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Comment by nicklovescode | Hacker News Reader

I wholeheartedly support the idea of children using interactive creative environments rather than just watch TV. However, as a non-parent, I can't figure out why cursing is such a big deal. Many parents wouldn't bat at eye at some pretty awful violence in movies(think Batman or something), but feel "fuck" is cause for evacuation. I have the same issue with fear of nudity.

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I think I can answer that as a pretty liberal parent. Like you I don't have a big problem with cursing or nudity. But that does not mean I let my kids listen to cursing or watch nudity willy nilly. To me it is not that the hearing of cursing itself is bad. The problem is that kids start saying those words themselves in inappropriate settings. That reflects badly upon you as a parent. Things related to nudity, sex, bodily functions etc is not easy either. Like when visiting a restaurant toilet and your son asks questions about how you pie very loud so everybody else can hear. It is not really about the kids, but the fact that everybody care a lot about what everybody else thinks about you and your kids.

E.g. in Norway where I am from, it is perfectly normal to let kids run around stark naked at the beach. It is seen as natural and nobody stares or makes a fuss about it. I don't have a problem with that. However when visiting the US, we don't let the kids run around naked at the beach. Not because we suddenly changed our attitudes towards nudity, but because we don't want to stick out. We don't want people to stare at us and think we are bad parents.

Ironically I read something related when visiting the DDR museum in Berlin. Being nude at the beach started as a protest against the conformist communist party. But eventually everybody in DDR became a nudist, because they didn't want to stick out by wearing clothes, because the majority stopped doing it.

I'm not sure but you could probably get arrested for letting your kid run naked in US. If you took pictures of your naked children you'd be charged with producing kiddie porn regardless of context (beach, parent, kids having fun).

One mother was charged for leaving her baby in the stroller outside of the diner in the US despite the fact that in her european country it's totally fin and everybody does it.

Wait, so every picture of a naked child is automatically child porn? And you can't let your children run around naked on the beach?

Man, you Americans are strange. goes back to eating his soup of sheep's stomach

> "every picture of a naked child is automatically child porn?"

Legally speaking, no. If the courts were given a picture of your kid running around naked on the beach, doing normal beach things, without any other reason to believe this was "child porn", they'd drop the charges fast.

The main danger is that Child Protective Services has a fairly broad mandate. If they're going to make a mistake, they'd rather be overprotective than underprotective. So if you have a picture of a naked child, they're likely to try to have your child removed from your home (temporarily) even if they know the charges won't stick.

> If the courts were given a picture of your kid running around naked on the beach, doing normal beach things, without any other reason to believe this was "child porn", they'd drop the charges fast.

I read that for some people charges were not drop fast enough to not ruin their lives.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290682/Walmart-Lisa...

> If they're going to make a mistake, they'd rather be overprotective than underprotective.

That's funny how they think that they are being protective by removing the child from the house where it has spent its entire life because they think that might save the kid few weeks of potential additional abuse.

You are not going to get arrested for having a young kid naked at a beach.

Well... good to hear. Don't take the pictures though while you are in the US:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290682/Walmart-Lisa...

http://richfield.patch.com/articles/parents-talk-when-are-na...

> "I can't figure out why cursing is such a big deal"

Children soak up everything in their environment, and they try to emulate it.

One thing to remember about excessive cursing is that it tends to be fairly emotional. The problem isn't really that some guy said "fuck" in a MineCraft video; it's that such language is usually bundled with an attitude of "fuck creepers" and "I hate those shithead zombie pigmen" and "this game is being a bitch by not giving me enough diamonds". If you replaced those swear words with euphemisms (or even very clever expressions of the same emotions), the underlying problem still remains: the attitudes and emotions are not what I want my kid emulating.

I suspect it's the fantasy of innocence. A person who says "fuck" is a person who's mature and jaded and frustrated. They've seen things and they know how much life can suck.

Many parents aren't willing to imagine their child having gone through that already, even if that's not actually what it means.

My two year old says it. I really don't think she's jaded or mature, and she has NO IDEA what the word means. All she knows is that mommy or I say it when we are Extremely Frustrated (and don't manage to censor ourselves fast enough).

The worst part is, it's _extremely funny_ to hear her make a frustrated grunt, followed by "fuck!" We can't laugh, or we reward it!

A fairly large amount of it is, I think, not wanting the kid to get in trouble later on. Even if you're OK with it, the society they live in may not be, and as a parent you're preparing them to live in that society. If you don't, they get punished and alienated. Which is worse, temporarily supporting nonsense, or temporarily causing problems?

I imagine the parent in the OP would also steer her child away from violence the same way she does bad language. That's just how our society is: There are some words and phrases that we have all accepted are improper or "bad", so most of us refrain from allowing children to hear them.

Wouldn't it make sense to just teach the children that many people accept these words as bad, and leave it at that? Why censor vast amounts of content(I would imagine most of the best Minecraft videos for instance wouldn't be PG) based on language used.

Well, because there are videos by other people who do not use excessive curse words. If there are alternatives, why not prefer them?

Now, if this were the parent blocking their child from viewing any Minecraft video because the majority of them include some cursing, it would be a bit different.

In my experience the Youtube/gaming videos default is not kid-friendly. If that's the case, then your kid will be getting less quality content for what I believe is basically no fair reason.

There are many Minecraft youtube videos that are PG with no swearing.

These cover the wide range of technical builds with redstone; creative builds; roleplay style; regular Let's Plays, everything.

I understand why parents don't like swearing in videos. Personally, I'm more concerned about hateful attitudes than just swearing.

> Wouldn't it make sense to just teach the children that many people accept these words as bad, and leave it at that?

I'm pretty sure kids don't think about the way other people perceive things until much older than 8-9.

If true, that's very interesting. Source?

It's actually quite a bit earlier than 8, but you can't really put a date on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind#Development

They might not properly understand why it's bad to say those things until ~13 due to a lack of abstract thinking, which might be what the above poster was getting at.

"In a classic study, Cialdini and colleagues manipulated the signs that were displayed in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, a site often plagued by tourists who end up grabbing some of the petrified wood to take home as a souvenir. In situations like this, the first inclination of well-meaning environmentalists might be to set a strong prescriptive norm — perhaps by saying something like, 'Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest. This is bad, don’t do this.' The idea here would be to invoke a sense of shame and severity before asking visitors to refrain from taking the wood. But read that prescriptive message once again. Is there anything descriptive in there? Yes, of course there is. That message is not just telling you that you shouldn’t take the wood — it’s also telling you that most other people do. In fact, people were actually more likely to steal wood from the forest when they saw the sign telling them how many people tend to do it themselves, even though the very next sentence was asking them to refrain. But when the researchers simply tweaked the message to read that 'the vast majority of past visitors have left the petrified wood in the park, helping to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest,' the thievery plummeted. [1]

Not a parent, but I would guess that kids are the same way only more so. The smart parent will make sure their kid sees other well-behaved kids most of the time.

[1] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/2013/03/28/ma...

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