronically unmet needs, over/under stimulation, hypersensitivity, general lack of control, sibling jealousy etc etc.

its a good idea to treat them as symptoms to investigate rather than ”behaviors” to eliminate.

Thermal conductivity isn't really relevant in window glazing materials, because nearly all of the insulation is provided by the argon in a double (or triple, or quadruple) glazing unit. Most of the recent advances in efficiency have come from improving the thermal conductivity of the frame and the use of low emissivity coatings to reduce infrared transmission.

Regarding the embodied energy, I think that the reduced durability of basically anything that isn't glass will prove fatal in most applications. We abandoned plastic smartphone screens for a reason. A glass screen might crack if you're careless, but a plastic screen will become severely scuffed in normal use.

> A glass screen might crack if you're careless, but a plastic screen will become severely scuffed in normal use.

Smartphone "glass" scratches pretty well too. Not that it's visible in daily use unless you look for it tho. Better have "scratched" screen than cracked screen IMO.

I've had very good luck with the tempered glass screen protectors and a cheap case thusfar. Broken a few of the protectors, mostly dropping my phone in parking lots, never had the screen actually break when I was using one.

Also, additional upside is, any scratches are on the glass protector, so, if you get a particularly bothersome one, you can just replace the glass and you're back to brand new for way cheaper than a new screen.

These protectors an already bad typing experience even worse. Never broke a glass and 10% lower resell value years later doesn't interest me.

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