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Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

My father blocked things from me, not internet based obviously because they weren't available. But things like fixing the heater so it wouldn't be set higher than what he considered reasonable.

I assume he's still alive, but I haven't communicated with him for years.

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My uncle was a forensic child psychiatrist. He told me once about a very poor family, both parents had the equivalent IQs of lukewarm water and over all were dull and struggled in every aspect of life.

Yet, they had a kid that was actually very bright.

One time during a family session the kid would complain that he got made fun of at school a lot because he smelled of burnt rubber.

Turns out, the dad would burn tires in the “living room” to heat the house and explained to my uncle that it was cold (freezing) and they couldn’t afford other heat so it was tires or freeze.

Story always stuck with me. He said his job in this case was to help the kid understand the reality of his situation and help him live with it so that he could move on past it when he was finally old enough to move out (and move up) in the world.

Maybe your dad also struggled with something that he kept from you that caused him to not want (or be unable to afford) to turn the heat up. Or, maybe, he was just a controlling jerk. Or some combination of the two even. I have no idea of course of your life but thought the story mildly relevant and worthy of sharing.

I... did you pick the first example of conflict that came to your head and there were many deeper problems, or do you think not being able to adjust the thermostat is some kind of huge red flag/worse?

I guess that depends on what temperature he thought was reasonable? Freezing is a temperature.

Put a sweater on instead of running the heat. Maybe I’m just an old fart.

I felt the cold a great deal and preferred a higher temperature. The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.

Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.

For the record I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself. She finally got a facebook account because it was required to engage with her university courses. She was livid.

> The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.

> Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.

When the preference in question is temperature, not many households include children in the consensus process. Adults deciding that is quite normal with few grudges.

I don't know how to interpret "instead of reason". If you mean that literally, I strongly doubt the temperature setting was chosen without reasoning things through.

My dad liked to say that if I wasn't happy with the temperature then I could start paying the gas bill.

>not many households include children in the consensus process.

That was at least something I could address when I became a parent.

My daughter mentioned to me a few weeks ago that she was confused by the fact that all of her friends seek her out when they need to know the right thing to do. I told her it is because she has a moral compass that you can see from space.

> I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself.

This is genius: (a) Treat your kid like an intelligent human being, and (b) don’t be a hypocrite.

It sounds like if you’d been my parent, maybe I would’ve respected you and taken your opinion seriously. As it is, I just quoted your anecdote (with link and attribution) in another venue where this HN thread got linked.

I will never forgive my parents for what they did to me when I was a teenager—allegedly “for my own good”. I thought I was smarter than they were. I was right.

Did yours also do the fun “hide the power cords to important electronics” as a punishment? That was always my favorite /s

When I had my computer mouse taken away because I got in school suspension (for getting domain admin in the local AD no less), I promptly learned how mouse control via keyboard worked.

Feels like a rite of passage.

My dad took the keyboard and left the mouse. I did ok, it was annoying using char map to copy letters because there was no virtual keyboard then.

Ended up making common phrases and commands in a txt file.

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