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Comment by ricketyricky | Hacker News Reader

Ehem - sounds like a normal childhood?

Compare that to the sheltered, all-wishes-granted and no minute spent w/o distractions like social media, kids. Started with Gen Z who get all angsty, with panic attacks, when they have to start performing, i.e., during final exams and the like. And never learned to deal with emotions and free-floating thoughts, handling themself, keeping calm.

(all observed from multiple coworkers being parents, some had to bring their offspring to psychiatric therapy - of course, driven, as taking public transport on their own would be too much!)

Due to our normal childhood, we could handle situations later in life where today's offspring inevitably fails.

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This follows the for-me-not-for-thee principle:

- The parent who grew up in the <more rugged years> self-identify as a tough rugrat who had fun and was fearless; not a wuzz like those modern kids (“kids” here excludes their own)

- But the parent would rather that their kids be safe than to have to pain themselves worrying about them constantly

Perhaps the modern parent must learn the difficult task of slowly trusting the unsupervised child the same way the unsupervised child must learn to trust themselves.

This seems a difficult ask, but it's possible and probably very healthy for all involved.

Quite a few of these are what you want others to be sheltered from. Like, rocks thrown on passing cars from the bridge.

Youth criminality, alcoholism rates, teenage pregnancies are down and that is a good thing.

> all observed

Reminds me of the Mark Twain quote:

> When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

I wonder what the equivalent is for knowing how to be the perfect parent until becoming one yourself.

You can learn to take good risks and handle hardship without taking stupid unnecessary risks. One important life lesson is that the only risks worth taking are those that offer corresponding upside - else the expected outcome is ruin. Education wise this means you give them necessary or low-impact risks to take - and let them endure outcomes such as failing a difficult but important project, failing to find love, losing a basketball match, or losing friendships. Of course, sometimes you may need to do something even if there is no upside for yourself directly, but that is outside the scope of this topic.

> You can learn to take good risks and handle hardship without taking stupid unnecessary risks.

How do you know what risks are stupid and unnecessary?

Kids spent a lot of time outside getting hurt for almost all of human history, and "ruin" wasn't something anyone worried about.

Kids survival was actually pretty poor for most of human history. Probably why the families were much larger

Yes, but that was less because of accidents and more about malnutrition or other health problems.

It was actually both. The accident rate was significantly higher, it was just dwarfed by the other health problems so it didn’t seem so bad in comparison

Yes 5 years old used to herd gooses unsupervised. Relatedly, deadly accidents of kids were much more frequent.

We obviously aren't going to achieve 0 unless we lock every kid on earth up in a padded room, which we aren't doing, so "more" or "less" is fine if the reward is worth the risk. Which is exactly the discussion being had right now.

I am not saying current US tradeoff is necessary ideal. But, when people argue by "human history" they should not ignore what actually happened during that history. Because as of now, kids ARE better off then they generally were for majority of human history.

The gooses thing was memory of my grandmother. It is not some kind of distant medieval history, it was the norm around WWII.

No one here is saying the 1880's are the goal. We're discussing if kids not going outside and messing around and getting hurt sometimes is good or bad.

I brought up "human history" as the logical extreme of the counter argument, not to argue that's the goal.

Right after WWII is not 1880s. It is much closer.

The problem with that logical extreme is that kids died a lot by our standards. They also had no protection against abuse. You had more of them due to non existent anticonception, which made their "value" go down.

I think the problem you're describing is not due to distractions and social media. I think the fault there is that school has changed, kids aren't taught to be allowed to make mistakes. If you're not taught that failure is part of learning, then you're just teaching kids to build anxiety because they are not allowed to fail.

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