Even the most Laissez-faire of parenting has boundaries; no reasonable adult is allowing their teenager to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway. The problem is that smartphone access isn't seen in the same category of danger that recreational opiates and unlicensed driving are in.

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binary132 2 days ago | parent [-]

“Reasonable” is a lynchpin bearing an awful lot of load here. Most people unfortunately aren’t very reasonable.

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Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> “Reasonable” is a lynchpin bearing an awful lot of load here.

No it's not. I could imagine sentences where it would be, but not this sentence. Here, watch me replace the word:

"99% of adults are not allowing their teenager to to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway."

Even if most people aren't ""reasonable"", they are whatever adjective that sentence describes.

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altairprime 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

“Over half of U.S. adults surveyed said that it’s very inappropriate, somewhat appropriate, or were uncertain whether it’s appropriate for their child to set boundaries for their interactions” is a reasonable-sounding statement, too; it’s plausible, applies to children of all ages (below or beyond age 25!), and is demonstrably an aspect of culture represented by media and other ephemera.

The position itself is, of course, completely unreasonable — boundaries are never inappropriate to consider (and to contrast with the parent’s boundaries about immediate versus deferred conversations in unsafe circumstances, the child’s age and cognitive ability to assess risk, and so on), no matter how uncomfortable it is to teach a child about boundaries by honoring one they’ve presented one! — but that intolerance is presented in such a reasonable guise, with a tone of majority support to quash any brief qualms, that it causes many to overlook its true nature.

See also “pleasant”, as in “Pleasantville”.

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binary132 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If you thought the discussion was actually about 12 year olds doing heroin and driving, I think you might have missed something.

	▲	Dylan16807 a day ago \| parent [-]
		That sentence was the only part of the argument using the idea of something being "reasonable". Whether you agree or disagree with their general stance, the word "reasonable" isn't load bearing. In particular they didn't say that limiting cell phones was reasonable, or requires parents to be reasonable. They just wanted an example of parents enforcing boundaries. The only load-bearing part of that sentence is the idea that parents do enforce those boundaries. Which they do. It's irrelevant if they are doing it because they're "reasonable". TL;DR: I do know what the discussion is about. But your comment wasn't about the general discussion, it was about the quality of a specific point, and I'm defending that specific point.

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godelski 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a pretty generalized phenomena too. Few people actually think about the assumptions their arguments rely upon. It makes actual discussions difficult to have and leads to more arguing than problem solving

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b00ty4breakfast 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sure you've got some hard data about the crazy amount of parents knowingly letting little Timmy develop an addiction to street drugs