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BrenBarntoday at 5:37 AM4 repliesview on HN

The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.


Replies

armchairhackertoday at 7:57 AM

Expel the kid

I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.

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samuelltoday at 6:12 AM

Which is probably one of the biggest problem with the outsourcing of parenting for half their awake time that is happening with our established school system.

Not that I claim it is super easy to find an alternative on a large scale, but I think societies need to think hard about how to enable involving parents to be as much involved as possible in the kid's day. (For parents working full time shifts + commuting in a major city, this is very hard).

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jonathanlydalltoday at 9:16 AM

Community service perhaps?

Would be annoying for both the kid and the parents, more so than just detention at school I would think, and if parents are also annoyed will hopefully further incentivise socially appropriate behaviour of the child.

Of course if the parents manage to convince the principal or someone else to not enforce, then the problem is with the school.

danpalmertoday at 6:20 AM

Yeah exactly, it's hard to do and requires effort.

It's a sad state of affairs if there's nothing at school a child cares about, and rules prohibiting using those things as leverage may make sense in some way at a population level (to prevent misuse), but are clearly a bad idea in most individual cases.