Ask HN: How far should parents control their children?
People write books in attempts to answer these questions and it&#x27;s pretty hard to provide detailed answers here but I&#x27;ll chime in a bit...<p>All children are people, and all people are different in how they learn and react, and what intrigues and inspires them.<p>My advice is to first understand your child is a person and to treat them like one, as opposed to a piece of personal property or a &quot;dog&quot; you can command to do tricks.<p>Study: Yes, you have to &quot;make them do things&quot; they don&#x27;t want to do, like take a bath, clean their room, do their homework, and help with household chores because they&#x27;d rather not.<p>When our youngest was 17 he was failing his Senior year in High School and I pulled him aside and explained that if he had visions of sitting in his bedroom playing video games all day after he got out of school what he&#x27;d find was me putting all his stuff on the curb and turning his bedroom into my home office and he could go find someone else to house and feed his lazy ass. He bucked up, graduated, and is now a manager at the company he works for.<p>Religion: We live in the &quot;Bible Belt&quot; where a lot of what is preached comes from &quot;Ministers&quot; who are more interested in what&#x27;s in the &quot;collection plate&quot; than teaching the lessons Jesus laid out. I stopped attending &quot;Church&quot; when I was a teen because I realized this but since most all of my children&#x27;s friends went to church they wanted to go as well and my wife and I let them and gave them rides so they could attend and then we&#x27;d discuss what they were told and taught afterwards. It wasn&#x27;t long before they started seen contradictions between the sermons they heard and what Jesus said and taught and my wife and I would go over these with them.<p>A good example is &quot;gay marriage&quot;. Jesus said &quot;there is no marriage in heaven&quot; and to &quot;love one another&quot;, and they all grew up around a few gay couples that are close friends of ours and knew they were loving and kind and caring people who were hurt by the huge anti-gay stance of the evangelicals we&#x27;re surrounded by. By the end of &quot;High School&quot; they didn&#x27;t want to go to church anymore because of the hate and vitriol they saw promoted there, but they also studied the Bible on their own to better understand the teachings of Christ and to defend themselves and their beliefs and by the end of High School they knew and understood scripture better than many of the adults that were &quot;teaching&quot; it to them.<p>Life Lessons: We gave each of our kids their first car and told them they&#x27;d be buying their 2nd one themselves. They all hated their first car because it wasn&#x27;t a brand new sporty car their friends would be envious of, and they all smashed that first car up while being stupid and then whined when we didn&#x27;t buy them another. And then they all worked hard, bought their own 2nd car, and not one of them has crashed their cars up since, or complained their car wasn&#x27;t &quot;cool&quot; enough to be seen in.<p>Internet: I&#x27;ve been making web sites and web software since the mid-1990s so they all grew up with it. I explained that there&#x27;s a lot crap on the internet and they&#x27;d be wise to not waste their time on the crap they could find there. And I told them I could, and would, track the sites they visited and pull the plug if they got stupid on it. And I explained that even if I was not tracking them, the access providers they use and sites they visit are tracking them so they needed to aware that others might find out what they do there and expose them and they&#x27;d better keep that in mind because they&#x27;d have to deal with that all on their own. But I never put any restrictions on what they could find there because they&#x27;d have none as adults and could find it somewhere else anyway.<p>Sex, Drugs, and Rock &amp; Roll: Yeah, you have to deal with that too. Our approach was to teach them that it&#x27;s fine to party but don&#x27;t make a career out of it. Don&#x27;t aspire to be the most drunk or do the most drugs at the party, and that doing hard drugs is always a stupid choice. All our children grew up seeing friends, family, and acquaintances do stupid shit to get high and when high and the consequences that ensued as a result and we didn&#x27;t shield them from that. We were very up front about it: &quot;Uncle Joe is in jail again because he&#x27;s a dumbass who&#x27;s spent his life chasing drugs and that&#x27;s why we&#x27;re not bailing him out, and we won&#x27;t bail you out either if that&#x27;s the path you take, so don&#x27;t expect or ask us to.<p>None of them wanted to be like &quot;Uncle Joe&quot; and none of them went that route.<p>The short of it is, raise your kids to be adults from the get go.