Hacker News Reader

Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Because not everyone who raises a child is their actual parent. See also the need for terms like “caretaker”, and “legal guardian”.

View on HN

Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Parents is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say parents we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.

Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Child-raiser is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say child-raisers we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.

child-riser is a lovely neologism, more self-explanatory than caretaker, but still caretaker is well established.

and to clarify: I chuckled with sympathy reading your response :-)

It's not that it's bad neologism. It's that neologism is bad in general. :-)

New words are bad in general? How so?

Change is hard and expensive. The juice needs to be worth the squeeze.

Far too often those introducing new words (or even worse redefining existing ones) are playing power games with their in groups best interests in mind, not the rest of us.

Every word you just wrote was a neologism at some point.

Caretaker is not well-established where I am. A caretaker takes care of grounds of schools and other similar large buildings.

I see. and that's indeed one of the two main meanings.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/caretaker

hmmm is there some extended n-gram search these days where you can search for a specific word *with a specific meaning*?

IMO I felt that battle was lost couple of years back when my wife was pregnant with our youngest. We were looking for CDC guidelines on covid booster for expectant mothers. The website mentions "pregnant people". That's when I felt discourse is evolving to cater to the edge cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...

I don't think 'people' is really an edge case.

It is newspeak to avoid saying „pregnant women“.

Personally I think women are people.

What an absurd complaint. "Expectant mothers" is much less direct and more euphemistic than "pregnant people".

That's not catering to edge cases; it's just clear, easy to understand communication.

So you're saying the CDC should not cater to the edge cases? Where are we drawing the line? 10% of the population? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%? That last one is still thousands of people. Does your opinion hold for all edge cases or just those involving gender identities?

If there is a place I'd expect to "cater to edge cases" including those that only make up a fraction of a permille of the population, it'd be the CDC because they have to address hundreds of millions of people so even a one-in-a-million edge case still represents hundreds of people.

“Child raiser” is perfectly adequate to the context of a conversation about people who are raising children.

Wouldn't the employees of the day care be able to be considered as "child raiser" if I follow the meaning of the words?

No, because child care (aka day care) is temporary and optional. A person who is raising a child has taken responsibility for them through their childhood—metaphorically “raising” them up into adulthood.

There are plenty of “child raisers” who provide more care than a daycare and less than a parent.

And since we’re being technically correct, raising a child is always optional (even for the parent).

I agree. That’s why I said child raisers have “taken responsibility.” I could have also said “accepted responsibility.”

I wouldn’t consider a parent who opts out of raising their child to be a child raiser.

What an insult to someone who has taken on the responsibility of raising a child. Of course they should be called parents. A man doesn’t adopt a son only to be called his “child raiser”. Stop this foolish line of thought.

You're the only one in this thread not attaching the same connotations of "child raiser" to "parent" and considering one lesser than the other. I don't know what's more insulting, being called a child raiser, or considering child raiser to be off-brand parent rather than a generalization of the term.

"No man goes into education to be called 'instructor', they're 'teachers'."

"No woman goes into CS to be called 'coder', they're 'developers'."

Some children are raised by grandparents, aunts or uncles, siblings, etc.

Child-raisers is the type of language you see from companies ending daycare.

So then why not use those existing terms?

They are if they're raising that child and I don't think you'll find many people with adoptive/step children cheering on being called like that.

They're parents, as simple as that.

I consider anyone raising a child as their parents, I honestly could care less who's physical bodies were involved.

It's interesting to me that anyone raising a child wouldn't want to be considered a parent. Is the use of this term by request of people actually in this position, or wasn't created by third parties in an assumption that we shouldn't call them parents?

Caretaker and legal guardian have different and more specific meaning than parent. Those terms are needed to more clearly describe a person's situation and involvement with someone else. Again its interesting to me that one would prefer not to be called a parent when they have taken on the responsibility and roles of being a parent to a child.

As a father to both biological and adopted children, I couldn't agree more. I'm Dad to all of them.

some kids are raised by other relatives or even non-relatives. will they at some point say "my real mommy was aunt xyz"? possibly. but still in no world auntie is a parent, in all worlds she is the caretaker.

The first coworker who comes to mind for me is a guy I worked with whose sister and brother-in-law died in a car accident. As next of kin, he took the kids and eventually adopted them, but as far as I'm aware, at no point did he ever call himself their parent and I think that would have seemed oddly distasteful to do so. Uncle still works even when you're raising them.

Yep I can definitely see that, I could see myself making the same decision in that situation. I would probably reach for uncle, caretaker, or guardian. I'm still lost as to when "child-raiser" would ever be needed though, and personally feel like avoiding saying parent would be more offensive to more people than the other way around.

I.e. I could see your coworker correcting someone and saying they aren't the father or parent with little or no offense taken. Though I could see referring to someone with adopted children as "child-raiser" as being really offensive to the person, as though I effectively took away the term "parent" and everything that goes along with it.

> I consider anyone raising a child as their parents

As do I. Parents are the ones doing parenting. Whether or not they are the biological parents isn't relevant to that.

My only caveat is that if someone shares with me that they don't refer to themselves as a parent I'd respect that. I just would expect that to be a pretty rare outlier all things considered, and benign if I incorrectly refer to them as a parent initially.

What were your pronouns, again?

Why do we have to change our language (and behaviour) for the edge cases?

Is a grandparent who raises their grandchildren offended by the word parent? I doubt it.

What’s the point?

The only people experiencing offense here seem to be the ones who don't like the term child raiser for some reason.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but if there's a pushback on a change, that's defense, not offence.

So, you are claiming they are "taking defense" not "taking offence"?

Is this a terrible dad joke?

Please, child-raiser joke.

It is, but it's also a point - if something is being changed, pushing back shouldn't be assumed to be being offended. In some cases, the people doing the change will be offended if you don't comply. And that will keep going when the change is changed again.

That's a weird distinction you've constructed to make it sound more okay to be offended if you feel you hold the more traditional position.

> take offense (idiom) : to become angry or upset by something that another person has said or done : to be offended by something - Merriam-Webster

That's all it means. If you're upset because someone says something different to what you consider the natural default you're still offended.

People take offence to changes to and transgression against cultural norms all the time - offence at public gay affection, offence at interracial relationships, offence at not respecting christianity and religious norms, offence at use of swears, offence at the normalisation of talking about sex etc etc.

Taking offence to certain changes to language isn't necessarily wrong, but it's still taking offence. "Taking offence" is what happens to you when something transgresses against your belief system, it's not just what the bad people do.

> you've constructed to make it sound more okay to be offended if you feel you hold the more traditional position

You're incorrect. I didn't construct it to do that.

> "Taking offence" is what happens to you when something transgresses against your belief system, it's not just what the bad people do.

All the rest of your comment isn't really to do with what I was saying, although it does illustrate it. I was saying it's silly to change something and then call any pushback "offence", rather than a wide range of things it might be (unnecessary; harder to understand; unfamiliar; yet another change of a bazillion and it'll change again soon).

the idiom is "take offense in sth"

> people experiencing offense

You mean, the "offended ones"?

Humans under effect of psychological duress.

For one, I have never heard the term "child raiser" in my life so I assume its even more confusing for those with english as a second language. It also just sounds so emotionless, like children are cattle. I'm really struggling to see what is gained by not using parent. For all intents and purposes, people use the term parent for those raising a child.

I am not taking sides in this discussion, but as a non-native English speaker I can assure you that the term was not confusing to me :-)

Yeah it's just internet people trying to coin terms then gaslighting those who don't adopt.

No one is gaslighting anyone, except maybe the folks who pretend language never changes. No one complained about the use of "parent". The folks who started the argument complained about "child raiser". The problem here are the "internet people" who pick pointless fights about the motives behind anyone who does anything differently than they would have done.

Agreed. I don’t mind the term, but it also sounds emotionless to me, like corporate speech. Something I’d expect in a press release.

I’m not a native speaker.

That’s a poor attempt at gaslighting.

Nobody is offended. It’s just silly.

(Variable) naming is hard. Hehe.

Seriously. I work in accounting and also do scripting and IT support. For a group who has to be precise with numbers, they’re frustratingly vague with words. Some of us got it, and some of us don’t.

It's not even an edge case. An "old school" absentee working dad is a parent, but not a child-raiser. The OP even touches upon this, calling out male child-raisers as exceptions while I'm sure you'll agree that roughly half of all parents are male.

When that's the topic at hand we should keep those distinctions in mind.

fr this is literally the first thing I thought of and I'm probably one of these extreme libs people think they're fighting here. I literally didn't consider any reason for using this phrase other than that both parents don't usually have equal child raising responsibilities. that's a perfectly normal traditional nuclear family situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com