I’ll try to remember that the next time my 3 year old insists he can drive my car

A 3-year-old could start learning to drive a car if the controls were adapted to their physical size. Driving a car is designed to be easy enough for anyone to do it, and kids routinely learn more difficult skills. The main reason we don’t have kids driving cars is because of poor decision making and impulse control, not poor reflexes or untrainable motor skills.

If you want to teach a kid to drive a car you should probably stick to video games or low-speed go karts though.

Yah, I know… my kids have a little electric car they drive around. They run into things all the time, they stop paying attention and run off the road, etc….

I’ve seen three year olds do pretty well at Mario Kart, sometimes even reaching first place where you’re not just wildly colliding with things. Perhaps real driving just isn’t interesting to them ;)

You’re just going to have to tell your toddler you can’t afford the insurance and crush his dreams.

Can I ask why you wrote this comment? It’s a dig at the other person and it’s not terribly funny, just sarcastic. I didn’t think he meant to allow kids to do anything they want, just not to tell them what’s impossible before they have a shot at it. Do children normally drive cars where you are from?

Sure, I don’t mind you asking.

I wrote it for a few reasons. One, to be funny… clearly the commenter was not thinking about something like driving when they made the comment, so I thought it was kinda funny to shift the perspective to think about something where it is clearly a bad idea to just let a kid try something they think they can do.

Secondly, it was a bit from exasperation from comments I see about the ‘right’ ways to raise kids without thinking about/understanding the limitations that actual parents are under when trying to raise kids. I have two young kids (6 and 3), and in my experience, parenting is so much more about circumstances than parenting advice ever seems to acknowledge.

For example, let’s take this advice. Whether I can just let my kids try something that I think they aren’t yet capable of doing is entirely dependent on the circumstances. Is it safe to let them try? Can I afford to spend the money it takes to let them try the thing? Do I have the time to clean up the mess that will happen if they fail? Is it legal to let them try? Will it prevent them from being able to do another thing that I think they are more likely to be able to do?

Basically, my response to advice like this is usually an exasperated, “yeah, no shit I’d love to do that if I can, but so many things stop me from always doing it.” Maybe that is harsh, but it is the gut reaction to this sort of advice as a parent of young children.

And I know I was guilty of this before I had kids. I had so many ideas about how I would raise my kids and do all of these things, but I learned quickly that you don’t have as much control as you would like to imagine as a parent. Before you have kids, you imagine you drive their growth like you drive a sports car, with precision and the ability to choose the exact path you take. In reality, it is more like sailing a giant sailboat in a storm, doing your best to keep the ship pointed in the generally correct direction without taking on too much water.

As a fellow parent of multiple small children, your driving example struck me as odd, too. I think any time you are making a joke that riffs on your own frustration at the expense of somebody else's aspirations to be better, it's likely to fall flat. Maybe just to me and that one other poster.

I don't think the advice is to truly let kids do whatever they want with no input. It's to seriously entertain it when a child wants to try something new, even if your first instinct is to think they are too young. You can still say no, but it should be for the reasons you followed up with, not because "they're not ready".

My response was under the assumption that when parents don't let their kids try something, it is almost always because the parent thinks it is too dangerous for them. By saying we should let them try stuff parents don't think they are ready for, it sounded to me like they were saying "ignore the danger" or that the danger is not as great as parents think. If they weren't saying that, then the comment seemed meaningless to me... basically the equivalent of saying, "make sure your kids eat the proper amount of food". It is a tautology, without any prescriptive advice.

I doubt many parents are just stopping their kids from trying things simply because they don't think they will succeed... it is always because non succeeding would have some negative consequence that is not worth the risk (e.g. the kid could get badly hurt, create a huge mess, destroy valuable property, etc).

I think there are certainly times where there is a negative consequence, and you should rationally say no. I disagree that it is always trivially easy to recognize and classify the situation, and for most parents, being unsure translates to No. Parent poster is encouraging people to do the work in those situations and decide whether there really is a negative consequence that isn't worth bearing, and encouraging them to raise their level of unacceptable risk.

I think you're engaging in black and white thinking by saying things are either dangerous or not. There's an in between.

You've constructed a strawman. It clearly wasn't "let them try anything, with complete disregard for the cost, consequences etc". Try to read it with the best possible interpretation and reply to that.

I appreciate your response! I wish you had written this comment instead of the other one or at least explained why. I think the internet at large encourages people to be snooty/witty/sarcastic in order to be the “winner” of the conversation. HN is a little smaller, smarter, and nicer. I hope that as a community we can stay that way despite being on the internet.

I also totally get where you’re coming from. There are so many people who have great ideas on how to tell you what to do and no willingness to discuss how it works in practice. That said, we are the ones who have to reach inside ourselves and instead of responding with something that wins you more internet points, it can be more beneficial instead to attempt being fair, insightful, and kind. That can be itself a simple benefit to reality.

And then maybe one day we won’t have advice given without context or insult with the same.

Be well.

I mean, I wrote the first comment while I was waiting for my daughter to finish pooping, so I only had a few minutes. I thought my joke/comment conveyed enough info to get some of my point across. I didn’t have time at the moment to write out the longer one.

I am not sure why you think the comment was so antagonistic towards the person I responded to; it was a light hearted joke pointing out a flaw in their suggestion, it wasn’t a personal attack or anything.

Your driving comment made me giggle and then I continued scrolling on. I think it was lighthearted and fine as it was, just my input.

FWIW, it didn’t come off as a personal attack to me.

On the other hand, it did seem to oversimplify and intentionally misinterpret the comment for the purpose of a shallow gag or unimportant edge case.

It would be great if HN was a place for deeper commentary. There are other places on the Internet for the caliber of commentary that fits in the duration of a session of potty training. It would probably be better if we worked to maintain some of what made HN different: substantial comments based around ideas without sarcasm or insults.

Just one poster’s opinion…

[Another poster's opinion]

> it did seem to oversimplify and intentionally misinterpret the comment for the purpose of a shallow gag or unimportant edge case

I'm surprised that bringing up an "edge case" against an over-generalized statement is considered "intentionally misinterpreting" the original comment.

I think charitable reading of comments goes both ways - if we are supposed to read "Let kids discover their limits instead of purposefully (or accidentally) imposing your own." in a charitable manner, why should we assume that a short comment that brings up an edge case is (only) intended as a sarcastic dig at the original comment? It definitely forces the reader to think of beyond the "ideal" case, going into the realm of practicality. It is short, admittedly sarcastic (probably bad, but you complained about more than sarcasm), but I think it gets the main point across.

Alternatively, if we're not feeling charitable, I think it can be fair to say that the original comment paints a way too simplistic over-generalization of the difficult decisions in parenting, maybe even trivializing the hardships of parenting and blaming parents for not being more encouraging to their kids despite the parents having tried their best to manage practical difficulties -- in which case the reply still makes sense.

BTH I just think you (and others) were simply biased towards "positive" comments that you agree to. The long exposition by cortesoft was nice, but unnecessary once the edge case was brought up (I for one, understood what he/she meant). Do we really want to impose a minimum limit on post length just to make people feel less offended?

> BTH I just think you (and others) were simply biased towards "positive" comments that you agree to.

What evidence supports this claim?

If you think my comment was oversimplified, couldn't the same be said of your original comment?

I don't think what my comment was saying was about an edge case. Many things kids want to do before they are ready are dangerous

I don’t know what comment you are referring to as my original comment. I only have one post in the thread.

Regardless, it’s incorrect logic to point out that there are other oversimplified posts in the thread and justification. Just because someone did something bad, doesn’t invite us to do more of the same.

Maybe edge cause is the wrong word. It’s plainly obvious. No one read the OP and thought: I wonder about 3 year olds driving cars!

Of course, safety and exploration exist along a continuum. It’s good to let kids learn. It’s good to protect kids. So far, the thread has shed no light on the nuance. One poster has expressed an unjustified preference for kids learning their own limits and another has added the pointless rejoinder — “not 3 year olds in cars!”

Oh sorry, I mistook your comment to mean you were the author of the first comment I responded to, without actually checking if that was the case.

I think it’s worth considering not everyone will feel the same way as you. I found it amusing.

Equally your comment seems like a tear down attempt.

It was just a harmless bit of joking sarcasm. Some people on this site have the humor tolerance of a soviet accounting clerk.