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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

> if you work through the refusal to clean their room

Well, is it their room or not? If it’s their room, viz. their inviolable space, what basis[1] do you have to enforce your standards on others’ spaces? Unless it’s an actual hygiene/H&S/hoarding situation, or part of the de-jure shared living space (like a Jack+Jill bathroom) then a messy room isn’t a real problem, and raising a fuss about it is only going to create conflict.

[1]: “my house, my rules” is not a convincing argument: your kids have no choice w.r.t. where they live.

EDIT: as you can tell, I’m not a parent - and am still too mentally close to adolescence :)

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It's very simple.

As a parent, your job is to help your children become the best people they can be, not the people they'd turn out by default.

I would much rather my son hate me now and thank me later than the other way around.

To use this example - if your choice is to raise a child who is organized vs one who is a slob: aim for organized because it will help them down the road in many ways. It's not the most important thing, but leaving the kid to their own devices is just lazy.

Funny example - every woman I ever dated has a story of coming to a guy's apartment, seeing that it's gross, and turning around. So these men are literally missing out on sex/partnership opportunities because their parents didn't teach them to clean up their room. Thanks a lot mom and dad.

I'm sure those men could clean their rooms perfectly well if someone made them. Their problem isn't using the wrong solvents or mixing light and dark laundry. It's lacking the conscientiousness to do boring/unpleasant life admin work consistently when no one is making them. There may be ways for parents to impart this trait, but just making them is probably not it. Boys who clean because their mothers are angry become men who clean because their wives are angry.

FWIW my parents were 100% diligent about bedtime, nutrition, cleaning my room, etc. I threw it all to the wind as soon as I moved out for college. Predictably I felt like shit. But I had to go through those experiences of feeling like shit, and then noticing that the "responsible" behaviors helped, before I cared enough to prioritize them.

In other words, I see what my parents were trying to do. I see what so many parents are trying to do when they get into huge conflicts with their kids. Teach lessons that they learned firsthand, so that the kids can skip the unpleasant parts (being sleep deprived, living in filth, bad breakups, whatever) and just do everything right the first time. But it doesn't work that way. Everyone has to find out for themselves.

It's a good point. But did it help that when you decided to prioritise those things, you actually had some idea how to execute?

I don’t think I ever found the information or techniques challenging. I do think that having the prior experience of a “wholesome” life made it occur to me as a potential solution to malaise. It’s very sad that some kids never experience that baseline.

Not if you have any kind of executive-function disorder, which is one of the common traits of ASD and ADD/ADHD.

> There may be ways for parents to impart this trait, but just making them is probably not it. Boys who clean because their mothers are angry become men who clean because their wives are angry.

This is the point I was trying to make in my downvoted post - thank you for stating it more clearly than I was able to.

> I would much rather my son hate me now and thank me later than the other way around.

Well put.

The role of a parent is to help children grow into healthy functioning adults. Avoiding unnecessary conflict is something we should all strive for, avoiding all conflict is tantamount to simply not parenting.

Frankly this entire argument feels like an intentional twisting of the common expression "their room."

I took it to mean their bedroom specifically, assuming they have a bedroom to themselves.

I’m fine with having family “team cleans”: it’s a positive shared experience, and I can’t protest instilling discipline for tidiness either - I just draw the line at “tidy your room” as overstepping a crucial boundary that arbitrarily encroaches on our autonomy.

By analogy, it’s like if my parents forced me to use a particular desktop wallpaper image on my computer, or restricting what I wore on weekends without a better reasoned argument than “because I said so”.

> I just draw the line at “tidy your room” as overstepping a crucial boundary that arbitrarily encroaches on our autonomy.

Teenagers don't have full autonomy, that's why they aren't adults. Parents exist to set boundaries and expectations for teenager's future adulthood (or more specifically their viewpoint on what a normal adult is).

Many teenagers enter adulthood and realize their parent's expectations weren't who they wish to be. But generally their parent's version is a good enough starting point to discover who they wish to become as an adult.

If new adults decide they want to live in a mess, at that time they can choose to do so because they hopefully understand the social, functional, and health consequences of that choice. An understanding a teenager may lack.

It's also about providing them with the necessary skills so that they actually do have a choice. If a kid never learns to tidy up, wash dishes, sort their laundry etc. then when they move out of home they may not know how to take care of themselves.

If they have the skills and just choose to be a slob, that's on them. But many young adults seem genuinely lost.

It's a stupid comparison, because keeping your stuff organized is an important life skill while choice of desktop wallpaper is irrelevant.

Well, I guess if your desktop wallpaper was porn or nazi paraphernalia your parents would be totally right to teach you that it should be something else.

Frankly your posts read like someone who doesn't understand that as an adult, it's your responsibility to have more wisdom and experience than your kids, and to help them benefit from it.

as an adult, it's your responsibility to have more wisdom and experience than your kids, and to help them benefit from it.

This is true, but it's also your responsibility to help them gain wisdom and experience. Making decisions for them may leverage your wisdom and experience wonderfully, but sometimes it's important to let them make mistakes and learn from them.

Sure. I am saying "the what", you are suggesting a "how." Hopefully the parent's wisdom and experience enables them to select the right approach for the circumstance.

Using the "clean your room" example though, that's more of a skill and habit because it's not the kind of thing that's gonna feel like "a mistake to learn from" - perhaps until much much later. That's actually how it worked out with me, my mom is a messy hoarder and I grew up like that, but by the time I moved in with my now-wife I just brought my plant, computer and a small amount of clothes :)

But my life would have been better if I was always neat and organized rather than figuring it out in my late 20s.

Conversely, they might just leave home and feel joy at the freedom to finally live how they want to live.

There's also something to be said for learning from the mistakes of others. I saw what smoking did to my grandfather. It destroyed his lungs and he slowly lost the ability to breathe. It robbed him of his strength, then his mobility, then his life. It made a stronger impression on me than a good role model ever could.

Perhaps you particularly appreciate the value of a good habit specifically because you saw the consequences of the opposite.

(Completely off-topic: I noticed your username and wondered if it was a reference to the C&C community?)

Yes. Tiberian Sun was the first PC game I owned and Westwood Online was the first service I needed a username for (aside from my email). It's been my handle since 1999.

It's their room but my house. Just like in my house I still have to follow the rules that my government puts on me, they have to follow the house rules. They have some autonomy as to how they want to do that, but they still have to follow the rules.

>Well, is it their room or not? ...their inviolable space

It is not their room.

> “my house, my rules” is not a convincing argument

It is in my house ;)

>> my house, my rules” is not a convincing argument

>> It is in my house ;)

Just wanted to tell you - I laughed out loud. Dad power! (Or mom-power, whatever)

And as an adult, you can “own” your house, but you still have to abide by the greater rules of the society you live in.

Teenager in a house has to live within the rules. Homeowner within a HOA has to live within the rules. Homeowner within city limits has to live within the rules, etc.

What about "I'm the adult, and you're the kid"? On the one hand, you do need to respect the child's personal living space, but on the other you have parental responsibility to ensure that 1) that space meets some established minimum quality of cleanliness and 2) the child learns enough cleaning/organizational skills to function as a member of society.

Obviously this is completely different when the child is a fully-grown adult--at that point, what they need is not a life lesson--but for a minor just beginning to learn how to be an adult, the parents must impose their will on their child to some extent for the child's own good.

> EDIT: as you can tell, I’m not a parent - and am still too mentally close to adolescence :)

Just a general remark: If you're not a parent [1], don't tell others how to be parents. It's okay to ask questions (e.g., "why are you doing it like this instead of like that?"), but don't believe you know what you're talking about.

[1] "Parent" as in "functionally a parent", not necessarily "biologically a parent". If you're raising a child, you're a parent, even if they aren't your biological child.

1. That highly downvoted post looks like it's mostly questions to me.

2. It's hard to know how to properly instill good habits in a teenager. Even being a parent of a teen doesn't always mean you know how to do that, and being a parent of a non-teen is definitely not enough. So don't try to categorize parents in general as having this knowledge.

I think we should foster an atmosphere of free philosophical inquiry here on HN.

FWIW I think GP raises an interesting question.

I don't think we should do that. I don't want to wade through the posts of adolescents, which is what reddit mostly is now.

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