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Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. And if a kid drinks beer only the parents should be liable.

Why are we all so horny to transfer unlimited liability to parents?

Because raising children is unequivocally the parents' responsibility. It's, like, their main job.

But we don't put barbed wire on random sidewalks and then blame parents if a kid walks over it and gets hurt. There is the attractive nuisance doctrine, among other things.

We don't leave the barbed wire on the side walk but require everyone that wants to walk on it to age verify first either. And the attractive nuisance doctrine some states have is absolutely bonkers.

Yes we do leave pubs on the sidewalk and require everyone that wants to drink there to age verify first, what are you talking about

Sure, a parent can release their child into the wilderness and when they inevitably hurt themselves, shrug their shoulders and say it's the kids fault. That would still be a failure of parenting.

Kids need varying levels of guidance until their brains mature and they learn how to navigate the adult world, which is why we have the legal concept of adulthood, and age-restricted laws for things like drinking alcohol and voting. Kids are not tiny adults, they're adults-in-training.

Viewing the continuance of our race as only the responsibility of parents is pathological.

Moreover, children are all of our [mid-term] futures too. If education fails, there are no doctors for anyone not ultra-wealthy.

You have to look from the other direction too - children have natural rights and deserve to be extending dignity as humans too.

>Viewing the continuance of our race as only the responsibility of parents is pathological.

That seems to be a uniquely American pathology.

Everywhere where else in the world, and in non-white American subcultures, the community taking a hand in raising children is expected. But many Americans seem to consider it socialist and an attack on Christian values.

See Hillary Clinton getting mocked for saying "it takes a village"[0] or BLM being accused of wanting to "destroy the nuclear family" by encouraging community based parenting[1].

[0]https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/news/9608/27/hillary.sp...

[1]https://medium.com/@emailnatesmith/the-blm-statement-on-fami...

It's extra weird because the concept of a nuclear family was invented by advertising agencies in the 1950s to sell suburban houses and cars.

> Viewing the continuance of our race as only the responsibility of parents is pathological.

That's not what I said.

You have a kid, you have responsibility for that kid. In Germany we have a term "Aufsichtspflicht" for this, which roughly translates to duty of supervision. Up to a certain age of the kid parents will be made responsible for damages your kid caused. One pretty funny example of that was a kid spending 1000s of Euros on a MMORPG because the MMO offered a payment option that allowed people to pay through their phone bill. Parents could've easily prevented any of that happening, but in that generation it was pretty common that kids were tech savvy while parents couldn't be bothered to learn about computers, which imo already is problematic.

Nowadays there are many many ways to supervise your children's online access. And yes, there are also many many ways for kids to work around that too, but ultimately if you buy your kid a device with internet access, you should try to supervise that. Parents need to care more about what their children are up to, instead of silencing them with a tablet for a moment of personal silence.

¿What are those ways?

A small example would be to set the device into "kiosk mode" which many companies use for their employee devices too. Prevent app installs, check what pages ur kids visit with their browsers and whatnot. Just make sure to be open about it so you don't hurt your kids by violating their privacy and trust towards you. Hell we even got parents having their kids take air tags with them so the parents know where they are.

Or the device could be mandated to have a "child mode" with more specific restrictions designed for children.

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