Stop Asking Your Teen How Their Day Was | Hacker News Reader

Stop Asking Your Teen How Their Day Was

slate.com

4 pointsrnjailamba6 comments

School is a bit like a prison for children. When you get out of prison you want to think about what you'll be doing the rest of the day, not what you had to go through on the inside. In addition, parents very rarely do what it takes to make a kid's day better while they are at school. You aren't allowed to let your kid just skip a week of school to recharge. So telling you that it was horribly stressful will result in a lot of nothing for them.

It's especially true for kids that have a demand avoidance. ADHD and ASD kids have a lot of problems with school for this reason. It's a high control environment and you have almost zero personal liberties. Some kids thrive in environments like that. A lot don't.

I heard this recently - "For the median student, the education system mostly wants to make the student do things they don't want to do. It's not about helping them achieve their goals more easily or more effectively. For the most part, it's about achieving goals that aren't theirs" https://youtu.be/dmeRQN9z504?si=AWqDy3cHhgh5oa_Q&t=12

Agreed. The uniform thought that school is good and a must for each kid is an issue. Education in the pure sense is a good thing but assuming that schools will find a way to educate each child optimally is tough. There's a lot more nuance and effort needed, especially from parents. I also feel that children's intuition's are mostly correct about things that are wrong with school and should be trusted more.

School is a must for every kid. However, the form that our current education system takes is absurd. It is barely appropriate for a minority of students. Much less all of them. There are so many better education systems in the world with amazing results and we refuse to make ours better.

I am a dad. This happened when my daughter reached high school and now my son as well. When I ask what happened in school, they always respond with one word - “nothing”. Then I follow up and say that they had so many classes and time on the playground. How could all of that amount to nothing. To that answer with two words- “nothing much”. I heave a huge sigh and mutter under my breath, It’s okay and move on. It’s probably to do with onset of puberty and the generation gap. I probably don’t understand their world much at all.

This is a tough phase. Children do fight hard to find themselves but they get done in by an authoritative and somewhat disingenuous system that puts them into a mimetic compliant attitude rather than the way they used to act when they were 4 or 5 years of age - their golden age of discovery.

My take is that children need more attention than ever when they've kind of disconnected from the world but the attention needs to be extremely competent as well as caring - a really tough combination.

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