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Comment by GaryBluto | Hacker News Reader

> I have sat down with her countless times and yeah she has broken my trust a few times and she looses access to the internet.

All that does is encourage her to lie and find work-arounds rather than fess-up and suffer consequences.

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Good breeding ground for new techies however. Circumventing net nannies and school protections got a lot of us interested in the first place.

That makes no sense. For rules to have any meaning at all, there must be consequences to breaking them. If OP doesn't take away his daughter's Internet access when she breaks his trust, it will just teach her that there's no reason to follow his rules because it doesn't affect the outcome for her.

This is unfortunately a common fallacy: rules with consequences can encourage kids to lie, it’s inferior to trust, so let’s have no rules (and don’t say no) and talk through everything. Not only is not how kids brains grow, but inevitably the parents lack time to talk all day long and the kids end up on their own unprepared to face anything with consequences. This is a recipe for the behavior and anxiety problems that have become so common.

What would a better approach look like?

Explain why it was bad, show them how you caught them, and tell them they have to do better next time. Rinse and repeat until a young hacker is born.

There is a fantasy theory that you can just only explain to them why something is bad, and they’ll understand and stop to do it by themselves. In contrast to past generations that are painted as caricatures that only had rules with harsh punishment, never talking and explaining. Looks obviously extremely appealing on paper, at least a generation of "modern" parents fell into the trap and are struggling with teens and young adults highly insecure and non adapted to the adult world.

Worked for me. I now have a secure young adult who's as well adapted as anybody I've seen.

Come to think of it, I never got punished much as a kid myself, unless you count lectures. Did OK.

Sorry about your cycle of authoritarianism there.

Repetition. Then make them repeat, to see if they understood why (they _will_ roll their eyes, until they age enough).

The only thing we were punished for in my childhood was lying. Not forgetting/not following on promises ('yes I will do it, don't worry '), that was fine, but saying 'i did it' when it wasn't done, that was getting harsh punishment. You didn't clean the toilet after use despite multiple warnings? As long as you admit it, no punishment, only a calm talk. I destroyed my little sister room and ran out for an hour during a teenager fit? Calm talk, asked to fix everything the best I can (and I did). Lying after the fact? Yeah, you've gained a curfew, and an unpaid job. The 'where were you' that most kid are asked in their late teenage years was always answered truthfully, even when it was doing illegal stuff (happened with my younger brother, in front of my even younger sister). Calm discussion, no punishments.

A few year, my sister called my dad at 3 am, while inebriated and high, and afraid (I don't remember if it was because she didn't trust her friend to drive her or that she felt weirdly bad and was afraid of GHB). The trust built in the early years from this approach might have saved her life.

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