Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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Parent of three teens headed to college/trades in the next year.

While I completely understand your positivity nihilism, this kind of parent as victim mentality needs to stop altogether.

I’m looking around where I live and literally zero of these people have to raise their children because they didn’t have the access to abortion, contraception or public services.* 99% of parents decided to keep and raise a child.

It is objectively bad to park your kids in front of an iPad for hours a day so you can work

It is objectively bad to have your kids all over social media

It is objectively bad to feed your children ultra processed foods

Etc…

If raising your children is not the most important thing in your life, to the extent that you’re going to actually do scientifically demonstrated correct things like providing them vaccines reducing sugar limiting screen time encouraging outdoor play and exploration and community building etc…then you should not have them.

If you do not have a community that can provide this if you are not independently capable enough… then you should probably not have them.

Being a parent is a transcendent privilege across every period of time, history, class and race - it literally is the driving factor of society.

*In the 18 months since Dobbs between .9% and 1.2% (should be zero but here we are) were victims of rape and forced into birthing that child according to:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/64-000-pregnancie...

Tortillas from the grocery store are UPFs. This sort of "you shouldn't have had kids if you can't cook everything from scratch every day" judgement is outrageous.

Breastfeeding appears to have better health outcomes than formula. It is also hard as shit. I'm absolutely not telling a parent that they should have aborted their kid if they choose to use formula because the mother keeps getting mastitis or because their kid is not strong enough to get a full meal in less than 70 minutes on the breast. Perfection is not required.

Ok but we were talking about marginal differences in potty training methods, not neglecting kids and feeding them garbage.

I read the parent post and your post several times and don't get the connection at all.

How do you think any of this relates?

Your comment conveniently disproves itself.

> It is objectively bad to feed your children ultra processed foods

It’s not “objectively bad” To feed your children ultra processed foods.

Once you do the work of defining what ultra processed food is in the first place (which you cannot because there is no definition and your argument is already lost), you will find that many ultra processed foods are objectively good for children and adults.

But then your comment only tells you what parents shouldn’t feed kids. It doesn’t tell you anything about what they should.

And when you look into that things get a lot harder. Meat? Not ultraprocsssed but almost certainly bad for health, especially in anything more than minor amounts. You know what else isn’t ultra processed? Alcohol.

And I can’t help but comment on the ridiculousness of pointing to the percentage of children being the outcome of rape being less than 1% as a somehow low njmber, while ignoring that it was 64,000 children. And rape isn’t the only way parents may struggle or regret having kids. And you’re pretending post partum depression doesn’t exist. Then you ignore all the children born with illnesses that may make it difficult or impossible for parents to manage them. Then you’re ignoring all the states that allow abortions but parents may still not opt for them because of cultural, religious, or even personal ethical considerations. Then you’re ignoring the fact that so many American marriages end in divorce and even the ones that don’t may not remain as tight knit as they were when the parents made the decision to have a child.

Your entire comment is a whole bunch of wrong based on your personal experience, which thankfully appears to have been positive.

> It’s not “objectively bad” To feed your children ultra processed foods.

It is though, it's in the definition, UPF are distinguished from processed food by having additives of no culinary nor nutritional value. So at best, they aren't better than processed food, at worst, they have additive that increase negative health outcomes.

note that if an additive (let's say high-fructose corn syrup) have inferior nutritional value than the product it replace (let's say honey),it is considered UPF, even if the process is quick and easy (i.e: you don't need a big industrial process to be classified UPF)

That's the definition in my country at least, maybe it's different in the US. I think you mistakenly think UPF are the same as processed food. This isn't the case.

[edit] you're right that it isn't objectively bad, because its rare something is "objectively bad". It is objectively worse though.

A good example for upf that is not likely to be bad for you is (European style) frozen pizzas.

And I think your comment is wrong. Parent is right in saying that there is no clear definition of what exactly ultra processed food is. However, in general, processed does not mean having additives, it means processed, running through multiple industrial processes to be made.

> Parent is right in saying that there is no clear definition of what exactly ultra processed food is

The definition of upf is 'food having additive of no culinary or nutritional value'. That's the current definition.

The original nova definition is 'food with additive of no culinary value', which isn't useful for nutritionists, hence it evolved.

I seriously doubt all frozen pizza are upf, the main advantage of frozen food is that you don't have to add nitrite salt or other conservatives. Maybe in some pizzas, to keep colours bright?

Thanks for raising the right voice

.9% and 1.2% of children being result of rape and then forced birth combo is awful lot. It implies that both rape is super prevalent and forced birth is super prevalent.

This in turn likely means that quite a lot of parents were subject of a rape that did not resulted in that kid. (Otherwise we would have to assume that all rape kids are first kid).

It's also objectively none of your business?

Individualism taken to the insane.

“How the next generation of your society is raised is none of your business”. Take some ownership

It's insane individualism to think other ppl don't get to dictate what kind of food people feed their kids?

Yes it is.

Kids grow up to run the world, a world I’m going to live in. I have a stake in that. This should be obvious if we take our civilization seriously.

We can barely even meaningfully define UPFs, and they aren't cleanly correlated with junk food.

Potato Chips are not UPFs but tortillas with an added preservative are.

Ice cream purchased at the store that has emulsifiers is a UPF. Homemade ice cream is not. But I think we'd agree that it is the fat and sugar in the ice cream that is the bad part to feed to kids.

I will go further and say that eating some ice cream does not hurt kids at all. No, you are not a bad parent because you gave your kid ice cream. And fat is completely legitimate part of food. Likewise sacharides.

I can simultaneously criticize your parenting and not want the government to "dictate" it be otherwise.

"I say whatever I want and people can't tell me to stfu" who is the insane individualist now?

Who are you quoting?

The collective well-being of the society I live in is my business.

Is it your business to tell AndrewKemendo what his business is?

Gee it’s a discussion forum my dude - people giving opinions on things that would otherwise be none of their business is what it’s for.

Well that's just like, my opinion man

It can not be your business and you're allowed to still have opinions on it. It's one thing to discredit opinions you think aren't someone's business - that's fine, maybe even understandable.

But everyone is entitled to their opinion, and you can't just make people shut up. It doesn't work like that.

If you feed your kid rocks yes I think you are stupid and yes I think you should've worn a condom. Whatever, who cares, listen or don't.

All of society is impacted by terrible parents who raise terrible kids.

As a black man in America I can promise you that how you raise your children will objectively be my problem

If everybody around me trains their children to be fascists that’s clearly my problem

How Society runs is everybody’s business

Lol iPad, social media, and processed food consumption is going to be your problem? OP was not talking about values, he was talking about the day to day specifics of child rearing.

As a white man/parent in America - same!

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