Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

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For all the "think of the children" commentators here and in the blog - why is it that kids who have parents that hide them from everything "bad", wind up so messed up, narcissistic, and are generally unable to cope with life?

The answer is of course right there, by putting them in a "safe place" you've removed every adversary and every challenge - right when the mind needs those things the most so it can form abilities necessary to deal with and move forward in life (a life that will throw all kinds of issues, disasters, and curve balls at you).

Its kind of like the peanut allergy study that was posted here a day or two ago... The infants and children that don't get exposed to peanuts at an early age - so their systems can get familiar and use to it, are most likely to end up in the highly allergic group. [this is just an analogy]

edit:

This isn't about movies (that word is not mentioned in my post). Some of the replies so far are red-herrings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring).

I'm not suggesting that children should be constantly exposed (or made to watch) graphic and horror movies to prepare them for life.

And I'm sure there are cases of children who just can't handle these things at the age of 10-15... Though most will be fine - and won't need therapy, will not have their lives ruined, nor will their well-beings be negatively impacted.

I am also not suggesting that they should have no supervision.

What I am suggesting is that there are too many over-protective and helicopter parents who are making "special children" that can only live and function inside bubbles.

And if the child get's broken by watching "Aliens" at the age of 11, then the problem is with the parenting - rather than the friend's dad who let them watch it.

In which case, please, attach a note to the child with all the rather available things that he/she should not be exposed to or is allergic to (like peanut butter).

We live in a society where a child would have to sit on a park bench for 700,000 years before he/she would get kidnapped, but if you leave him/her in a car to pay the gas station clerk, someone can take a picture of that child being untended and send it to the police, which will then charge you with a misdemeanor.

In my parental opinion, there's more meaningful adversity for parents to give their children than terrifying movies. For my own childhood, a diet of passive and disjointed media led to learned helplessness.

My own children are forced to hike adult distances and work hard on tasks they find unpleasant. Hopefully this will lead to strength in the face of adversity.

> there's more meaningful adversity for parents to give their children than terrifying movies

I grew up in a (relatively) rough part Chicago and in spite or because of the depressed nature of the place never saw a lot of horror movies growing up.

Now working with a lot of people who grew up and live in suburbia on a steady diet of horror movies, I am amazed at the amount of fear and anxiety they demonstrate when dealing with anything vaguely paranormal or the thought of an intruder.

I know numerous people who sleep with a gun under their pillow even though statistically crime (especially violent crime) is stunningly low in the places we now live. They take precautions I never even considered growing up even though break-ins and muggings happened regularly in the neighborhood.

This is 100% idle conjecture on my part, but I always wondered if horror movies played some part in such behavior.

I've got to say, I've never actually met anybody that admitted to taking paranormal nonsense seriously. People understand that "Freddy" isn't real, and that kind of slasher-fic is not why people own guns for home defense.

Of course they know the stuff on screen isn't real. It's what it symbolizes that they're scared of.

Isn't that the point of a horror movie though? The audience is supposed to know that it isn't real, and are supposed to be scared of what it symbolizes.

If kids aren't scared by Aliens, then the movie failed. Being scared by Aliens even though they know it isn't real doesn't mean that the movie inappropriate for them, it means that they are handling the movie as adults do.

Well you can still be scared by something while knowing its not real, eg there are parts of Alien that always make me jump even though I've seen it many times (I personally prefer original Alien it to the more shoot-em-up sequel).

Sticking with your original context of people owning guns for home defense, while I would never assert that they do so directly in response to horror movies or suchlike, I would argue that such movies often serve an ideological function of embodying our social fears so as to domesticate them, and that this can heighten the perception of risk.

Drop me a line about this if you'd like to continue the conversation. I'm very interested in psychoananalytic approaches to film theory and would be happy to discuss it further.

My uncle back when I was really young showed me and my cousin "Full Metal Jacket". I still remember some scenes, the film traumatized me, literally. I don't know what age I was but I was way too young for that.

Kids can get terrified by horror and violence. Sex? Not so much. I don't understand why we hide nudity from kids.

I got "traumatized" by Baywatch (something with a ghost on the beach) and the short (2-4 sentences) teaser texts of mystery/horror-books in a book catalogue (with very broad sortiment) that came to our house. On the other hand I coped well with Mad Max and Missing in Action. You just can't predict what hits.

I don't understand why we hide nudity from kids.

Because we are afraid of harming them, because we are conditioned to be afraid of ourselves. !Kung Bushmen often lived in hand-made temporary huts. Therefore it was basically normal for couples to make love in front of the kids. !Kung Bushmen brides were also once prized by neighboring agricultural people, as they were thought to be particularly uninhibited and enthusiastic sexually.

The US is still very much a puritan culture in some weirdly sublimed ways.

Not sure why you were downvoted. I never saw dogs or cats hiding to screw. Fact.

Making love in front of someone is different though. I think it's for the same reason someone doesn't like to be sober around drunk people, or the reverse.

I saw Event Horizon when I was like ten or eleven. I saw IT when I was about the same age. I used to stay up and watch old reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents with my dad.

...I'm not convinced that that was a good thing.

I'll grant you Event Horizon (I haven't seen the other too). I was scared shitless for a long time after this movie.

On the plus side, it kind of planted the seeds of insanity required for my current career doing web development in enterprise healthcare.

Where we're going, we won't need modern practices.

Yeah. I think I'm gonna rewatch it soon as I've been tasked to bolt on WSDL support to a REST API app just because the top can save some money on an outsourced mobile app, whose developers have automated class generators for WSDL...

Libera te tutemet ex inferis...

Probably a good time to tear your eyes out.

Yeah. Or someone elses...

A bit offtopic but relevant to your post: When I was an SGI customer support engineer, I repaired an SGI system for one of the film video production companies in SOHO in London - one of the SGI's was being used to render a scene in Event Horizon in which a fire extinguisher was being blown past the camera by an explosion.

Loved the movie when it came out.

When I saw Event Horizon I thought, "that... SUCKED!" But then, I was an adult at the time.

I wonder if it was like seeing Salem's Lot as a kid vs as an adult? As a kid it terrified me (well, the floating kid in the window scene anyway) but as an adult I wondered how such horrible acting and filmmaking could ever get green lit. I've heard the same from others in my generation.

I saw Event Horizon in the theater when I was seventeen or so and I was traumatized. That movie was pretty twisted. I felt completely exhausted when I came out of the theater.

More than the simple fact of whether the child has access to 'adult' material or not, what's important is how it's presented to them. Whether they see a film with friends who got a copy from another friend, or whether their parents actually show it to them makes a big difference in how they analyze what they see. So not putting your child in a bubble and not wanting to show them disturbing media aren't mutually exclusive at all.

why is it that kids who have parents that hide them from everything "bad", wind up so messed up, narcissistic, and are generally unable to cope with life?

Precisely because!

As the Japanese say, "You only know true kindness through suffering."

What a strange expression. Does this mean to truly appreciate how good my car is I must drive it into a tree and wreck it?

I think it's more along the lines of "to truly appreciate how good your car is you must drive one that is a lot worse".

No. I'm thinking more along the lines of stuff that happened to members of my family and their friends in Korea under the Japanese occupation. Yours is indeed a first world perspective. To borrow your phrase: "To truly appreciate how good your life is, you must first 'drive' one that is a lot worse."

If you drove your car into a tree and became paralyzed, you might become much kinder from a firsthand understanding of deep suffering. (You might also become angry and bitter. You might even do both these things at the same time!)

Strawman much? I didn't argue for complete prohibition. That's silly, even if it seems to be popular in some parts of the world (e.g. state-sponsored sexual abstinence programs in the US).

Wow, what a wildly ignorant comment.

Could you expand on this? As someone with no kids yet, your parent's comment resonated with me as I often feel that kids are being shielded far more than I recall from my childhood, to their detriment, but I'd love to see it from the other side.

Well, provide any data at all? What percentage of kids that are being shielded from stuff end up being messed up? And what does it even mean - do you mean kids should not be protected from anything at all? Or what, specifically, should they not be protected from?

Ah, gotcha, if by "ignorant" it was meant "unsupported and unspecific" then I certainly see that point.

I tend to agree. The biggest problem I have is that movie ratings for all practical purposes carry the force of law even here in the US, despite the lack of anything resembling valid evidence of harm that kids under 16 or 17 might undergo by exposure to a movie. The Germans in particular are ridiculously overprotective in this sense. Um, guys, I'm pretty sure Hitler never saw Aliens. Lighten up already.

The second, more serious criticism I have is that the moral panic associated with exposure to children to onscreen violence, sex, and drugs can only diminish the real outrage that we ought to feel when kids in war-torn countries, inner-city slums, and refugee zones actually experience real-life violence and horror beyond anything Hollywood can conjure, and on a daily basis. If most of those kids don't grow up to be serial killers, I somehow doubt a movie is going to do it.

> If most of those kids don't grow up to be serial killers, I somehow doubt a movie is going to do it.

1. Anyone in those conditions isn't seeing violence glorified the way it is in movies, where the guys you were rooting for win at the end and you rarely see prolonged consequences. Someone in a refugee camp knows all too well that the bad guys can leave people broken and pay no consequences for it.

2. Perhaps not serial killers out of a horror film but it's not like the concept of cycles of violence is unknown: children who grow up in horrible conditions do have a higher rate of either becoming gang/cartel/etc. members, soldiers, etc.[1] or have escalated rates of suicide, domestic violence, substance abuse, etc. because they've never recovered from what happened.

1. either because they have no choice or because they're all too familiar with what happens when you don't represent enough of a threat to deter violence. Closer to home, This American Life had a great interview with kids talking about how they had to join gangs because they'd be getting attacked either way so it was a question of either being afraid to leave your house or having enough allies to be relatively safe most days:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h...

> If most of those kids don't grow up to be serial killers, I somehow doubt a movie is going to do it.

That's not why most people want to restrict the amount of violent content their children watch.

See, for example, the "You've been Tango'd" ads in the UK. There's a soda called "Tango". One advert showed someone drinking the can, than a fat near naked man painted orage runs in, and slaps the drinker's face with both hands. Children imitated this, causing several perforated eardrums. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Man_%28advertisement%2... (see controversy section). That's one example of children imitating what they saw on tv, and other children being harmed as a result.

EDIT: i'm not saying children copy everything. But this example proves that children do imitate some behaviours; that children are influenced by some things they watch. Ask any parent about the children's show "Caillou" and the change of their children into whiners. Parents realise that some content will cause mild behaviour changes or nightmares and they want to be prepared.

So how are half of the children, who play violent video-games all day long, not imitating the behavior they see and do in those games?

We should be at least overrun by car-jackings at this point thanks to Grand Theft Auto.

So how are half of the children, who play violent video-games all day long, not imitating the behavior they see and do in those games?

A lot of those games involve hardware the children do not have access to. The games also often portray consequences in a way which the kids still know to be very bad. (As much as children play "war," they know viscerally that being in pain and bleeding is generally not fun.

We should be at least overrun by car-jackings at this point thanks to Grand Theft Auto.

There was one young man who enacted a GTA scenario and shot his way out of a police station with a gun he stole from a police officer. However, he is very much the exception.

What the orange advert did was to portray an activity with bad consequences as a trivial and harmless one, in a way that specifically worked around the built in understanding that otherwise deters kids from doing things like that. (Unless they mean harm. That's also within the possible range of behaviors of children. However, it's not so common in many places for children to want to really harm their playmates.)

A lot of those games involve hardware the children do not have access to.

I guess that's one theory.

> A lot of those games involve hardware the children do not have access to.

You mean things like fists, feet, pipes, kitchen knives, crowbars, hammers, that kinda thing? Like others said, if video games made normal people violent you'd see a lot more violence.

That anecdote about the 'enacting a GTA scenario' would also have happened just like that without the GTA link. Then it becomes a guy with a gun in a police station.

You mean things like fists, feet, pipes, kitchen knives, crowbars, hammers, that kinda thing?

Yes. Actually, there was an incident I was personally witness to involving someone's 8 year old son and an ordinary clawhammer. There is clearly such a thing as "desensitization," and opposition to the notion is usually the kind of unconscious bias one generally sees in politics. < http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ > Note that my position is not so simpleminded as to be simply placed on one side or another of the typical Internet argument.

If you believe that widespread gun ownership generally increases the incidence of gun injuries, then you are subscribing to the same general theory, that availability increases likelihood. Do I believe that's a justification for banning things? No, but we should be honest about the existence of such effects. (Also, fists and feet are an entirely different category, as they are naturally part of your body. And while I said it wasn't common in some places, in others kids do use those to enact violence.)

Like others said, if video games made normal people violent you'd see a lot more violence.

I would put good odds on your repeating what lots of people angrily repeat on the Internet in defense of their hobby. In the grand scheme of things, people are violent! We are extraordinarily violent as animals. In particular, we have an ability to band together in groups and murder each other in a coordinated fashion, one that probably predates our getting language! We also accomplish fantastic things living together, so we also have fantastic mechanisms for coexisting. Seeing things in media does have the effect of reinforcing the portrayed actions and scenarios in our minds. However, human minds are very complex and robust. We have mental defenses, much as we have homeostatic mechanisms.

That anecdote about the 'enacting a GTA scenario' would also have happened just like that without the GTA link. Then it becomes a guy with a gun in a police station.

Read up on the incident and honestly tell me that GTA had nothing to do with putting the idea into his head. Of course, one could also find other pieces of media he was exposed to conveying much the same message. The systemic problems resulting in his violence are probably more serious and of greater import to society than the content of some video game.

movie ratings for all practical purposes carry the force of law even here in the US

?! Is this some leftover trauma from not being allowed in to an R-rated film when you where 13? The only people who are constrained by ratings are producers, and then only in the sense that producers push for an R rating (thereby pushing the envelope of what's acceptable for an 'R') because many theater chains refuse to show NC-17 movies for commercial reasons.

I am sure that Hitler never had a diet of fast food and burgers, yet if he ate them constantly he'd get fat.

The same goes with what you put in your brain; if you watch slime, slime is more acceptable to you and what comes out of you is only a product of what goes in - slime. Just because someone in the past did horrific things doesn't mean we need to expose ourselves to a barrage of horrific things.

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