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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

It’s not just intellectual challenge that parents are unwilling to entertain. It’s part of a wider problem of avoiding any and all confrontation. The moment a child shows any disinterest, the activity is shut down.

It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries. The average parent is unwilling to even teach their children to eat and enjoy actual food. Why bother when you can just heat up some tendies?

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This level of generalization and certainty shouted down from the moral high ground is the hallmark of a great comment!

Of course, you are an enlightened parent that is better than all those other parents that spoil their children and prevent them from achieving all that they could do. More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere. It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved. Grow up, man.

> It is intellectually lazy to call other people's kids tendie eaters because you think they are underserved.

It’s anecdata for sure, but it’s not a metaphor. I literally mean the parents are eating “real food” while regularly feeding the children just butter noodles and chicken fingers. The diet is a microcosm of their entire upbringing.

I ate plenty of junk when I was a child, too. Children love chicken nuggets and applesauce. Let them do their thing, within reason of course. I turned out ok.

> More seriously, though, good and bad parents exist everywhere.

Yes. And if makes a great difference which ones decide what the educational system will look like.

> It’s why you have a generation of kids that only eat chicken fingers and french fries.

I’m 42 years old and something like this was already said about kids when I was a child (I suspect it was like that before my time as well). Children’s palate develops with age and so does their taste.

Don’t know about that…it’s not some rule that palate develops with age. You have to actively try. And when you grow up on a diet consisting of limited foods, you will definitely have problems appreciating a variety of foods a ps an adult. Pretty sure that’s the main reason average restaurant food quality in the US is so bad. The customers can’t even tell the difference because their palate is so limited.

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