5 ms·

A house I lived in for a while had one room where all the interior panes were plexiglass. It wasn't that clear (they'd been significantly scuffed up) and there

• encoderer 3y ago
  Love stories like this that unintentionally show how hard parenting is. I guarantee a big share of non parents are thinking “I would simply stop the bad behavior or would have never let it start to begin with”
  • jader201 3y ago
    I’m a parent of two mostly grown boys, one of which was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, so he definitely had behaviors at a young age that were challenging. But even I’m having a hard time rationalizing that replacing windows with plexiglass was the first solution that worked. It seems like there are a number of other things that would’ve helped without having to go to that extreme. But I do get it — every child is different, and every parent has different methods for approaching challenges. Just saying that this feels extreme, even from the perspective of another parent.
    • bagful 3y ago
      As a non-parent, I might replace the window with acrylic simply to deny the child the satisfaction of destroying plate glass
      • joshspankit 3y ago
        Most parents would tell you that having a child learn how to deny satisfaction is a huge detriment. If they learn it from a parent it’s almost impossible to constructively address.
        • worthless-trash 3y ago
          Can you restate that for me, because the way I read it, you are saying that if you teach a child how to deny satisfaction it is a negative. I think there is evidence to show that children who can't delay/deny satisfaction end up making significantly poorer life choices and have worse lives. Anecdotally, every teenager I knew who couldn't accept delayed/denied satisfaction were absolute shits.
          • joshspankit 3y ago
            > Can you restate that for me Definitely. I appreciate when someone asks for clarity. The part I was talking about was “denying the child the satisfaction” as in the parent intentionally frustrating the child to teach them a lesson. I tried to take a shortcut by using the same wording as the person I replied to but I can see how that made it unclear. The point I meant to make is that if a parent uses that technique to teach lessons in that way it’s likely that the child learns to use that technique themselves and turn it on the parent. Further: If a child learns this type of technique from a parent it can be very hard to stop them from using it.
    • dylan604 3y ago
      I didn't read the story as the plexiglass working for anything other than eliminating recurring bills of replacing windows. Clearly, the tantrums did not stop as the plexi was all scratched up. So to me, your hard time rationalizing is probably because it's not something that needs doing. Sometimes, you have to stop the bleeding before you can fix the actual issue.
  • verve_rat 3y ago
    Put me in the "ever let it start to begin with" camp, because I'm never having kids. That shit looks hard as all hell. Having a kid that smashes windows when told to go to its room sounds like the kind of soul draining thing that causes relationships to end. Huge props to those parents for navigating through that.
    • dwbehappy 3y ago
      [dead]
  • Aurornis 3y ago
    On the other hand, non-parents read stories like this and assume it's common behavior, or that all children are like this. A child who throws tantrums and breaks windows would be a parenting challenge indeed and it's not as simple as blaming the parents, but to be clear a situation like this (child breaks windows on a routine basis) would be rather rare.
    • eulgro 3y ago
      Solution: don't replace the window and let the goddamn child pay for his sins during the whole winter. That'll teach him. Hint: I'm a non parent.
      • antifa 3y ago
        20% rise in dead children for parents who take this advice seriously.
        • tnel77 3y ago
          Just give them another blanket or two! They’ll be fine. /s
        • eulgro 3y ago
          I call it natural selection.
  • andrei_says_ 3y ago
    And a big share of parents are thinking “this is a really smart solution!” “Bad behaviors” are almost always rooted in chronically unmet needs, over/under stimulation, hypersensitivity, general lack of control, sibling jealousy etc etc. its a good idea to treat them as symptoms to investigate rather than ”behaviors” to eliminate.
• jdietrich 3y ago
  Thermal conductivity isn't really relevant in window glazing materials, because nearly all of the insulation is provided by the argon in a double (or triple, or quadruple) glazing unit. Most of the recent advances in efficiency have come from improving the thermal conductivity of the frame and the use of low emissivity coatings to reduce infrared transmission. Regarding the embodied energy, I think that the reduced durability of basically anything that isn't glass will prove fatal in most applications. We abandoned plastic smartphone screens for a reason. A glass screen might crack if you're careless, but a plastic screen will become severely scuffed in normal use.
  • dzhiurgis 3y ago
    > A glass screen might crack if you're careless, but a plastic screen will become severely scuffed in normal use. Smartphone "glass" scratches pretty well too. Not that it's visible in daily use unless you look for it tho. Better have "scratched" screen than cracked screen IMO.
    • jtriangle 3y ago
      I've had very good luck with the tempered glass screen protectors and a cheap case thusfar. Broken a few of the protectors, mostly dropping my phone in parking lots, never had the screen actually break when I was using one. Also, additional upside is, any scratches are on the glass protector, so, if you get a particularly bothersome one, you can just replace the glass and you're back to brand new for way cheaper than a new screen.
      • dzhiurgis 3y ago
        These protectors an already bad typing experience even worse. Never broke a glass and 10% lower resell value years later doesn't interest me.