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Comment by taberiand | Hacker News Reader

I'm frequently surprised by what is considered by other parents as too scary for their children to watch or read, when it seems to me the whole point of scary stories is to provide a safe place for children to feel scared and learn what it takes overcome fear.

That's not to say that anything goes, just that I think parents need to be willing to let their children be appropriately afraid and comfort them and teach them courage. Avoiding any scary themes or dangerous ideas, instead of providing safe ways to engage with these things, I think leads to children growing into adults who will have a much harder time recognising and dealing with the real dangers of life.

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Nobody anchors with age. One parent will advocate for allowing children to watch Scarface, without mentioning their child is 17. Another parent will explain The Neverending Story is far too scary, without mentioning their child just turned 4 yesterday.

Much like parents who trumpet how children should be free to roam and explore without meddling from adults, but never clarify whether they are talking about middle schoolers or toddlers.

I control movies, but books are much more open. If a child can read it; they should be allowed. The process of ingesting a novel is so different from a video. You're experiences and maturity put limits on how you perceive things you read. Books open your mind to new ideas and that should be encouraged even if the ideas are more mature.

You've just reminded me that I learned about Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was 8 or 9 from a girl in my class describing the ending.

I've never seen it and have no intention ever to do so.

I'm not going to try and convince you to watch it, but would like to remark that it is not at all as visceral and graphic as it is commonly made out to be.

It's more about disturbing atmosphere than gore. Personally I find it interesting in part because it's pretty much based on (early seventies) news reports about crime and serial killers, trying to capture that kind of storytelling.

The horror comes more from socially prevalent suspicions about working class, rural and mentally disabled people than on the nose depictions of violence. A supposedly frightening revolt of the subaltern, of sorts.

I find much of what I see in the news much, much nastier than anything this movie has to offer.

Nobody anchors to temperament, either.

I don't think twice about letting my 7 year old watch shows that I steer my 9 year old away from. The 7 year old, a thrill seeker, enjoys things that would give my 9 year old nightmares for a week.

Maybe the nightmares are a method for the child to process the perceived trauma and come out on the other side as more resilient. What actual harm is happening?

In Italy is now illegal to send your kids to school alone before they turn 14, it's now legally child abandonment. Even if the school is few hundreds meters from your house.

I went to school alone since my second day of elementary school, in Japan kids cross Tokyo streets at the same age.

I have given math lessons for two decades and during that timespan kids have changed a lot due to how much parents changed. It went quickly from "if he doesn't listen you slap him hard" to "how dares the teacher give him a bad grade".

I have brought that topic with some people my age on a programming board and all fellow devs surprisingly told me they agreed, that it is child abandonment and streets are dangerous.

I feel like such over protection makes for young adults that are absolutely unprepared for the harshness of real life.

That is insane!

I had taken my kids out of school by that age, but they would go to places alone much younger than that - depending on where we lived, the time of day etc.

if you don't mind me asking, why take them out? did you homeschool them?

Will never understand homeschooling, social (and even survival) skills are the most important to learn when young imho.

And they can be learnt outside of school just as well. I'll never understand how readily people are to accept schooling.

I hear this all the time, but so far every time I've met a home schooled kid they show that lack of socialization. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it is so rare that I doubt any home schooled kid is.

Sure they will have a lot of kids, but that is not the same. Do they interact with kids that are different? Poor, rich? Different religion? Different political background? (note that many private school suffer from the same problem - generally not as bad as home schools, but it is easy to find private schools that don't really socialize kids well either.)

I fully agree with you, however....

> Do they interact with kids that are different? Poor, rich? Different religion? Different political background?

This is often the main reason that parents take them out of school in the first place.

Schools seem like a poor place to learn social skills unless one plans to live out Lord of the Flies later in life.

Life is tough and the dynamics of the book are common in real life.

Isn't Italy a country where "mama hotels" come from? There was some statistic showing that average age of man leaving parents house is 39 years or so.

I was going to alone to elementary school since second day as well. I had 2 younger siblings, it was not possible for my parents to take me at school at that time. Nowadays, having siblings is not common when US fertility rate is 1.6 and in EU 1.4 per woman.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab...

39 feels too high, but yeah, it's one of the worst, and depending on the statistic the worst outright, in Europe.

In 2022 the average was 30 years https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

A significant factor in that, beyond cultural ones, is the fact that it's quite expensive to buy/rent, especially given the high youth unemployment

These unemployed folks could literally be building their own homes with the right institutional policies and support.

On which money?

The power of debt and helping an economy grow faster than the debt growth rate. A healthy society has a good roi, Italy is dying as is.

Debt is tool for making citizens obedient and always voting for system that they benefit from.

If you refuse to participate on debt system, you have no choice than share property with parents so I'm not surprised.

Debt just means young families can have a place to live now while they pay off over time. No one can afford upfront housing…

So debt (to what anyway if currency doesn't store value) is default state for living?

> In Italy is now illegal to send your kids to school alone before they turn 14, it's now legally child abandonment

I find your claim very hard to believe, can you back this up? I did some searching and could not find anything to back up your claim.

Sure I do.

Even leaving them alone at home is a felony. There have been sentences already.

https://www.brocardi.it/codice-penale/libro-secondo/titolo-x...

And now the fertility rate of Italy will go down even further, as less will bother to have children.

Where are the examples?

The only ones linked on that page are for someone who left his disabled son in the car for many hours, someone leaving a 9 month old alone, and someone abandoning their elderly disabled mother

In Switzerland kids are expected to go to school alone from primary school, but I've seen kids to the Kindergarten alone as well (5-6 yo). It's normal.

> streets are dangerous.

I have a vague hypothesis that people's mind have a detector of a danger, and mind adjust sensitivity of the detector to get some specific average value of danger. The safer our streets, the more sensitive detector becomes, so the perceived level of danger remains the same.

Most mental processes follow this return-to-the-mean style of homeostatis.

You are experiencing the power of television/media for sowing division. The more you watch, the more misinformed about the mean you are :)

That's wild. 13 is so old. In the UK it's completely normal for most secondary kids (11+) to travel to school on their own, and many younger kids will go to primary on their own.

We live about 10 minutes from school. My eldest is 9 and in the penultimate year of primary school. He walks home and I meet him half way (mostly as an excuse to go for a walk), he's fine. From next year he'll probably go by himself half the time.

The only concerns I have are around crossing the road. And even with that I'm aware that my worries are overblown, we've taught him how to cross carefully. He will be fine.

I can understand if you live in a rough neighbourhood, or where the roads are really terrible for crossing, but making it a blanket rule is ridiculous.

> and streets are dangerous.

In most places I've lived, streets are objectively less dangerous than they were a few decades ago in all aspects except traffic density, which is a mixed bag. In places with poor urban design, I can see the argument that street (crossing, particular) is high risk for say 6-8 year olds. In places with better design, the idea that a 8 year old, let alone a 14 year old, shouldn't be able to navigate a reasonable distance by themselves seems pretty crazy.

> when it seems to me the whole point of scary stories is to provide a safe place for children to feel scared and learn what it takes overcome fear.

That’s not the point of the original scary fairy tales. The point was to keep kids from danger by scaring them so much that they don’t expose themselves to said danger. The downside of this style of child raising , of course, is that kids are unable to realistically assess the danger and sometimes don’t shed their fears when they get older.

I suppose so, but I think from a modern parenting perspective scary stories should be used to teach resilience to fear.

Yes, exactly. There is too much romanticizing of scary fairy tales as useful educational tools. It's important to remember that the pedagogical model behind these stories was the same that lead people to believe that harsh corporal punishment was a crucial component of successfully raising a child.

Is it odd that that's how I used to see video games, as a safe environment to learn grit, how to reason about systems and choosing better actions, where "better" is defined as "actions that lead you to beat the game" or "achieve a better score"?

> 'how to reason about systems and choosing better actions, where "better" is defined as "actions that lead you to beat the game" or "achieve a better score"'

This is a double-edged sword because in the real world, actually interesting systems don't have this kind of closed feedback loop.

Training your mind for this can lead to an inside-the-box mindset where you need to find the score which would provide the external validation of your actions. For a lot of people, money provides that reassuring score, and then money becomes the primary value in one's life replacing any deeper intrinsic motivation.

Indeed; "Money is a way to keep track of the score" was explicitly stated in some of the entrepreneurial presentations I went to at the end of my degree, the first time I tried self employment.

I did too.

No longer.

Video games tend to have a pre-built path. The real world has minimal feedback loops and millions of bad choices.

I can relate to this, however, I come from a very different angle. I was born visually impaired, and went blind at the age of 7. If I were to name the single most important thing that was holding me back, then it was the protectiveness of my father and my mother*. Counterintuitive, but if anything is really bad, then if you prevent your kid from making its own experiences.

I agree for reading. The example of Cinderella's sisters chopping her feet isn't too much for a child to read about, but nobody wants to watch that in an animated film.

There's also a point where books become unsuitable for children. "All Quiet on the Western Front" with its gruesome WWI details probably wouldn't have been a good idea before 5th grade, and it was a good thing we were older reading "Cupid and Psyche" in Latin where the main character gets r---d within the first 3 pages.

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