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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

What my son has wanted for as long as he has been a teenager is a chance to have grown-up responsibility. That's why he loves working on his start-up project. An actual profit-making business proposal gets evaluated by investors with no "grading on the curve" or concern for "self-esteem." He can deal with that. He found school environments that attempted to coddle teenagers (he wasn't in many such environments, but encountered them in passing) very off-putting.

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I realize this is a site dedicated to startups, but business proposals and investors for children? As long as he likes it I suppose and doesn't rationalize happiness = money.

I felt like the whole purpose of this discussion was essentially to point out: teenagers aren't exactly children. Teenagers can be fully functioning adults, they just aren't given the chance to get the necessary experience. (I'm assuming here that the teenager in question is at least 15, I feel like younger than that blurs the line between child and teenager...)

Disclaimer: I'm 17, and this is just how I feel about people equating teenagers to children. Also, sorry if this post came off a bit... over-vehement. ;)

He has been quite motivated in his learning as considers the problem of how to use his teen years to get ready for running a business in his (soon) adulthood. That's been good for my younger children to see his thought process in making the teen years count for adult independent life. The essay pg wrote about this

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

has been helpful in our family's thinking about this issue. Perhaps endure school-like experiences, but look for the most adult-like learning experiences possible.

I understand your rationale and sounds like everything is going swimmingly. In my eyes some things aren't meant to be 'optimized' or taken so seriously, like when you are teenager. Or maybe I'm just playing Devil's advocate.

Why not take something seriously if it is meaningful to you? I don't take (for example) the high school prom at all seriously, rather when I was in high school I look learning foreign languages seriously. Isn't freedom all about letting people decide for themselves what to value?

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