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Comment by cromka | Hacker News Reader

We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.

You could make same exact argument regarding kids health, alcohol abuse, nicotine abuse, all types of addictions, age of consent, and so on.

You can't just have all the safeguards dropped because you think you're doing a good job. Or, even worse, you have no kids and it's your virtues merely projecting.

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> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.

From both someone involved in raising kids as well as someone who knows a lot of teachers: none of the involved parties want that. Schools are at best for teaching, but never for raising.

I respectfully disagree. Yes, parents should raise their children as in be present in their lives and help them grow and shape themselves. However, schools with the rules, social engagements, and learning is also a form of raising. Teachers, especially in elementary school, are extremely influential for young kids. How teachers behave when somebody is bullied, how they handle questions, basically how they handle anything, forms the minds of young children.

Is it the sole responsibility of a school to ensure well raised (for whichever specific definition of “well”) children? No. However, they are a large factor in the raising of children.

School was an escape from my home life, but it could never fix my home life. As a child who had no ability to determine what constituted "normal" in order to escape my situation, the only real solution for my home life was for me to be born to different parents. I doubt any amount of legislation would have accomplished that.

That's why I think it was a huge mistake to make teachers mandatory reporters. The idea was that they'd report people neglecting or abusing their children, but what happened is the more egregious cases usually learned to just do a half-ass "home schooling" instead so the child never sees a mandatory reporter and then situation is even worse because now the kid has no escape, no access to doctors, etc.

I feel like you must have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes “raising” kids if we’re omitting the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours and the people most of their social universe is based in.

We’ve had a live experiment with this during COVID and it’s pretty clear that kids raised solely at home by their parents fared way worse. Not just on academic metrics, but basic conflict resolution or social skills.

Raising almost all children in these government socialist barracks is so dystopian. What you call "worse" conflict resolution and social skills I call superior confidence and autonomy. People today are oversocialized.

Yes, Finn's and Swedes are the modern day clusterfu*ks of societies /s

This is one of those comments where I get your point, but have a couple of big "uhm actually"s :point-up: :nerd-face:

I wouldn't think that COVID is a good indicator as this was in no way typical home-schooling. The vast majority of kids were going to school "online," and not schooled by their parents. They were also largely confined indoors with their families all day and all evening.

I'm having trouble making my other point without slipping deep into trying to define "raising," so I'm just going to hit "reply" here.

I didn’t mean home schooling specifically but the assertion, and the general sentiment, that parental input is the only determinant that matters when it comes to the development of children into healthy and well-socialized adults. The family isn’t an island it’s something that exists within its society. The people in it also have communities outside the family—including complicated social groups, people coming from different cultural and subcultural norms, and complicated bureaucratic systems and institutions—that they have to learn to interact with an thrive under. School is a critical part of teaching and socializing them to navigate that even beyond the specific curricular stuff. And beyond school lots of other stuff kids interact with is having a hand in teaching them what to expect of society and what society expects of them.

It is a parenting issue.

Don't let kids have an internet-connected phone, the same way they can't have a bottle of wine.

If they really need such device make sure that device is locked to a small list of app/contacts possible.

There's no need to lock down the rest of the internet because the responsible person of such kid can't tolerate their complaints. It is a parenting issue.

You totally ignored the point OP was making! Even if it is a parenting issue, simply declaring that will not make parents parent better. It's the same reason why we ban children from drinking wine, because parents cannot be relied upon here.

Unless your point was that we should legally ban kids from handling phones, which I think is too extreme.

But that is my point.

Chase the responsible adult if you see a kid with an overpowered phone, much like you would if you found the same kid with a bottle of wine.

And granted, we don't have locked-enough phone in market yet, but that's a solvable problem if we were to create that market.

There is also the influence of the church.

I have seen religious parents been vocally opposed to their children seeing or even discussing anything related to sexuality.

An example from the past:

"The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, was an American Catholic group founded in 1934 by the Archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas, as an organization dedicated to identifying objectionable content in motion pictures on behalf of Catholic audiences."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Decency

https://www.archbalt.org/catholicism-influenced-moviemaking-...

You have to appreciate the level of audacity required for a catholic organization to claim they are protecting children from harms regarding sexuality.

Just put your kids in a bubble so not a single adult is the slightest bit inconvenienced by having to exercise any social responsibility for their well being. Easy.

We also cannot to make sure that literally every kid is properly supervised. That's neither possible nor is the cost to coming anywhere close to that compatible with a free society.

Public schooling is also hardly a glowing example of how letting the government take over parenting is always good for kids.

So they should be raised by the state just in case? I feel like Ive read this story somewhere...

Parents should be imprisoned if they give children access to the internet. We have to make parents criminally liable. Without a change in incentives, we cannot expect behavior to change. Until then 'parents need to parent' is a slogan and not a solution.

"It takes a village to raise a child." Except these same parents who won't take care of their kids are also the very first who go all "How dare you speak to my child like that! I'm going to have you fired!"

If your way of talking to kids gets you fired, it was atrocious in the first place. "It takes a village to raise a child." is not about carte blanche to abuse any kid that you encounter.

The saying is about kids watching and learning from their environment - from how adults act. If you set up to be jerk or take advantage of random kids that happen to be around, you are teaching them to take advantage of people. And no amount of yelling "their parents are responsible because they did not stopped me" is going to change that.

"If your way of talking to kids gets you fired, it was atrocious in the first place."

I'm guessing you don't have kids.

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