Hacker News Reader

Comment by swartkrans | Hacker News Reader

> Not every toddler needs 24/7 supervision

Yes, every toddler needs 24/7 supervision.

> and once they identify harming things

Some of those harming things are really bad, even life threatening.

> I strongly believe that toddlers need not so much supervision and more free time/will. It will help them to become more self-sufficient person in future.

I doubt any of this is true, and I worry for the safety of your child.

> and more free time/will.

When my daughter was a toddler, she didn't want to be alone, she wanted to be, and she still always wants to be with someone. I have never heard of a toddler that wants free time. More like parents want free time and don't get any. Children at that young age need a lot of attention, caring and love, they should not be alone, like ever only nowadays many parents are too busy staring at their phones to notice.

View on HN

I wonder what kind of supervision, you, me, my parents, your parents had in our/their toddler days?

>I doubt any of this is true, and I worry for the safety of your child.

> When my daughter was a toddler, she didn't want to be alone, she wanted to be, and she still always wants to be with someone. I have never heard of a toddler that wants free time. More like parents want free time and don't get any. Children at that young age need a lot of attention, caring and love, they should not be alone, like ever.

I have same experience with my older one. That does not make me happy not because of I need free time. I can sleep less and have free time. It worries me because of him being afraid of being by himself. BTW, me and my wife did supervise him 24/7 till 3 years.

All in all, I understand being obsessive with supervision in parenting is trend these days and anybody with other view will be considered as dangerous parent. At the end of day, one can create safe environment for kid, hence won't need to be worried every second. But I guess, this is part of evolution in parenting and we have to ride it out.

Both my toddlers needed free time. When they did not had possibility to play independently, they became very irritable.

I've used to play without parent supervision in front of out block of flats since I was 2 years old. AFAICT it was not unusual back then (Eastern Europe, cca 1975).

>> I worry for the safety of your child.

Was that necessary? It's an internet message board post. It's not like we're watching video of the guy's house as he declares his refusal to clean up the broken glass bottle of lemonade in the kitchen because "the kid'll learn him quick!"

Maybe too harsh. But I've known many cases of toddlers dying in which parents left them alone "just a second": jumping through windows, drowned in the bathtub, etc.

What children want is doing (specially discovering and learning) things by themselves, but that's not the same as being alone.

And every child I've seen wants more attention from their parents. There's an age for everything and that's not the one for unsupervised independence.

You witnessed these cases of toddlers dying personally? Or did you watch them on TV?

A friend's nephew, some acquitances' son... at that time, ten to twenty years ago, domestic tragedies didn't appear in the media.

Edit: I live in Spain. I don't know how it is in your country. Now here these accidents are increasingly in tv.

FFS! I never said anything about ignoring your kid, and yet somehow my words have been twisted to mean this.

Hopefully if I explain my beliefs further you'll see what I mean. Yes, I believe that kids should be encouraged to be self-reliant from a young age, because I believe ultimately every individual only grows off their own impulses, and the job of an adult is to give a safe and loving environment for this process to unfold.

But a toddler might not have developed ideas of right and wrong, right? Isn't what I'm saying irresponsible? Again, no, because you can teach self-reliance. By talking through ideas with a kid, asking for their opinion, asking them to consider alternative points of view, you help teaching them how to make sense of their options. This process still requires attentiveness, but changes the parent-child relationship.

Perhaps the best example I know of in the real world was the way Feynmann's dad taught Feynmann to explore his curiosity... The Importance of a Father: http://youtu.be/695Flhmjmg4

Going back to the original article, imagine the kid in the video is a younger version of yourself. If you could go back in time to pass on a message to this younger you, what would you tell him? Personally I'd tell him it's okay to play, but he'd only truly understand why if he could reason for himself.

Finally, I realise that parenting is a big responsibility, and consequently people worry about whether they're doing it right, so let me be clear... I am not criticising you, I don't even know you, all I am saying is what I would prefer to do, your decisions are yours to own.

I'm told that as a toddler, even as a baby, I loved nothing more than spend time by myself. My mum would put me to bed as a baby and instead of falling asleep I'd just stare at the ceiling for hours on end absorbed in my own mind.

This behaviour continued when I was older. I would spend most of my time running around the backyard and getting into all sorts of trouble without much supervision. The only thing I remember from those times are that I was deadly afraid of the very big steep hill that formed a natural border on one side of the yard, the upstairs balcony that had no railings, and the wooden stairs that lead upstairs.

I imagine those fears were instilled by my parents to keep me safe. Those areas were dangerous to visit on my own, so naturally they made me so afraid of them, that I wouldn't dare even get close.

It worked out pretty well. I have never had a broken bone in my life and I learned to be fairly independent early on (for instance, I would walk to school every morning for about 1km on a road without sidewalks when I was 7 years old)

There are different definitions of "alone" and "supervised", but regardless you might find this interesting:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21537988

every child (and every parent) is different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com