[kreek]

The author of the post is working nice hours a day so one can spend three hours with his daughter, it's a pretty big stretch to say he's "child-centered".

You bemoan the lack of manners of today's youth. When, prey tell, are children going to learn proper behavior from their parents if they're spending only an hour a day with them? Where else will they learn manners? At school or day-care? Good luck with that.

You're a fan of Louis CK so I'll paraphrase him to denounce your disgusting call for more figurative or literal smacking. You have a physically and emotionally weak being who trusts you implicitly and they end up being the only people you're allowed to hit. Sounds like a recipe for a well adjusted kid to me!

"a little neglect never hurt anybody", but a lot hurts everybody. Children today are so neglected they fill their time with TV, video games, and junk food. As a result of this they will be the first generation in eons who are less healthy than their parents (and we'll pick up the tab be it Obamacare or private insurance).

Unless you're Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg your tombstone isn't going to read "Hacker Extraordinar", if you're lucky it'll say "Loving and devoted Father". No matter what it says you're children will be the only people on this earth who will remember you. The least you can do is spend a couple extra hours a week with them.

[abalashov]

I respect the sentiment of your post, but you posit a false dichotomy between either the type of all-consuming "helicopter parenting" gruseom is inveighing against on the one hand, or antisocial behaviour, TV, video games, junk food, and early death on the other. If that's really the choice, well, how can anyone disagree with you?

See my sibling post; I strongly feel there is a third way.

[calibraxis]

I don't think the above comment is positing a false dichotomy. Then again, the highest-rated comment here literally advocates violence against children — because supposedly other mammals do it, so we should be violent animals too and inflict premeditated pain on the weakest — and everything else pales in comparison. "Disgusting" is quite an understatement. (And it's not so much the fellow advocating child abuse who's disturbing, but those supporting this advocacy here with upvotes and agreement.)

[_cttz]

Obviously I'm not advocating violence against children. Nobody does that, not even those who practice it.

I was referring to nature films we've all seen where a bunch of adorable cubs are crawling over a mother lion and one of them crosses a line somehow and she swipes it with a paw. What I'm advocating, which I think was pretty obvious, is quick, clear, and loving boundary-setting in response to bad behavior. How one does this is beside the point; that's why I said "figuratively". The point is that we ought to do it, children need it (have you never seen a child calm down after being stopped like this? they need it for their own security), but parents who identify with their children tend not to do it.

Violence is all about the emotion of the violent one - trying to relieve a feeling of rage or whatever. Discipline is about giving the child something they need. It's impossible to do that when in a violent state oneself, so in fact these two things are mutually exclusive. It's possible to be violent to a child without any physical contact. That's our preferred form of violence nowadays.

On the whole, it's better for people not to hit their kids than to be as brutal as past generations often were. But to turn that into a virtue, as we have, is self-righteous.

[iradik]

Man this is so true. Violence is a state of mind.

[theycallmemorty]

"what any ordinary mammal does when their offspring goes too far - smack them. Figuratively if you prefer."

I'd call that advocating discipline, not necessarily violence.

[calibraxis]

I agree. It's easy to be seduced by all sorts of justifications to be incompetent at your job, an incompetent parent, whatever. These failure-justifying perspectives are so elaborate, it's hard to even know where to start untangling them.

In particular with such a skewed demographic (for example, overwhelmingly male), which is obviously symptomatic of something.