Comment by scop

My family did this too. It did make me a condescending asshole, but worse than that, it taught me to be paralyzingly afraid of doing The Wrong Thing.

Did it protect me from driving drunk when I was in college? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from having a healthy social life because I couldn't engage with any sort of normal behavior. Did it protect me from getting on drugs? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from getting on desperately needed psychiatric medication because that was for Other People, Who Are Too Weak To Handle Their Problems Properly. Did it protect my parents from sleeping around? Yeah, but it also locked them into a miserable marriage for half their lives, leaving both them and their children with heaping scoops of extra trauma.

Maybe that trade-off is worth it, but if you're going down this route, make sure your kids know how to experiment and screw up sometimes, too.

I'm inclined to say that a better solution is to recognize that none of us exist in a vacuum. When our societies are full of toxicity and manipulation and brainrot, we can't escape those things without cutting off a part of ourselves. Sometimes we have to do that, but ultimately what we need is a healthy culture to live in - and if we don't have one, we should be working to make one.

Agreed. So much of it is identity (going back to James Clear in Atomic Habits). "I'm not a smoker" is more powerful than "I'm trying to quit".

"We just don't watch Youtube on our phones in this house." [and you work to develop that into healthy self-confidence rather than ego]

Growing up homeschooled, we had the same simmering sense of pride in not doing what others (e.g. "public schoolers" did). Never had a rebellious teen phase, etc. Some families overdid it, but...idk...I'm still quite close to my parents, so I never felt stifled.

It makes it -very- natural in life to focus on what my SO and I think are optimal and more or less disregard what's normal.

This truly works.

And honestly we live in a competitive, entropic world. Why some people so sensitive? Maybe because it’s true?

So yes. Some people are better than others, not due to some intrinsic features but because they cultivate some self defining attributes that set them apart from the rest.

I know there are definitely trashy, destructive, and self-imposed low class people. I don’t associate with them. I am not bothered nor do I lose sleep thinking about them. There are others who have everything but decide to be losers and awful people. Again, not my problem and not my associations. Maybe we work together. But we aren’t friends beyond whatever means to an end.

They chose whatever they did today. I did what I chose today and I’ll be going to sleep happy af and refreshed for tomorrow.

Another day to crush and a life to enjoy.

And I yearn to be even better tomorrow.

No drugs. No junk food. Discipline. Experiences over screen addiction. Learning and growing. Cherishing life and its fine moments. Not every day is perfect, but at least each day is constructive.

> The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority.

Odd!

It was the worst thing my parents did for me, I believed them.

Took a long time to realise I am, we were, quite ordinary.

That's one way to make everyone around your kids hate them.

You don't have to put yourself arrogantly above others to still teach your kids values. IMHO, not doing that probably breeds a better moral value system...

I'm sure you are a great person and all that, but in my experience, this particular recipe has produced absolute legions of smug, arrogant people who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. Many of these people were dangerously unprepared for a world where they weren't the smartest person in the room in a not-very-smart room.

This is SUCH an interesting comment. There’s a “homeschooling” post elsewhere in HN with a comment that espoused the exact opposite view as this one: raise your kids with humility and openness to other people and families.

Nothing beats "othering" the out-group members to really pull the tribe together!

My family didn't exactly say "better," but they meant it.

Same experience for me

For my case though, they refused to give smartphone access to me(despite multiple requests).They instead encouraged me to use laptop, while my friends were buying new smartphone while joining college.

I think you're on to something...

The one I heard was: "Dad, can you show me Minecraft? All my friends keep talking about Minecraft, but I don't understand it. I want to know more about Minecraft".

If you don't give the stuff to your kids, they get socially excluded.

The best we can do is to teach them how to use stuff in moderation. Show them how excessive usage can go bad: there are plenty of examples around, all the time.

<< disconnecting entirely makes one a social pariah.

Maybe, maybe not. The real question is.. do I really want my kid to associate with kids that are so heavily invested in social media. I know my personal answer to this. I even know my SO answer and the upcoming battles ahead.

There's almost zero chance for that pretend scenario to happen, kid and parents intermingle all the time at drop off and other school activities, kids are pretty vocal about their birthday and who they want to be present, and their parents will find a way to get the message across, and the kid will know from school interactions anyway if they are invited, and relay the info to the parent.

All of my kid’s sixth grade friends have smartphones. No exceptions. If I excluded those families my kid wouldn’t be allowed to have friends. Best I can do is take the other kids phones away after a certain number of screen hours at my house.

Limiting screen time is an exceptionally challenging task because of the many loopholes and bugs in parental controls, and my lack of direct control over the chromebooks the schools issue.

Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?

I know that I have a great friendship as an adult with my parents, in part because they were parents while I was growing up. I had a friend ask what I would do in a situation and I wanted to yell be a parent! Said something nicer, but basically gently pointed out that sometimes that means giving up things you may want to do to show a good example. For instance, if you are always on social media then of course they will want to be too. Right now, you are the biggest influence on your children's life, even when they do not like something now that does not mean they will not thank you later. Anyway, I was debating building a house that wouldn't allow radio waves in so that everything has to be approved. One of the quotes I like is, "It is not the things that I had as a child that makes me the man I am today, but the things I did not." Went on a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to encourage that for most of history it was considered good for children to learn to interact well not with their peers but with their elders. This helps firm realistic expectations of what the majority of life will be like, the opposite of social media and much of the internet. Also, remember that if you address a topic with your child first you are the trusted expert, rather than someone else, in their minds.

We choose an apple watch for this reason, that way we can still call them / locate them, they are part of their friends iMessage groups, but no social media apps are possible...

We specifically decided against the school that was closest to us because they give iPads in first grade. Even if the school is good, convenient and very well ranked, I don't want my kid to have a tablet until much later. I despise tablets because of the focus on consumption versus tinkering and creation and I think it's a distraction in a classroom that shouldn't be there.

I do give my son access to a computer but it's a based on misterfpga running the amiga core. Set up in such a way that he can explore and discover how things work from a time when computers were still relatively open.

> The only thing that I've learned, this is all in line with California’s state-approved computer literacy recommendations.

That's seriously fucked up!

100% this. Our kids were required to bring laptops to school for no particularly good reason, then allowed to zombie out on them in the library during lunch and free periods. Infuriating.

There is a sister thread on HN currently asking why people homeschool. Welcome to the conversation.

What there is 100% a precedent for prohibiting certain activities from minors because their brains are undeveloped.

In the future we will view a child spending hours a day on Tiktok how we currently view a kid smoking cigarettes. It is creating an entire generation of anxious, ADHD addled kids who struggle with school and focused work of any kind.

No, those kids can't have whatever they have if they're under 13, 14 or 18, depending on what it is that they have.

Do you have children? We are not bad parents just because we prohibit our children from doing something that is a "common" practice for many other kids in our circles. As for inhibiting socially, do you realize that multiple major publications have just been putting out articles in the past month about adults isolating more than ever? If anything, social media is a contributing factor to that social decline. I'm grateful my kids are young, and were not born a decade earlier because many kids I know that were born around that time have suffered with smartphone access. These are not arbitrary standards--it is a widely understood problem.

Yeah that point wasn't lost on me.

Maybe it's due to my age, but CDs don't seem that analog to me.

A few things CDs don't have that tapes and/or vinyl do:

- gradual degradation from repeated use

- need for maintenance (e.g. cleaning vinyl with a brush, or occasionally splicing a broken tape[0])

- time and effort needed to move to the next song or replay the current one (and my first tape deck didn't have a rewind button, so I had to eject the tape, flip the cassette, forward, then flip back and hope I had gotten to roughly the right point)

- the ability to directly manipulate the medium, e.g. using a hand to move the record slightly faster, or using a pencil to wind a tape

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXx2nq6dmpg

I think it’s fair enough to call a CD analog because the data stream is nothing for than wave amplitudes. It doesn’t use a Fourier transform or compression or require “software”.

Would not suggest vinyl for kids. That's a needle on the record player, it scratches everything up. Not easy to aim the arm to the beginning of the track.

Tapes are more foolproof. If you put them in the wrong way, the player won't close. And even though you can damage the actual tape part by mishandling it, you're not all that likely to do so.

This is how we handle it as well. We were at friends' last night and the older kids had the N64 out. The older kids reported that ours just wanted to be read to the whole time, but early doses of things we intend to introduce anyway (video games predating modern addictive mechanics) are fine at that frequency.

We are mindful of potential Pandora's boxes though. You can't ban everything unhealthy without causing long term issues. You strive though to only introduce things when they're developmentally ready to cope with it, even if that means restrictions on yourself as an adult.

You work to constantly provide good examples via your own life, compelling narratives, etc. of people who exemplify the virtues you want to instill. That's how you help shape (the best you can) the life of someone with an innate identity to, when necessary, "just say no", or simply be uninterested in and unswayed by things that don't conform to their value system.

They aren't stifled by rules and wrestling with temptation--not valuing YT Kids is just who they are.

I like it! Thanks for the explanation of your process.

This complex is deserved.

Just a thought: watching a parent leave to have a cigarette outside or something, from a child's perspective, isn't hugely damaging. The kid can't understand addiction nor lung cancer (and so on), so the kid's perception of "smoking = bad" is mostly only on how the kid themself feels.

With a phone, the kid can fell ignored, unheard, unengaged with the addicted parent for hours at a time, every single day.

Maybe kids will grow up thinking "hey, I don't wanna be a phone zombie like my daddy was," or something.

I begged my parents to quit smoking for a decade, and they finally did when I was 12.

I am so sensitive and triggered to smoke even as a middle aged man, it just smells so awful to me, even the hint on a smokers clothes makes me gag.

Now we have pot, which apparently I can smell across state lines?? And through my cars hepa filter? Devils weed indeed.

When my oldest was going into middle school the district started providing devices for the kids to use in class. There was breathless hype about how this would usher in a new age of technological competence and improved pedagogy. I asked the district IT folks in attendance what types of controls they had in place to prevent misuse -- watching YouTube, open browsing of the web, etc. They had literally nothing in place.

You can guess how that went.

I love Vernor Vinge's works, but the worst prediction of his ever, just 180 degrees totally in the wrong direction, was _Rainbow's End_'s treatment of technology in education. His take (and this was as late as 2006!) was that unfettered access to technology would turn elementary students into a cohort of genius autodidacts. Fast forward to 2025 (coincidently the date the book is set in) and unfettered access to technology has turned children into feed-consuming zombies.

Thanks. When you homeschool how do you create enough opportunities for social development?