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Comment by qball | Hacker News Reader

>Perhaps he'll experience it peering in through someone else's phone.

And better yet, once the child is free of their parent's influence, they'll probably just get sucked in because they never developed the mental mechanisms to handle the tools properly (because their parent was too emotionally blinded and thus incapable of teaching risk management).

Just like that parent probably did when _they_ grew up and left home, for the same reasons. Cycles of emotional abuse are hard to break.

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Emotional abuse?? That's quite a bit of a leap to make, from someone saying they won't let their kid on social media, don't you think?

The word "abuse" has been thrown around enough now to have lost almost all meaning. What OP described is called "being a parent".

I’m not sure how your point relates to the shared experience of individual alienation, but is the child you speak of really free from their parent’s influence if they’re living their life via the same broken mechanism?

This is like saying we should have our child experience gambling, alcohol, cigarettes, and other addictive activities to teach risk management because they're going to be exposed to it when they leave home, which is silly. Kids aren't born mature. Self-discipline and risk management are skills that need to be built up over time before we expose our kids to the most addictive aspects of life IMO.

That is actually a common argument with alcohol, that people who are exposed to it in moderation with supervision handle it better later on. Nobody argues that with cigarettes because it's rare to use them with any regularity and not get addicted.

Exactly! I think the OP talking about emotional abuse is confusing actual emotional abuse with the simple absence of a well-developed cognitive structure, and the problems that arise when parents lacking this structure try to raise kids of their own.

If a parent could give their kid an exact copy of their good/bad mapping for the world, the result wouldn't be a copy of a well-adjusted parent. The result would be a child who, at best, is able to function one step from their own reality without too much chaos. But I think it's more likely they would lose their footing somewhere around college and go off the rails, an increasingly necessary process it seems. Hopefully they have enough self-awareness left at that point to figure out how to exist in their world, finally in their own way.

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